The Battle Ground
by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow · English · Gutenberg #6872 · 723,056 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Battle Ground
Author: Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
Release date: November 1, 2004 [eBook #6872]
Most recently updated: March 15, 2018
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6872
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BATTLE GROUND ***
Produced by Wendy Crockett, Tiffany Vergon, Juliet
Sutherland, Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
THE BATTLE GROUND
By Ellen Glasgow
To
The Beloved Memory of My Mother
CONTENTS
BOOK FIRST
GOLDEN YEARS
I. “De Hine Foot er a He Frawg”
II. At the Full of the Moon
III. The Coming of the Boy
IV. A House with an Open Door
V. The School for Gentlemen
VI. College Days
BOOK SECOND
YOUNG BLOOD
I. The Major's Christmas
II. Betty dreams by the Fire
III. Dan and Betty
IV. Love in a Maze
V. The Major loses his Temper
VI. The Meeting in the Turnpike
VII. If this be Love
VIII. Betty's Unbelief
IX. The Montjoy Blood
X. The Road at Midnight
XI. At Merry Oaks Tavern
XII. The Night of Fear
XIII. Crabbed Age and Callow Youth
XIV. The Hush before the Storm
BOOK THIRD
THE SCHOOL OF WAR
I. How Merry Gentlemen went to War
II. The Day's March
III. The Reign of the Brute
IV. After the Battle
V. The Woman's Part
VI. On the Road to Romney
VII. “I wait my Time”
VIII. The Altar of the War God
IX. The Montjoy Blood again
BOOK FOURTH
THE RETURN OF THE VANQUISHED
I. The Ragged Army
II. A Straggler from the Ranks
III. The Cabin in the Woods
IV. In the Silence of the Guns
V. “The Place Thereof”
VI. The Peaceful Side of War.
VII. The Silent Battle
VIII. The Last Stand
IX. In the Hour of Defeat
X. On the March again
XI. The Return
BOOK FIRST
GOLDEN YEARS
I
“DE HINE FOOT ER A HE FRAWG”
Toward the close of an early summer afternoon, a little girl came running
along the turnpike to where a boy stood wriggling his feet in the dust.
“Old Aunt Ailsey's done come back,” she panted, “an' she's conjured the
tails off Sambo's sheep. I saw 'em hanging on her door!”
The boy received the news with an indifference from which it blankly
rebounded. He buried one bare foot in the soft white sand and withdrew it
with a jerk that powdered the blackberry vines beside the way.
“Where's Virginia?” he asked shortly.
The little girl sat down in the tall grass by the roadside and shook her
red curls from her eyes. She gave a breathless gasp and began fanning
herself with the flap of her white sunbonnet. A fine moisture shone on her
bare neck and arms above her frock of sprigged chintz calico.
“She can't run a bit,” she declared warmly, peering into the distance of
the long white turnpike. “I'm a long ways ahead of her, and I gave her the
start. Zeke's with her.”
With a grunt the boy promptly descended from his heavy dignity.
“You can't run,” he retorted. “I'd like to see a girl run, anyway.” He
straightened his legs and thrust his hands into his breeches pockets. “You
can't run,” he repeated.
The little girl flashed a clear defiance; from a pair of beaming hazel eyes
she threw him a scornful challenge. “I bet I can beat you,” she stoutly
rejoined. Then as the boy's glance fell upon her hair, her defiance waned.
She put on her sunbonnet and drew it down over her brow. “I reckon I can
run some,” she finished uneasily.
The boy followed her movements with a candid stare. “You can't hide it,” he
taunted; “it shines right through everything. O Lord, ain't I glad my
head's not red!”
At this pharisaical thanksgiving the little girl flushed to the ruffled
brim of her bonnet. Her sensitive lips twitched, and she sat meekly gazing
past the boy at the wall of rough gray stones which skirted a field of
ripening wheat. Over the wheat a light wind blew, fanning the even heads of
the bearded grain and dropping suddenly against the sunny mountains in the
distance. In the nearer pasture, where the long grass was strewn with wild
flowers, red and white cattle were grazing beside a little stream, and the
tinkle of the cow bells drifted faintly across the slanting sunrays. It was
open country, with a peculiar quiet cleanliness about its long white roads
and the genial blues and greens of its meadows.
“Ain't I glad, O Lord!” chanted the boy again.
The little girl stirred impatiently, her gaze fluttering from the
landscape.
“Old Aunt Ailsey's conjured all the tails off Sambo's sheep,” she remarked,
with feminine wile. “I saw 'em hanging on her door.”
“Oh, shucks! she can't conjure!” scoffed the boy. “She's nothing but a free
nigger, anyway--and besides, she's plum crazy--”
“I saw 'em hanging on her door,” steadfastly repeated the little girl. “The
wind blew 'em right out, an' there they were.”
“Well, they wan't Sambo's sheep tails,” retorted the boy, conclusively,
“'cause Sambo's sheep ain't got any tails.”
Brought to bay, the little girl looked doubtfully up and down the turnpike.
“Maybe she conjured 'em _on_ first,” she suggested at last.
“Oh, you're a regular baby, Betty,” exclaimed the boy, in disgust. “You'll
be saying next that she can make rattlesnake's teeth sprout out of the
ground.”
“She's got a mighty funny garden patch,” admitted Betty, still credulous.
Then she jumped up and ran along the road. “Here's Virginia!” she called
sharply, “an' I beat her! I beat her fair!”
A second little girl came panting through the dust, followed by a small
negro boy with a shining black face. “There's a wagon comin' roun' the
curve,” she cried excitedly, “an' it's filled with old Mr. Willis's
servants. He's dead, and they're sold--Dolly's sold, too.”
She was a fragile little creature, coloured like a flower, and her smooth
brown hair hung in silken braids to her sash. The strings of her white
pique bonnet lined with pink were daintily tied under her oval chin; there
was no dust on her bare legs or short white socks.
As she spoke there came the sound of voices singing, and a moment later the
wagon jogged heavily round a tuft of stunted cedars which jutted into the
long curve of the highway. The wheels crunched a loose stone in the road,
and the driver drawled a patient “gee-up” to the horses, as he flicked at
a horse-fly with the end of his long rawhide whip. There was about him an
almost cosmic good nature; he regarded the landscape, the horses and the
rocks in the road with imperturbable ease.
Behind him, in the body of the wagon, the negro women stood chanting the
slave's farewell; and as they neared the children, he looked back and spoke
persuasively. “I'd set down if I was you all,” he said. “You'd feel better.
Thar, now, set down and jolt softly.”
But without turning the women kept up their tremulous chant, bending their
turbaned heads to the imaginary faces upon the roadside. They had left
their audience behind them on the great plantation, but they still sang to
the empty road and courtesied to the cedars upon the way. Excitement
gripped them like a frenzy--and a childish joy in a coming change blended
with a mother's yearning over broken ties.
A bright mulatto led, standing at full height, and her rich notes rolled
like an organ beneath the shrill plaint of her companions. She was large,
deep-bosomed, and comely after her kind, and in her careless gestures there
was something of the fine fervour of the artist. She sang boldly, her full
body rocking from side to side, her bared arms outstretched, her long
throat swelling like a bird's above the gaudy handkerchief upon her breast.
The others followed her, half artlessly, half in imitation, mingling with
their words grunts of self-approval. A grin ran from face to face as if
thrown by the grotesque flash of a lantern. Only a little black woman
crouching in one corner bowed herself and wept.
The children had fallen back against the stone wall, where they hung
staring.
“Good-by, Dolly!” they called cheerfully, and the woman answered with a
long-drawn, hopeless whine:--
“Gawd A'moughty bless you twel we
Meet agin.”
Zeke broke from the group and ran a few steps beside the wagon, shaking the
outstretched hands.
The driver nodded peaceably to him, and cut with a single stroke of his
whip an intricate figure in the sand of the road. “Git up an' come along
with us, sonny,” he said cordially; but Zeke only grinned in reply, and the
children laughed and waved their handkerchiefs from the wall. “Good-by,
Dolly, and Mirandy, and Sukey Sue!” they shouted, while the women, bowing
over the rolling wheels, tossed back a fragment of the song:--
“We hope ter meet you in heaven, whar we'll
Part no mo',
Whar we'll part no mo';
Gawd A'moughty bless you twel we
Me--et a--gin.”
“Twel we meet agin,” chirped the little girls, tripping into the chorus.
Then, with a last rumble, the wagon went by, and Zeke came trotting back
and straddled the stone wall, where he sat looking down upon the loose
poppies that fringed the yellowed edge of the wheat.
“Dey's gwine way-way f'om hyer, Marse Champe,” he said dreamily. “Dey's
gwine right spang over dar whar de sun done come f'om.”
“Colonel Minor bought 'em,” Champe explained, sliding from the wall, “and
he bought Dolly dirt cheap--I heard Uncle say so--” With a grin he looked
up at the small black figure perched upon the crumbling stones. “You'd
better look out how you steal any more of my fishing lines, or I'll sell
you,” he threatened.
“Gawd er live! I ain' stole one on 'em sence las' mont',” protested Zeke,
as he turned a somersault into the road, “en dat warn' stealin' 'case hit
warn' wu'th it,” he added, rising to his feet and staring wistfully after
the wagon as it vanished in a sunny cloud of dust.
Over the broad meadows, filled with scattered wild flowers, the sound of
the chant still floated, with a shrill and troubled sweetness, upon the
wind. As he listened the little negro broke into a jubilant refrain,
beating his naked feet in the dust:--
“Gawd A'moughty bless you twel we
Me--et a--gin.”
Then he looked slyly up at his young master.
“I 'low dar's one thing you cyarn do, Marse Champe.”
“I bet there isn't,” retorted Champe.
“You kin sell me ter Marse Minor--but Lawd, Lawd, you cyarn mek mammy leave
off whuppin' me. You cyarn do dat widout you 'uz a real ole marster
hese'f.”
“I reckon I can,” said Champe, indignantly. “I'd just like to see her lay
hands on you again. I can make mammy leave off whipping him, can't I,
Betty?”
But Betty, with a toss of her head, took her revenge.
“'Tain't so long since yo' mammy whipped you,” she rejoined. “An' I reckon
'tain't so long since you needed it.”
As she stood there, a spirited little figure, in a patch of faint sunshine,
her hair threw a halo of red gold about her head. When she smiled--and she
smiled now, saucily enough--her eyes had a trick of narrowing until they
became mere beams of light between her lashes. Her eyes would smile, though
her lips were as prim as a preacher's.
Virginia gave a timid pull at Betty's frock. “Champe's goin' home with us,”
she said, “his uncle told him to--You're goin' home with us, ain't you,
Champe?”
“I ain't goin' home,” responded Betty, jerking from Virginia's grasp. She
stood warm yet resolute in the middle of the road, her bonnet swinging in
her hands. “I ain't goin' home,” she repeated.
Turning his back squarely upon her, Champe broke into a whistle of
unconcern. “You'd just better come along,” he called over his shoulder as
he started off. “You'd just better come along, or you'll catch it.”
“I ain't comin',” answered Betty, defiantly, and as they passed away
kicking the dust before them, she swung her bonnet hard, and spoke aloud to
herself. “I ain't comin',” she said stubbornly.
The distance lengthened; the three small figures passed the wheat field,
stopped for an instant to gather green apples that had fallen from a stray
apple tree, and at last slowly dwindled into the white streak of the road.
She was alone on the deserted turnpike.
For a moment she hesitated, caught her breath, and even took three steps on
the homeward way; then turning suddenly she ran rapidly in the opposite
direction. Over the deepening shadows she sped as lightly as a hare.
At the end of a half mile, when her breath came in little pants, she
stopped with a nervous start and looked about her. The loneliness seemed
drawing closer like a mist, and the cry of a whip-poor-will from the little
stream in the meadow sent frightened thrills, like needles, through her
limbs.
Straight ahead the sun was setting in a pale red west, against which the
mountains stood out as if sculptured in stone. On one side swept the
pasture where a few sheep browsed; on the other, at the place where two
roads met, there was a blasted tree that threw its naked shadow across the
turnpike. Beyond the tree and its shadow a well-worn foot-path led to a
small log cabin from which a streak of smoke was rising. Through the open
door the single room within showed ruddy with the blaze of resinous pine.
The little girl daintily picked her way along the foot-path and through a
short garden patch planted in onions and black-eyed peas. Beside a bed of
sweet sage she faltered an instant and hung back. “Aunt Ailsey,” she called
tremulously, “I want to speak to you, Aunt Ailsey.” She stepped upon the
smooth round stone which served for a doorstep and looked into the room.
“It's me, Aunt Ailsey! It's Betty Ambler,” she said.
A slow shuffling began inside the cabin, and an old negro woman hobbled
presently to the daylight and stood peering from under her hollowed palm.
She was palsied with age and blear-eyed with trouble, and time had ironed
all the kink out of the thin gray locks that straggled across her brow. She
peered dimly at the child as one who looks from a great distance.
“I lay dat's one er dese yer ole hoot owls,” she muttered querulously, “en
ef'n 'tis, he des es well be a-hootin' along home, caze I ain' gwine be
pestered wid his pranks. Dar ain' but one kind er somebody es will sass you
at yo' ve'y do,' en dat's a hoot owl es is done loss count er de time er
day--”
“I ain't an owl, Aunt Ailsey,” meekly broke in Betty, “an' I ain't hootin'
at you--”
Aunt Ailsey reached out and touched her hair. “You ain' none er Marse
Peyton's chile,” she said. “I'se done knowed de Amblers sence de fu'st one
er dem wuz riz, en dar ain' never been a'er Ambler wid a carrot haid--”
The red ran from Betty's curls into her face, but she smiled politely as
she followed Aunt Ailsey into the cabin and sat down in a split-bottomed
chair upon the hearth. The walls were formed of rough, unpolished logs, and
upon them, as against an unfinished background, the firelight threw reddish
shadows of the old woman and the child. Overhead, from the uncovered
rafters, hung several tattered sheepskins, and around the great fireplace
there was a fringe of dead snakes and lizards, long since as dry as dust.
Under the blazing logs, which filled the hut with an almost unbearable
heat, an ashcake was buried beneath a little gravelike mound of ashes.
Aunt Ailsey took up a corncob pipe from the stones and fell to smoking. She
sank at once into a senile reverie, muttering beneath her breath with
short, meaningless grunts. Warm as the summer evening was, she shivered
before the glowing logs.
For a time the child sat patiently watching the embers; then she leaned
forward and touched the old woman's knee. “Aunt Ailsey, O Aunt Ailsey!”
Aunt Ailsey stirred wearily and crossed her swollen feet upon the hearth.
“Dar ain' nuttin' but a hoot owl dat'll sass you ter yo' face,” she
muttered, and, as she drew her pipe from her mouth, the gray smoke circled
about her head.
The child edged nearer. “I want to speak to you, Aunt Ailsey,” she said.
She seized the withered hand and held it close in her own rosy ones. “I
want you--O Aunt Ailsey, listen! I want you to conjure my hair coal black.”
She finished with a gasp, and with parted lips sat waiting. “Coal black,
Aunt Ailsey!” she cried again.
A sudden excitement awoke in the old woman's face; her hands shook and she
leaned nearer. “Hi! who dat done tole you I could conjure, honey?” she
demanded.
“Oh, you can, I know you can. You conjured back Sukey's lover from Eliza
Lou, and you conjured all the pains out of Uncle Shadrach's leg.” She fell
on her knees and laid her head in the old woman's lap. “Conjure quick and I
won't holler,” she said.
“Gawd in heaven!” exclaimed Aunt Ailsey. Her dim old eyes brightened as she
gently stroked the child's brow with her palsied fingers. “Dis yer ain' no
way ter conjure, honey,” she whispered. “You des wait twel de full er de
moon, w'en de devil walks de big road.” She was wandering again after the
fancies of dotage, but Betty threw herself upon her. “Oh, change it! change
it!” cried the child. “Beg the devil to come and change it quick.”
Brought back to herself, Aunt Ailsey grunted and knocked the ashes from her
pipe. “I ain' gwine ter ax no favors er de devil,” she replied sternly.
“You des let de devil alont en he'll let you alont. I'se done been young,
en I'se now ole, en I ain' never seed de devil stick his mouf in anybody's
bizness 'fo' he's axed.”
She bent over and raked the ashes from her cake with a lightwood splinter.
“Dis yer's gwine tase moughty flat-footed,” she grumbled as she did so.
“O Aunt Ailsey,” wailed Betty in despair. The tears shone in her eyes and
rolled slowly down her cheeks.
“Dar now,” said Aunt Ailsey, soothingly, “you des set right still en wait
twel ter-night at de full er de moon.” She got up and took down one of the
crumbling skins from the chimney-piece. “Ef'n de hine foot er a he frawg
cyarn tu'n yo' hyar decent,” she said, “dar ain' nuttin' de Lawd's done
made es'll do hit. You des wrop er hank er yo' hyar roun' de hine foot,
honey, en' w'en de night time done come, you teck'n hide it unner a rock in
de big road. W'en de devil goes a-cotin' at de full er de moon--en he been
cotin' right stiddy roun' dese yer parts--he gwine tase dat ar frawg foot a
mile off.”
“A mile off?” repeated the child, stretching out her hands.
“Yes, Lawd, he gwine tase dat ar frawg foot a mile off, en w'en he tase
hit, he gwine begin ter sniff en ter snuff. He gwine sniff en he gwine
snuff, en he gwine sniff en he gwine snuff twel he run right spang agin de
rock in de middle er de road. Den he gwine paw en paw twel he root de rock
clean up.”
The little girl looked up eagerly.
“An' my hair, Aunt Ailsey?”
“De devil he gwine teck cyar er yo' hyar, honey. W'en he come a-sniffin' en
a-snuffin' roun' de rock in de big road, he gwine spit out flame en smoke
en yo' hyar hit's gwine ter ketch en hit's gwine ter bu'n right black. Fo'
de sun up yo' haid's gwine ter be es black es a crow's foot.”
The child dried her tears and sprang up. She tied the frog's skin tightly
in her handkerchief and started toward the door; then she hesitated and
looked back. “Were you alive at the flood, Aunt Ailsey?” she politely
inquired.
“Des es live es I is now, honey.”
“Then you must have seen Noah and the ark and all the animals?”
“Des es plain es I see you. Marse Noah? Why, I'se done wash en i'on Marse
Noah's shuts twel I 'uz right stiff in de j'ints. He ain' never let nobody
flute his frills fur 'im 'cep'n' me. Lawd, Lawd, Marse Peyton's shuts warn'
nuttin ter Marse Noah's!”
Betty's eyes grew big. “I reckon you're mighty old, Aunt Ailsey--'most as
old as God, ain't you?”
Aunt Ailsey pondered the question. “I ain' sayin' dat, honey,” she modestly
replied.
“Then you're certainly as old as the devil--you must be,” hopefully
suggested the little girl.
The old woman wavered. “Well, de devil, he ain' never let on his age,” she
said at last; “but w'en I fust lay eyes on 'im, he warn' no mo'n a brat.”
Standing upon the threshold for an instant, the child reverently regarded
her. Then, turning her back upon the fireplace and the bent old figure, she
ran out into the twilight.
II
AT THE FULL OF THE MOON
By the light of the big moon hanging like a lantern in the topmost pine
upon a distant mountain, the child sped swiftly along the turnpike.
It was a still, clear evening, and on the summits of the eastern hills a
fringe of ragged firs stood out illuminated against the sky. In the warm
June weather the whole land was fragrant from the flower of the wild grape.
When she had gone but a little way, the noise of wheels reached her
suddenly, and she shrank into the shadow beside the wall. A cloud of dust
chased toward her as the wheels came steadily on. They were evidently
ancient, for they turned with a protesting creak which was heard long
before the high, old-fashioned coach they carried swung into view--long
indeed before the driver's whip cracked in the air.
As the coach neared the child, she stepped boldly out into the road--it was
only Major Lightfoot, the owner of the next plantation, returning, belated,
from the town.
“W'at you doin' dar, chile?” demanded a stern voice from the box, and, at
the words, the Major's head was thrust through the open window, and his
long white hair waved in the breeze.
“Is that you, Betty?” he asked, in surprise. “Why, I thought it was the
duty of that nephew of mine to see you home.”
“I wouldn't let him,” replied the child. “I don't like boys, sir.”
“You don't, eh?” chuckled the Major. “Well, there's time enough for that, I
suppose. You can make up to them ten years hence,--and you'll be glad
enough to do it then, I warrant you,--but are you all alone, young lady?”
As Betty nodded, he opened the door and stepped gingerly down. “I can't
turn the horses' heads, poor things,” he explained; “but if you will allow
me, I shall have the pleasure of escorting you on foot.”
With his hat in his hand, he smiled down upon the little girl, his face
shining warm and red above his pointed collar and broad black stock. He was
very tall and spare, and his eyebrows, which hung thick and dark above his
Roman nose, gave him an odd resemblance to a bird of prey. The smile
flashed like an artificial light across his austere features.
“Since my arm is too high for you,” he said, “will you have my hand?--Yes,
you may drive on, Big Abel,” to the driver, “and remember to take out those
bulbs of Spanish lilies for your mistress. You will find them under the
seat.”
The whip cracked again above the fat old roans, and with a great creak the
coach rolled on its way.
“I--I--if you please, I'd rather you wouldn't,” stammered the child.
The Major chuckled again, still holding out his hand. Had she been eighty
instead of eight, the gesture could not have expressed more deference. “So
you don't like old men any better than boys!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, yes, sir, I do--heaps,” said Betty. She transferred the frog's foot to
her left hand, and gave him her right one. “When I marry, I'm going to
marry a very old gentleman--as old as you,” she added flatteringly.
“You honour me,” returned the Major, with a bow; “but there's nothing like
youth, my dear, nothing like youth.” He ended sadly, for he had been a gay
young blood in his time, and the enchantment of his wild oats had increased
as he passed further from the sowing of them. He had lived to regret both
the loss of his gayety and the languor of his blood, and, as he drifted
further from the middle years, he had at last yielded to tranquillity with
a sigh. In his day he had matched any man in Virginia at cards or wine or
women--to say nothing of horseflesh; now his white hairs had brought him
but a fond, pale memory of his misdeeds and the boast that he knew his
world--that he knew all his world, indeed, except his wife.
“Ah, there's nothing like youth!” he sighed over to himself, and the child
looked up and laughed.
“Why do you say that?” she asked.
“You will know some day,” replied the Major. He drew himself erect in his
tight black broadcloth, and thrust out his chin between the high points of
his collar. His long white hair, falling beneath his hat, framed his ruddy
face in silver. “There are the lights of Uplands,” he said suddenly, with a
wave of his hand.
Betty quickened her pace to his, and they went on in silence. Through the
thick grove that ended at the roadside she saw the windows of her home
flaming amid the darkness. Farther away there were the small lights of the
negro cabins in the “quarters,” and a great one from the barn door where
the field hands were strumming upon their banjos.
“I reckon supper's ready,” she remarked, walking faster. “Yonder comes
Peter, from the kitchen with the waffles.”
They entered an iron gate that opened from the road, and went up a lane of
lilac bushes to the long stuccoed house, set with detached wings in a grove
of maples. “Why, there's papa looking for me,” cried the child, as a man's
figure darkened the square of light from the hall and came between the
Doric columns of the portico down into the drive.
“You won't have to search far, Governor,” called the Major, in his ringing
voice, and, as the other came up to him, he stopped to shake hands. “Miss
Betty has given me the pleasure of a stroll with her.”
“Ah, it was like you, Major,” returned the other, heartily. “I'm afraid it
isn't good for your gout, though.”
He was a small, soldierly-looking man, with a clean-shaven, classic face,
and thick, brown hair, slightly streaked with gray. Beside the Major's
gaunt figure he appeared singularly boyish, though he held himself severely
to the number of his inches, and even added, by means of a simplicity
almost august, a full cubit to his stature. Ten years before he had been
governor of his state, and to his friends and neighbours the empty honour,
at least, was still his own.
“Pooh! pooh!” the older man protested airily, “the gout's like a woman, my
dear sir--if you begin to humour it, you'll get no rest. If you deny
yourself a half bottle of port, the other half will soon follow. No, no, I
say--put a bold foot on the matter. Don't give up a good thing for the sake
of a bad one, sir. I remember my grandfather in England telling me that at
his first twinge of gout he took a glass of sherry, and at the second he
took two. 'What! would you have my toe become my master?' he roared to the
doctor. 'I wouldn't give in if it were my whole confounded foot, sir!' Oh,
those were ripe days, Governor!”
“A little overripe for the toe, I fear, Major.”
“Well, well, we're sober enough now, sir, sober enough and to spare. Even
the races are dull things. I've just been in to have a look at that new
mare Tom Bickels is putting on the track, and bless my soul, she can't hold
a candle to the Brown Bess I ran twenty years ago--you don't remember Brown
Bess, eh, Governor?”
“Why, to be sure,” said the Governor. “I can see her as if it were
yesterday,--and a beauty she was, too,--but come in to supper with us, my
dear Major; we were just sitting down. No, I shan't take an excuse--come
in, sir, come in.”
“No, no, thank you,” returned the Major. “Molly's waiting, and Molly
doesn't like to wait, you know. I got dinner at Merry Oaks tavern by the
way, and a mighty bad one, too, but the worst thing about it was that they
actually had the impudence to put me at the table with an abolitionist.
Why, I'd as soon eat with a darkey, sir, and so I told him, so I told him!”
The Governor laughed, his fine, brown eyes twinkling in the gloom. “You
were always a man of your word,” he said; “so I must tell Julia to mend her
views before she asks you to dine. She has just had me draw up my will and
free the servants. There's no withstanding Julia, you know, Major.”
“You have an angel,” declared the other, “and she gets lovelier every day;
my regards to her,--and to her aunts, sir. Ah, good night, good night,” and
with a last cordial gesture he started rapidly upon his homeward way.
Betty caught the Governor's hand and went with him into the house. As they
entered the hall, Uncle Shadrach, the head butler, looked out to reprimand
her. “Ef'n anybody 'cep'n Marse Peyton had cotch you, you'd er des been
lammed,” he grumbled. “An' papa was real mad!” called Virginia from the
table.
“That's jest a story!” cried Betty. Still clinging to her father's hand,
she entered the dining room; “that's jest a story, papa,” she repeated.
“No, I'm not angry,” laughed the Governor. “There, my dear, for heaven's
sake don't strangle me. Your mother's the one for you to hang on. Can't you
see what a rage she's in?”
“My dear Mr. Ambler,” remonstrated his wife, looking over the high old
silver service. She was very frail and gentle, and her voice was hardly
more than a clear whisper. “No, no, Betty, you must go up and wash your
face first,” she added decisively.
The Governor sat down and unfolded his napkin, beaming hospitality upon his
food and his family. He surveyed his wife, her two maiden aunts and his own
elder brother with the ineffable good humour he bestowed upon the majestic
home-cured ham fresh from a bath of Madeira.
“I am glad to see you looking so well, my dear,” he remarked to his wife,
with a courtliness in which there was less polish than personality. “Ah,
Miss Lydia, I know whom to thank for this,” he added, taking up a pale tea
rosebud from his plate, and bowing to one of the two old ladies seated
beside his wife. “Have you noticed, Julia, that even the roses have become
more plentiful since your aunts did us the honour to come to us?”
“I am sure the garden ought to be grateful to Aunt Lydia,” said his wife,
with a pleased smile, “and the quinces to Aunt Pussy,” she added quickly,
“for they were never preserved so well before.”
The two old ladies blushed and cast down their eyes, as they did every
evening at the same kindly by-play. “You know I am very glad to be of use,
my dear Julia,” returned Miss Pussy, with conscious virtue. Miss Lydia, who
was tall and delicate and bent with the weight of potential sanctity, shook
her silvery head and folded her exquisite old hands beneath the ruffles of
her muslin under-sleeves. She wore her hair in shining folds beneath her
thread-lace cap, and her soft brown eyes still threw a youthful lustre over
the faded pallor of her face.
“Pussy has always had a wonderful talent for preserving,” she murmured
plaintively. “It makes me regret my own uselessness.”
“Uselessness!” warmly protested the Governor. “My dear Miss Lydia, your
mere existence is a blessing to mankind. A lovely woman is never useless,
eh, Brother Bill?”
Mr. Bill, a stout and bashful gentleman, who never wasted words, merely
bowed over his plate, and went on with his supper. There was a theory in
the family--a theory romantic old Miss Lydia still hung hard by--that Mr.
Bill's peculiar apathy was of a sentimental origin. Nearly thirty years
before he had made a series of mild advances to his second cousin, Virginia
Ambler--and her early death before their polite vows were plighted had, in
the eyes of his friends, doomed the morose Mr. Bill to the position of a
perpetual mourner.
Now, as he shook his head and helped himself to chicken, Miss Lydia sighed
in sympathy.
“I am afraid Mr. Bill must find us very flippant,” she offered as a gentle
reproof to the Governor.
Mr. Bill started and cast a frightened glance across the table. Thirty
years are not as a day, and, after all, his emotion had been hardly more
than he would have felt for a prize perch that had wriggled from his line
into the stream. The perch, indeed, would have represented more
appropriately the passion of his life--though a lukewarm lover, he was an
ardent angler.
“Ah, Brother Bill understands us,” cheerfully interposed the Governor. His
keen eyes had noted Mr. Bill's alarm as they noted the emptiness of Miss
Pussy's cup. “By the way, Julia,” he went on with a change of the subject,
“Major Lightfoot found Betty in the road and brought her home. The little
rogue had run away.”
Mrs. Ambler filled Miss Pussy's cup and pressed Mr. Bill to take a slice of
Sally Lunn. “The Major is so broken that it saddens me,” she said, when
these offices of hostess were accomplished. “He has never been himself
since his daughter ran away, and that was--dear me, why that was twelve
years ago next Christmas. It was on Christmas Eve, you remember, he came to
tell us. The house was dressed in evergreens, and Uncle Patrick was making
punch.”
“Poor Patrick was a hard drinker,” sighed Miss Lydia; “but he was a citizen
of the world, my dear.”
“Yes, yes, I perfectly recall the evening,” said the Governor,
thoughtfully. “The young people were just forming for a reel and you and I
were of them, my dear,--it was the year, I remember, that the mistletoe was
brought home in a cart,--when the door opened and in came the Major. 'Jane
has run away with that dirty scamp Montjoy,' he said, and was out again and
on his horse before we caught the words. He rode like a madman that night.
I can see him now, splashing through the mud with Big Abel after him.”
Betty came running in with smiling eyes, and fluttered into her seat. “I
got here before the waffles,” she cried. “Mammy said I wouldn't. Uncle
Shadrach, I got here before you!”
“Dat's so, honey,” responded Uncle Shadrach from behind the Governor's
chair. He was so like his master--commanding port, elaborate shirt-front,
and high white stock--that the Major, in a moment of merry-making, had once
dubbed him “the Governor's silhouette.”
“Say your grace, dear,” remonstrated Miss Lydia, as the child shook out her
napkin. “It's always proper to offer thanks standing, you know. I remember
your great-grandmother telling me that once when she dined at the White
House, when her father was in Congress, the President forgot to say grace,
and made them all get up again after they were seated. Now, for what are we
about--”
“Oh, papa thanked for me,” cried Betty. “Didn't you, papa?”
The Governor smiled; but catching his wife's eyes, he quickly forced his
benign features into a frowning mask.
“Do as your aunt tells you, Betty,” said Mrs. Ambler, and Betty got up and
said grace, while Virginia took the brownest waffle. When the thanksgiving
was ended, she turned indignantly upon her sister. “That was just a sly,
mean trick!” she cried in a flash of temper. “You saw my eye on that
waffle!”
“My dear, my dear,” murmured Miss Lydia.
“She's des an out'n out fire bran', dat's w'at she is,” said Uncle
Shadrach.
“Well, the Lord oughtn't to have let her take it just as I was thanking Him
for it!” sobbed Betty, and she burst into tears and left the table,
upsetting Mr. Bill's coffee cup as she went by.
The Governor looked gravely after her. “I'm afraid the child is really
getting spoiled, Julia,” he mildly suggested.
“She's getting a--a vixenish,” declared Mr. Bill, mopping his expansive
white waistcoat.
“You des better lemme go atter a twig er willow, Marse Peyton,” muttered
Uncle Shadrach in the Governor's ear.
“Hold your tongue, Shadrach,” retorted the Governor, which was the harshest
command he was ever known to give his servants.
Virginia ate her waffle and said nothing. When she went upstairs a little
later, she carried a pitcher of buttermilk for Betty's face.
“It isn't usual for a young lady to have freckles, Aunt Lydia says,” she
remarked, “and you must rub this right on and not wash it off till
morning--and, after you've rubbed it well in, you must get down on your
knees and ask God to mend your temper.”
Betty was lying in her little trundle bed, while Petunia, her small black
maid, pulled off her stockings, but she got up obediently and laved her
face in buttermilk. “I don't reckon there's any use about the other,” she
said. “I believe the Lord's jest leavin' me in sin as a warnin' to you and
Petunia,” and she got into her trundle bed and waited for the lights to go
out, and for the watchful Virginia to fall asleep.
She was still waiting when the door softly opened and her mother came in, a
lighted candle in her hand, the pale flame shining through her profile as
through delicate porcelain, and illumining her worn and fragile figure. She
moved with a slow step, as if her white limbs were a burden, and her head,
with its smoothly parted bright brown hair, bent like a lily that has begun
to fade.
She sat down upon the bedside and laid her hand on the child's forehead.
“Poor little firebrand,” she said gently. “How the world will hurt you!”
Then she knelt down and prayed beside her, and went out again with the
white light streaming upon her bosom. An hour later Betty heard her soft,
slow step on the gravelled drive and knew that she was starting on a
ministering errand to the quarters. Of all the souls on the great
plantation, the mistress alone had never rested from her labours.
The child tossed restlessly, beat her pillow, and fell back to wait more
patiently. At last the yellow strip under the door grew dark, and from the
other trundle bed there came a muffled breathing. With a sigh, Betty sat up
and listened; then she drew the frog's skin from beneath her pillow and
crept on bare feet to the door. It was black there, and black all down the
wide, old staircase. The great hall below was like a cavern underground.
Trembling when a board creaked under her, she cautiously felt her way with
her hands on the balustrade. The front door was fastened with an iron chain
that rattled as she touched it, so she stole into the dining room, unbarred
one of the long windows, and slipped noiselessly out. It was almost like
sliding into sunshine, the moon was so large and bright.
From the wide stone portico, the great white columns, looking grim and
ghostly, went upward to the roof, and beyond the steps the gravelled drive
shone hard as silver. As the child went between the lilac bushes, the
moving shadows crawled under her bare feet like living things.
At the foot of the drive ran the big road, and when she came out upon it
her trailing gown caught in a fallen branch, and she fell on her face.
Picking herself up again, she sat on a loosened rock and looked about her.
The strong night wind blew on her flesh, and she shivered in the moonlight,
which felt cold and brazen. Before her stretched the turnpike, darkened by
shadows that bore no likeness to the objects from which they borrowed
shape. Far as eye could see, they stirred ceaselessly back and forth like
an encamped army of grotesques.
She got up from the rock and slipped the frog's skin into the earth beneath
it. As she settled it in place, her pulses gave a startled leap, and she
stood terror-stricken beside the stone. A thud of footsteps was coming
along the road.
For an instant she trembled in silence; then her sturdy little heart took
courage, and she held up her hand.
“If you'll wait a minute, Mr. Devil, I'm goin' in,” she cried.
From the shadows a voice laughed at her, and a boy came forward into the
light--a half-starved boy, with a white, pinched face and a dusty bundle
swinging from the stick upon his shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” he snapped out.
Betty gave back a defiant stare. She might have been a tiny ghost in the
moonlight, with her trailing gown and her flaming curls.
“I live here,” she answered simply. “Where do you live?”
“Nowhere.” He looked her over with a laugh.
“Nowhere?”
“I did live somewhere, but I ran away a week ago.”
“Did they beat you? Old Rainy-day Jones beat one of his servants and he ran
away.”
“There wasn't anybody,” said the boy. “My mother died, and my father went
off--I hope he'll stay off. I hate him!”
He sent the words out so sharply that Betty's lids flinched.
“Why did you come by here?” she questioned. “Are you looking for the devil,
too?”
The boy laughed again. “I am looking for my grandfather. He lives somewhere
on this road, at a place named Chericoke. It has a lot of elms in the yard;
I'll know it by that.”
Betty caught his arm and drew him nearer. “Why, that's where Champe lives!”
she cried. “I don't like Champe much, do you?”
“I never saw him,” replied the boy; “but I don't like him--”
“He's mighty good,” said Betty, honestly; then, as she looked at the boy
again, she caught her breath quickly. “You do look terribly hungry,” she
added.
“I haven't had anything since--since yesterday.”
The little girl thoughtfully tapped her toes on the road. “There's a
currant pie in the safe,” she said. “I saw Uncle Shadrach put it there. Are
you fond of currant pie?--then you just wait!”
She ran up the carriage way to the dining-room window, and the boy sat down
on the rock and buried his face in his hands. His feet were set stubbornly
in the road, and the bundle lay beside them. He was dumb, yet disdainful,
like a high-bred dog that has been beaten and turned adrift.
As the returning patter of Betty's feet sounded in the drive, he looked up
and held out his hands. When she gave him the pie, he ate almost wolfishly,
licking the crumbs from his fingers, and even picking up a bit of crust
that had fallen to the ground.
“I'm sorry there isn't any more,” said the little girl. It had seemed a
very large pie when she took it from the safe.
The boy rose, shook himself, and swung his bundle across his arm.
“Will you tell me the way?” he asked, and she gave him a few childish
directions. “You go past the wheat field an' past the maple spring, an' at
the dead tree by Aunt Ailsey's cabin you turn into the road with the
chestnuts. Then you just keep on till you get there--an' if you don't ever
get there, come back to breakfast.”
The boy had started off, but as she ended, he turned and lifted his hat.
“I am very much obliged to you,” he said, with a quaint little bow; and
Betty bobbed a courtesy in her nightgown before she fled back into the
house.
III
THE COMING OF THE BOY
The boy trudged on bravely, his stick sounding the road. Sharp pains ran
through his feet where his shoes had worn away, and his head was swimming
like a top. The only pleasant fact of which he had consciousness was that
the taste of the currants still lingered in his mouth.
When he reached the maple spring, he swung himself over the stone wall and
knelt down for a drink, dipping the water in his hand. The spring was low
and damp and fragrant with the breath of mint which grew in patches in the
little stream. Overhead a wild grapevine was festooned, and he plucked a
leaf and bent it into a cup from which he drank. Then he climbed the wall
again and went on his way.
He was wondering if his mother had ever walked along this road on so
brilliant a night. There was not a tree beside it of which she had not told
him--not a shrub of sassafras or sumach that she had not carried in her
thoughts. The clump of cedars, the wild cherry, flowering in the spring
like snow, the blasted oak that stood where the branch roads met, the
perfume of the grape blossoms on the wall--these were as familiar to him as
the streets of the little crowded town in which he had lived. It was as if
nature had stood still here for twelve long summers, or as if he were
walking, ghostlike, amid the ever present memories of his mother's heart.
His mother! He drew his sleeve across his eyes and went on more slowly. She
was beside him on the road, and he saw her clearly, as he had seen her
every day until last year--a bright, dark woman, with slender, blue-veined
hands and merry eyes that all her tears had not saddened. He saw her in a
long, black dress, with upraised arm, putting back a crepe veil from her
merry eyes, and smiling as his father struck her. She had always smiled
when she was hurt--even when the blow was heavier than usual, and the blood
gushed from her temple, she had fallen with a smile. And when, at last, he
had seen her lying in her coffin with her baby under her clasped hands,
that same smile had been fixed upon her face, which had the brightness and
the chill repose of marble.
Of all that she had thrown away in her foolish marriage, she had retained
one thing only--her pride. To the end she had faced her fate with all the
insolence with which she faced her husband. And yet--“the Lightfoots were
never proud, my son,” she used to say; “they have no false pride, but they
know their place, and in England, between you and me, they were more
important than the Washingtons. Not that the General wasn't a great man,
dear, he was a very great soldier, of course--and in his youth, you know,
he was an admirer of your Great-great-aunt Emmeline. But she--why, she was
the beauty and belle of two continents--there's an ottoman at home covered
with a piece of her wedding dress.”
And the house? Was the house still as she had left it on that Christmas
Eve? “A simple gentleman's home, my child--not so imposing as Uplands, with
its pillars reaching to the roof, but older, oh, much older, and built of
brick that was brought all the way from England, and over the fireplace in
the panelled parlour you will find the Lightfoot arms.
“It was in that parlour, dear, that grandmamma danced a minuet with General
Lafayette; it looks out, you know, upon a white thorn planted by the
General himself, and one of the windows has not been opened for fifty
years, because the spray of English ivy your Great-aunt Emmeline set out
with her own hands has grown across the sash. Now the window is quite dark
with leaves, though you can still read the words Aunt Emmeline cut with her
diamond ring in one of the tiny panes, when young Harry Fitzhugh came in
upon her just as she had written a refusal to an English earl. She was
sitting in the window seat with the letter in her hand, and, when your
Great-uncle Harry--she afterwards married him, you know--fell on his knees
and cried out that others might offer her fame and wealth, but that he had
nothing except love, she turned, with a smile, and wrote upon the pane
'Love is best.' You can still see the words, very faint against the ivy
that she planted on her wedding day--”
Oh, yes, he knew it all--Great-aunt Emmeline was but the abiding presence
of the place. He knew the lawn with its grove of elms that overtopped the
peaked roof, the hall, with its shining floor and detached staircase that
crooked itself in the centre where the tall clock stood, and, best of all,
the white panels of the parlour where hung the portrait of that same
fascinating great-aunt, painted, in amber brocade, as Venus with the apple
in her hand.
And his grandmother, herself, in her stiff black silk, with a square of
lace turned back from her thin throat and a fluted cap above her corkscrew
curls--her daguerreotype, taken in all her pride and her precision, was
tied up in the bundle swinging on his arm.
He passed Aunt Ailsey's cabin, and turned into the road with the chestnuts.
A mile farther he came suddenly upon the house, standing amid the grove of
elms, dwarfed by the giant trees that arched above it. A dog's bark sounded
snappily from a kennel, but he paid no heed. He went up the broad white
walk, climbed the steps to the square front porch, and lifted the great
brass knocker. When he let it fall, the sound echoed through the shuttered
house.
The Major, who was sitting in his library with a volume of Mr. Addison open
before him and a decanter of Burgundy at his right hand, heard the knock,
and started to his feet. “Something's gone wrong at Uplands,” he said
aloud; “there's an illness--or the brandy is out.” He closed the book,
pushed aside the bedroom candle which he had been about to light, and went
out into the hall. As he unbarred the door and flung it open, he began at
once:--
“I hope there's no ill news,” he exclaimed.
The boy came into the hall, where he stood blinking from the glare of the
lamplight. His head whirled, and he reached out to steady himself against
the door. Then he carefully laid down his bundle and looked up with his
mother's smile.
“You're my grandfather, and I'm very hungry,” he said.
The Major caught the child's shoulders and drew him, almost roughly, under
the light. As he towered there above him, he gulped down something in his
throat, and his wide nostrils twitched.
“So you're poor Jane's boy?” he said at last.
The boy nodded. He felt suddenly afraid of the spare old man with his long
Roman nose and his fierce black eyebrows. A mist gathered before his eyes
and the lamp shone like a great moon in a cloudy circle.
The Major looked at the bundle on the floor, and again he swallowed. Then
he stooped and picked up the thing and turned away.
“Come in, sir, come in,” he said in a knotty voice. “You are at home.”
The boy followed him, and they passed the panelled parlour, from which he
caught a glimpse of the painting of Great-aunt Emmeline, and went into the
dining room, where his grandfather pulled out a chair and bade him to be
seated. As the old man opened the huge mahogany sideboard and brought out a
shoulder of cold lamb and a plate of bread and butter, he questioned him
with a quaint courtesy about his life in town and the details of his
journey. “Why, bless my soul, you've walked two hundred miles,” he cried,
stopping on his way from the pantry, with the ham held out. “And no money!
Why, bless my soul!”
“I had fifty cents,” said the boy, “that was left from my steamboat fare,
you know.”
The Major put the ham on the table and attacked it grimly with the
carving-knife.
“Fifty cents,” he whistled, and then, “you begged, I reckon?”
The boy flushed. “I asked for bread,” he replied, stung to the defensive.
“They always gave me bread and sometimes meat, and they let me sleep in the
barns where the straw was, and once a woman took me into her house and
offered me money, but I would not take it. I--I think I'd like to send her
a present, if you please, sir.”
“She shall have a dozen bottles of my best Madeira,” cried the Major. The
word recalled him to himself, and he got up and raised the lid of the
cellaret, lovingly running his hand over the rows of bottles.
“A pig would be better, I think,” said the boy, doubtfully, “or a cow, if
you could afford it. She is a poor woman, you know.”
“Afford it!” chuckled the Major. “Why, I'll sell your grandmother's silver,
but I'll afford it, sir.”
He took out a bottle, held it against the light, and filled a wine glass.
“This is the finest port in Virginia,” he declared; “there is life in every
drop of it. Drink it down,” and, when the boy had taken it, he filled his
own glass and tossed it off, not lingering, as usual, for the priceless
flavour. “Two hundred miles!” he gasped, as he looked at the child with
moist eyes over which his red lids half closed. “Ah, you're a Lightfoot,”
he said slowly. “I should know you were a Lightfoot if I passed you in the
road.” He carved a slice of ham and held it out on the end of the knife.
“It's long since you've tasted a ham like this--browned in bread crumbs,”
he added temptingly, but the boy gravely shook his head.
“I've had quite enough, thank you, sir,” he answered with a quaint dignity,
not unlike his grandfather's and as the Major rose, he stood up also,
lifting his black head to look in the old man's face with his keen gray
eyes.
The Major took up the bundle and moved toward the door. “You must see your
grandmother,” he said as they went out, and he led the way up the crooked
stair past the old clock in the bend. On the first landing he opened a door
and stopped upon the threshold. “Molly, here is poor Jane's boy,” he said.
In the centre of a big four-post bed, curtained in white dimity, a little
old lady was lying between lavender-scented sheets. On her breast stood a
tall silver candlestick which supported a well-worn volume of “The
Mysteries of Udolpho,” held open by a pair of silver snuffers. The old
lady's face was sharp and wizened, and beneath her starched white nightcap
rose the knots of her red flannel curlers. Her eyes, which were very small
and black, held a flickering brightness like that in live embers.
“Whose boy, Mr. Lightfoot?” she asked sharply.
Holding the child by the hand, the Major went into the room.
“It's poor Jane's boy, Molly,” he repeated huskily.
The old lady raised her head upon her high pillows, and looked at him by
the light of the candle on her breast. “Are you Jane's boy?” she questioned
in suspicion, and at the child's “Yes, ma'am,” she said, “Come nearer.
There, stand between the curtains. Yes, you are Jane's boy, I see.” She
gave the decision flatly, as if his parentage were a matter of her
pleasure. “And what is your name?” she added, as she snuffed the candle.
The boy looked from her stiff white nightcap to the “log-cabin” quilt on
the bed, and then at her steel hoops which were hanging from a chair back.
He had always thought of her as in her rich black silk, with the tight gray
curls about her ears, and at this revelation of her inner mysteries, his
fancy received a checkmate.
But he met her eyes again and answered simply, “Dandridge--they call me
Dan--Dan Montjoy.”
“And he has walked two hundred miles, Molly,” gasped the Major.
“Then he must be tired,” was the old lady's rejoinder, and she added with
spirit: “Mr. Lightfoot, will you show Dan to Jane's old room, and see that
he has a blanket on his bed. He should have been asleep hours ago--good
night, child, be sure and say your prayers,” and as they crossed the
threshold, she laid aside her book and blew out her light.
The Major led the way to “Jane's old room” at the end of the hall, and
fetched a candle from somewhere outside. “I think you'll find everything
you need,” he said, stooping to feel the covering on the bed. “Your
grandmother always keeps the rooms ready. God bless you, my son,” and he
went out, softly closing the door after him.
The boy sat down on the steps of the tester bed, and looked anxiously round
the three-cornered room, with its sloping windows filled with small, square
panes of glass. By the candlelight, flickering on the plain, white walls
and simple furniture, he tried to conjure back the figure of his
mother,--handsome Jane Lightfoot. Over the mantel hung two crude drawings
from her hand, and on the table at the bedside there were several books
with her name written in pale ink on the fly leaves. The mirror to the high
old bureau seemed still to hold the outlines of her figure, very shadowy
against the greenish glass. He saw her in her full white skirts--she had
worn nine petticoats, he knew, on grand occasions--fastening her coral
necklace about her stately throat, the bands of her black hair drawn like a
veil above her merry eyes. Had she lingered on that last Christmas Eve, he
wondered, when her candlestick held its sprig of mistletoe and her room was
dressed in holly? Did she look back at the cheerful walls and the stately
furniture before she blew out her light and went downstairs to ride madly
off, wrapped in his father's coat? And the old people drank their eggnog
and watched the Virginia reel, and, when they found her gone, shut her out
forever.
Now, as he sat on the bed-steps, it seemed to him that he had come home for
the first time in his life. All this was his own by right,--the queer old
house, his mother's room, and beyond the sloping windows, the meadows with
their annual yield of grain. He felt the pride of it swelling within him;
he waited breathlessly for the daybreak when he might go out and lord it
over the fields and the cattle and the servants that were his also. And at
last--his head big with his first day's vanity--he climbed between the
dimity curtains and fell asleep.
When he awaked next morning, the sun was shining through the small square
panes, and outside were the waving elm boughs and a clear sky. He was
aroused by a knock on his door, and, as he jumped out of bed, Big Abel, the
Major's driver and confidential servant, came in with the warm water. He
was a strong, finely-formed negro, black as the ace of spades (so the Major
put it), and of a singularly open countenance.
“Hi! ain't you up yit, young Marster?” he exclaimed. “Sis Rhody, she sez
she done save you de bes' puffovers you ever tase, en ef'n you don' come
'long down, dey'll fall right flat.”
“Who is Sis Rhody?” inquired the boy, as he splashed the water on his face.
“Who she? Why, she de cook.”
“All right, tell her I'm coming,” and he dressed hurriedly and ran down
into the hall where he found Champe Lightfoot, the Major's great-nephew,
who lived at Chericoke.
“Hello!” called Champe at once, plunging his hands into his pockets and
presenting an expression of eager interest. “When did you get here?”
“Last night,” Dan replied, and they stood staring at each other with two
pairs of the Lightfoot gray eyes.
“How'd you come?”
“I walked some and I came part the way on a steamboat. Did you ever see a
steamboat?”
“Oh, shucks! A steamboat ain't anything. I've seen George Washington's
sword. Do you like to fish?”
“I never fished. I lived in a city.”
Zeke came in with a can of worms, and Champe gave them the greater share of
his attention. “I tell you what, you'd better learn,” he said at last,
returning the can to Zeke and taking up his fishing-rod. “There're a lot of
perch down yonder in the river,” and he strode out, followed by the small
negro.
Dan looked after him a moment, and then went into the dining room, where
his grandmother was sitting at the head of her table, washing her pink
teaset in a basin of soapsuds. She wore her stiff, black silk this morning
with its dainty undersleeves of muslin, and her gray curls fell beneath her
cap of delicate yellowed lace. “Come and kiss me, child,” she said as he
entered. “Did you sleep well?”
“I didn't wake once,” answered the boy, kissing her wrinkled cheek.
“Then you must eat a good breakfast and go to your grandfather in the
library. Your grandfather is a very learned man, Dan, he reads Latin every
morning in the library.--Cupid, has Rhody a freshly broiled chicken for
your young master?”
She got up and rustled about the room, arranging the pink teaset behind the
glass doors of the corner press. Then she slipped her key basket over her
arm and fluttered in and out of the storeroom, stopping at intervals to
scold the stream of servants that poured in at the dining-room door. “Ef'n
you don' min', Ole Miss, Paisley, she done got de colick f'om a hull pa'cel
er green apples,” and “Abram he's des a-shakin' wid a chill en he say he
cyarn go ter de co'n field.”
“Wait a minute and be quiet,” the old lady responded briskly, for, as the
boy soon learned, she prided herself upon her healing powers, and suffered
no outsider to doctor her husband or her slaves. “Hush, Silas, don't say a
word until I tell you. Cupid--you are the only one with any sense--measure
Paisley a dose of Jamaica ginger from the bottle on the desk in the office,
and send Abram a drink of the bitters in the brown jug--why, Car'line, what
do you mean by coming into the house with a slit in your apron?”
“Fo' de Lawd, Ole Miss, hit's des done cotch on de fence. All de ducks Aun'
Meeley been fattenin' up fur you done got loose en gone ter water.”
“Well, you go, too, every one of you!” and she dismissed them with waves of
her withered, little hands. “Send them out, Cupid. No, Car'line, not a
word. Don't 'Ole Miss' me, I tell you!” and the servants streamed out again
as they had come.
When he had finished his breakfast the boy went back into the hall where
Big Abel was taking down the Major's guns from the rack, and, as he caught
sight of the strapping figure and kindly black face, he smiled for the
first time since his home-coming. With a lordly manner, he went over and
held out his hand.
“I like _you_, Big Abel,” he said gravely, and he followed him out into the
yard.
For the next few weeks he did not let Big Abel out of his sight. He rode
with him to the pasture, he sat with him on his doorstep of a fine evening,
and he drove beside him on the box when the old coach went out. “Big Abel
says a gentleman doesn't go barefooted,” he said to Champe when he found
him without his shoes in the meadow, “and I'm a gentleman.”
“I'd like to know what Big Abel knows about it,” promptly retorted Champe,
and Dan grew white with rage and proceeded to roll up his sleeves. “I'll
whip any man who says Big Abel doesn't know a gentleman!” he cried, making
a lunge at his cousin. In point of truth, it was Champe who did the
whipping in such free fights; but bruises and a bleeding nose had never
scared the savage out of Dan. He would spring up from his last tumble as
from his first, and let fly at his opponent until Big Abel rushed, in
tears, between them.
From the garrulous negro, the boy soon learned the history of his
family--learned, indeed, much about his grandfather of which the Major
himself was quite unconscious. He heard of that kindly, rollicking early
life, half wild and wholly good-humoured, in which the eldest male
Lightfoot had squandered his time and his fortune. Why, was not the old
coach itself but an existing proof of Big Abel's stories? “'Twan' mo'n
twenty years back dat Ole Miss had de fines' car'ige in de county,” he
began one evening on the doorstep, and the boy drove away a brood of
half-fledged chickens and settled himself to listen. “Hadn't you better
light your pipe, Big Abel?” he inquired courteously.
Big Abel shuffled into the cabin and came back with his corncob pipe and a
lighted taper. “We all ain' rid in de ole coach den,” he said with a sigh,
as he sucked at the long stem, and threw the taper at the chickens. “De ole
coach hit uz th'owed away in de out'ouse, en I 'uz des stiddyin' 'bout
splittin' it up fer kindlin' wood--en de new car'ige hit cos' mos' a mint
er money. Ole Miss she uz dat sot up dat she ain' let de hosses git no
sleep--nor me nurr. Ef'n she spy out a speck er dus' on dem ar wheels,
somebody gwine year f'om it, sho's you bo'n--en dat somebody wuz me. Yes,
Lawd, Ole Miss she 'low dat dey ain' never been nuttin' like dat ar car'ige
in Varginny sence befo' de flood.”
“But where is it, Big Abel?”
“You des wait, young Marster, you des wait twel I git dar. I'se gwine git
dar w'en I come ter de day me an Ole Marster rid in ter git his gol' f'om
Mars Tom Braxton. De car'ige hit sutney did look spick en span dat day, en
I done shine up my hosses twel you could 'mos' see yo' face in dey sides.
Well, we rid inter town en we got de gol' f'om Marse Braxton,--all tied up
in a bag wid a string roun' de neck er it,--en we start out agin (en Ole
Miss she settin' up at home en plannin' w'at she gwine buy), w'en we come
ter de tave'n whar we all use ter git our supper, en meet Marse Plaintain
Dudley right face to face. Lawd! Lawd! I'se done knowed Marse Plaintain
Dudley afo' den, so I des tech up my hosses en wuz a-sailin' 'long by, w'en
he shake his han' en holler out, 'Is yer wife done tied you ter 'er ap'on,
Maje?' (He knowed Ole Miss don' w'ar no ap'on des es well es I knowed
hit--dat's Marse Plaintain all over agin); but w'en he holler out dat, Ole
Marster sez, 'Stop, Abel,' en I 'bleeged ter stop, you know, I wuz w'en Ole
Marster tell me ter.
“'I ain' tied, Plaintain, I'm tired,' sez Ole Marster, 'I'm tired losin'
money.' Den Marse Plaintain he laugh like a devil. 'Oh, come in, suh, come
in en win, den,' he sez, en Ole Marster step out en walk right in wid Marse
Plaintain behint 'im--en I set dar all night,--yes, suh, I set dar all
night a-hol'n' de hosses' haids.
“Den w'en de sun up out come Ole Marster, white es a sheet, with his han's
a-trem'lin', en de bag er gol' gone. I look at 'im fur a minute, en den I
let right out, 'Ole Marster, whar de gol'?' en he stan' still en ketch his
breff befo' he say, 'Hit's all gone, Abel, en de car'ige en de hosses dey's
gone, too.” En w'en I bust out cryin' en ax 'im, 'My hosses gone, Ole
Marster?' he kinder sob en beckon me fer ter git down f'om my box, en den
we put out ter walk all de way home.
“W'en we git yer 'bout'n dinner time, dar wuz Ole Miss at de do' wid de sun
in her eyes, en soon es she ketch sight er Ole Marster, she put up her han'
en holler out, 'Marse Lightfoot, whar de car'ige?' But Ole Marster, he des
hang down his haid, same es a dawg dat's done been whupped fur rabbit
runnin', en he sob, 'Hit's gone, Molly en de bag er gol' en de hosses,
dey's gone, too, I done loss 'em all cep'n Abel--en I'm a bad man, Molly.'
Dat's w'at Ole Marster say, 'I'm a bad man, Molly,' en I stiddy 'bout my
hosses en Ole Miss' car'ige en shet my mouf right tight.”
“And Grandma? Did she cry?” asked the boy, breathlessly.
“Who cry? Ole Miss? Huh! She des th'ow up her haid en low, 'Well, Marse
Lightfoot, I'm glad you kep' Abel--en we'll use de ole coach agin',' sez
she--en den she tu'n en strut right in ter dinner.”
“Was that all she ever said about it, Big Abel?”
“Dat's all I ever hyern, honey, en I b'lieve hit's all Ole Marster ever
hyern eeder, case w'en I tuck his gun out er de rack de nex' day, he was
settin' up des es prim in de parlour a-sippin' a julep wid Marse Peyton
Ambler, en I hyern 'im kinder whisper, 'Molly, she's en angel, Peyton--' en
he ain' never call Ole Miss en angel twel he loss 'er car'ige.”
IV.
A HOUSE WITH AN OPEN DOOR
The master of Uplands was standing upon his portico behind the Doric
columns, looking complacently over the fat lands upon which his fathers had
sown and harvested for generations. Beyond the lane of lilacs and the two
silver poplars at the gate, his eyes wandered leisurely across the blue
green strip of grass-land to the tawny wheat field, where the slaves were
singing as they swung their cradles. The day was fine, and the outlying
meadows seemed to reflect his gaze with a smile as beneficent as his own.
He had cast his bread upon the soil, and it had returned to him threefold.
As he stood there, a small, yet imposing figure, in his white duck suit,
holding his broad slouch hat in his hand, he presented something of the
genial aspect of the country--as if the light that touched the pleasant
hills and valleys was aglow in his clear brown eyes and comely features.
Even the smooth white hand in which he held his hat and riding-whip had
about it a certain plump kindliness which would best become a careless
gesture of concession. And, after all, he looked but what he was--a bland
and generous gentleman, whose heart was as open as his wine cellar.
A catbird was singing in one of the silver poplars, and he waited, with
upraised head, for the song to end. Then he stooped beside a column and
carefully examined a newly planted coral honeysuckle before he went into
the wide hall, where his wife was seated at her work-table.
From the rear door, which stood open until frost, a glow of sunshine
entered, brightening the white walls with their rows of antlers and
gunracks, and rippling over the well-waxed floor upon which no drop of
water had ever fallen. A faint sweetness was in the air from the
honeysuckle arbour outside, which led into the box-bordered walks of the
garden.
As the Governor hung up his hat, he begun at once with his daily news of
the farm. “I hope they'll get that wheat field done to-day,” he said: “but
it doesn't look much like it--they've been dawdling over it for the last
three days. I am afraid Wilson isn't much of a manager, after all; if I
take my eyes off him, he seems to lose his head.”
“I think everything is that way,” returned his wife, looking up from one of
the elaborately tucked and hemstitched shirt fronts which served to gratify
the Governor's single vanity. “I'm sure Aunt Pussy says she can't trust
Judy for three days in the dairy without finding that the cream has stood
too long for butter--and Judy has been churning for twenty years.” She cut
off her thread and held the linen out for the Governor's inspection. “I
really believe that is the prettiest one I've made. How do you like this
new stitch?”
“Exquisite!” exclaimed her husband, as he took the shirt front in his hand.
“Simply exquisite, my love. There isn't a woman in Virginia who can do such
needlework; but it should go upon a younger and handsomer man, Julia.”
His wife blushed and looked up at him, the colour rising to her beautiful
brow and giving a youthful radiance to her nunlike face. “It could
certainly go upon a younger man, Mr. Ambler,” she rejoined, with a touch of
the coquetry for which she had once been noted; “but I should like to know
where I'd find a handsomer one.”
A pleased smile broadened the Governor's face, and he settled his waistcoat
with an approving pat. “Ah, you're a partial witness, my dear,” he said;
“but I've an error to confess, so I mustn't forego your favour--I--I bought
several of Mr. Willis's servants, my love.”
“Why, Mr. Ambler!” remonstrated his wife, reproach softening her voice
until it fell like a caress. “Why, Mr. Ambler, you bought six of Colonel
Blake's last year, you know and one of the house servants has been nursing
them ever since. The quarters are filled with infirm darkies.”
“But I couldn't help it, Julia, I really couldn't,” pleaded the Governor.
“You'd have done it yourself, my dear. They were sold to a dealer going
south, and one of them wants to marry that Mandy of yours.”
“Oh, if it's Mandy's lover,” broke in Mrs. Ambler, with rising interest,
“of course you had to buy him, and you did right about the others--you
always do right.” She put out her delicate blue-veined hand and touched his
arm. “I shall see them to-day,” she added, “and Mandy may as well be making
her wedding dress.”
“What an eye to things you have,” said the Governor, proudly. “You might
have been President, had you been a man, my dear.”
His wife rose and took up her work-box with a laugh of protest. “I am quite
content with the mission of my sex, sir,” she returned, half in jest, half
in wifely humility. “I'm sure I'd much rather make shirt fronts for you
than wear them myself.” Then she nodded to him and went, with her stately
step, up the broad staircase, her white hand flitting over the mahogany
balustrade.
As he looked after her, the Governor's face clouded, and he sighed beneath
his breath. The cares she met with such serenity had been too heavy for her
strength; they had driven the bloom from her cheeks and the lustre from her
eyes; and, though she had not faltered at her task, she had drooped daily
and grown older than her years. The master might live with a lavish
disregard of the morrow, not the master's wife. For him were the open
house, the shining table, the well-stocked wine cellar and the morning
rides over the dewy fields; for her the cares of her home and children, and
of the souls and bodies of the black people that had been given into her
hands. In her gentle heart it seemed to her that she had a charge to keep
before her God; and she went her way humbly, her thoughts filled with
things so vital as the uses of her medicine chest and the unexpounded
mysteries of salvation.
Now, as she reached the upper landing, she met Betty running to look for
her.
“O, mamma, may I go to fish with Champe and the new boy and Big Abel? And
Virginia wants to go, too, she says.”
“Wait a moment, child,” said Mrs. Ambler. “You have torn the trimming on
your frock. Stand still and I'll mend it for you,” and she got out her
needle and sewed up the rent, while Betty hopped impatiently from foot to
foot.
“I think the new boy's a heap nicer than Champe, mamma,” she remarked as
she waited.
“Do you, dear?”
“An' he says I'm nicer than Champe, too. He fought Champe 'cause he said I
didn't have as much sense as he had--an' I have, haven't I, mamma?”
“Women do not need as much sense as men, my dear,” replied Mrs. Ambler,
taking a dainty stitch.
“Well, anyway, Dan fought Champe about it,” said Betty, with pride. “He'll
fight about 'most anything, he says, if he jest gets roused--an' that
cert'n'y did rouse him. His nose bled a long time, too, and Champe whipped
him, you know. But, when it was over, I asked him if I had as much sense as
he had, and he said, 'Psha! you're just a girl.' Wasn't that funny, mamma?”
“There, there, Betty,” was Mrs. Ambler's rejoinder. “I'm afraid he's a
wicked boy, and you mustn't get such foolish thoughts into your head. If
the Lord had wanted you to be clever, He would have made you a man. Now,
run away, and don't get your feet wet; and if you see Aunt Lydia in the
garden, you may tell her that the bonnet has come for her to look at.”
Betty bounded away and gave the message to Aunt Lydia over the whitewashed
fence of the garden. “They've sent a bonnet from New York for you to look
at, Aunt Lydia,” she cried. “It came all wrapped up in tissue paper, with
mamma's gray silk, and it's got flowers on it--a lot of them!” with which
parting shot, she turned her back upon the startled old lady and dashed off
to join the boys and Big Abel, who, with their fishing-poles, had gathered
in the cattle pasture.
Miss Lydia, who was lovingly bending over a bed of thyme, raised her eyes
and looked after the child, all in a gentle wonder. Then she went slowly up
and down the box-bordered walks, the full skirt of her “old lady's gown”
trailing stiffly over the white gravel, her delicate face rising against
the blossomless shrubs of snowball and bridal-wreath, like a faintly tinted
flower that had been blighted before it fully bloomed. Around her the
garden was fragrant as a rose-jar with the lid left off, and the very paths
beneath were red and white with fallen petals. Hardy cabbage roses, single
pink and white dailies, yellow-centred damask, and the last splendours of
the giant of battle, all dipped their colours to her as she passed, while
the little rustic summer-house where the walks branched off was but a
flowering bank of maiden's blush and microphylla.
Amid them all, Miss Lydia wandered in her full black gown, putting aside
her filmy ruffles as she tied back a hanging spray or pruned a broken
stalk, sometimes even lowering her thread lace cap as she weeded the tangle
of sweet Williams and touch-me-not. Since her gentle girlhood she had
tended bountiful gardens, and dreamed her virgin dreams in the purity of
their box-trimmed walks. In a kind of worldly piety she had bound her
prayer book in satin and offered to her Maker the incense of flowers. She
regarded heaven with something of the respectful fervour with which she
regarded the world--that great world she had never seen; for “the proper
place for a spinster is her father's house,” she would say with her
conventional primness, and send, despite herself, a mild imagination in
pursuit of the follies from which she so earnestly prayed to be
delivered--she, to whom New York was as the terror of a modern Babylon, and
a Jezebel but a woman with paint upon her cheeks. “They tell me that other
women have painted since,” she had once said, with a wistful curiosity.
“Your grandmamma, my dear Julia, had even seen one with an artificial
colour. She would not have mentioned it to me, of course,--an unmarried
lady,--but I was in the next room when she spoke of it to old Mrs.
Fitzhugh. She was a woman of the world, was your grandmamma, my dear, and
the most finished dancer of her day.” The last was said with a timid pride,
though to Miss Lydia herself the dance was the devil's own device, and the
teaching of the catechism to small black slaves the chief end of existence.
But the blood of the “most finished dancer of her day” still circulated
beneath the old lady's gown and the religious life, and in her attenuated
romances she forever held the sinner above the saint, unless, indeed, the
sinner chanced to be of her own sex, when, probably, the book would never
have reached her hands. For the purely masculine improprieties, her charity
was as boundless as her innocence. She had even dipped into Shakespeare and
brought away the memory of Mercutio; she had read Scott, and enshrined in
her pious heart the bold Rob Roy. “Men are very wicked, I fear,” she would
gently offer, “but they are very a--a--engaging, too.”
To-day, when Betty came with the message, she lingered a moment to convince
herself that the bonnet was not in her thoughts, and then swept her
trailing bombazine into the house. “I have come to tell you that you may as
well send the bonnet back, Julia,” she began at once. “Flowers are much too
fine for me, my dear. I need only a plain black poke.”
“Come up and try it on,” was Mrs. Ambler's cheerful response. “You have no
idea how lovely it will look on you.”
Miss Lydia went up and took the bonnet out of its wrapping of tissue paper.
“No, you must send it back, my love,” she said in a resigned voice. “It
does not become me to dress as a married woman. It may as well go back,
Julia.”
“But do look in the glass, Aunt Lydia--there, let me put it straight for
you. Why, it suits you perfectly. It makes you look at least ten years
younger.”
“A plain black poke, my dear,” insisted Aunt Lydia, as she carefully
swathed the flowers in the tissue paper. “And, besides, I have my old one,
which is quite good enough for me, my love. It was very sweet of you to
think of it, but it may as well go back.” She pensively gazed at the mirror
for a moment, and then went to her chamber and took out her Bible to read
Saint Paul on Woman.
When she came down a few hours later, her face wore an angelic meekness. “I
have been thinking of that poor Mrs. Brown who was here last week,” she
said softly, “and I remember her telling me that she had no bonnet to wear
to church. What a loss it must be to her not to attend divine service.”
Mrs. Ambler quickly looked up from her needlework. “Why, Aunt Lydia, it
would be really a charity to give her your old one!” she exclaimed. “It
does seem a shame that she should be kept away from church because of a
bonnet. And, then, you might as well keep the new one, you know, since it
is in the house; I hate the trouble of sending it back.”
“It would be a charity,” murmured Miss Lydia, and the bonnet was brought
down and tried on again. They were still looking at it when Betty rushed in
and threw herself upon her mother. “O, mamma, I can't help it!” she cried
in tears, “an' I wish I hadn't done it! Oh, I wish I hadn't; but I set fire
to the Major's woodpile, and he's whippin' Dan!”
“Betty!” exclaimed Mrs. Ambler. She took the child by her shoulders and
drew her toward her. “Betty, did you set fire to the Major's woodpile?” she
questioned sternly.
Betty was sobbing aloud, but she stopped long enough to gasp out an answer.
“We were playin' Injuns, mamma, an' we couldn't make believe 'twas real,”
she said, “an' it isn't any fun unless you can make believe, so I lit the
woodpile and pretended it was a fort, an' Big Abel, he was an Injun with
the axe for a tomahawk; but the woodpile blazed right up, an' the Major
came runnin' out. He asked Dan who did it, an' Dan wouldn't say 'twas
me,--an' I wouldn't say, either,--so he took Dan in to whip him. Oh, I wish
I'd told! I wish I'd told!”
“Hush, Betty,” said Mrs. Ambler, and she called to the Governor in the
hall, “Mr. Ambler, Betty has set fire to the Major's woodpile!” Her voice
was hopeless, and she looked up blankly at her husband as he entered.
“Set fire to the woodpile!” whistled the Governor. “Why, bless my soul, we
aren't safe in our beds!”
“He whipped Dan,” wailed Betty.
“We aren't safe in our beds,” repeated the Governor, indignantly. “Julia,
this is really too much.”
“Well, you will have to ride right over there,” said his wife, decisively.
“Petunia, run down and tell Hosea to saddle his master's horse. Betty, I
hope this will be a lesson to you. You shan't have any preserves for supper
for a week.”
“I don't want any preserves,” sobbed Betty, her apron to her eyes.
“Then you mustn't go fishing for two weeks. Mr. Ambler, you'd better be
starting at once, and don't forget to tell the Major that Betty is in great
distress--you are, aren't you, Betty?”
“Yes, ma'am,” wept Betty.
The Governor went out into the hall and took down his hat and riding-whip.
“The sins of the children are visited upon the fathers,” he remarked
gloomily as he mounted his horse and rode away from his supper.
V
THE SCHOOL FOR GENTLEMEN
The Governor rode up too late to avert the punishment. Dan had taken his
whipping and was sitting on a footstool in the library, facing the Major
and a couple of the Major's cronies. His face wore an expression in which
there was more resentment than resignation; for, though he took blows
doggedly, he bore the memory of them long after the smart had ceased--long,
indeed, after light-handed justice, in the Major's person, had forgotten
alike the sin and the expiation. For the Major's hand was not steady at the
rod, and he had often regretted a weakness of heart which interfered with
a physical interpretation of the wisdom of Solomon. “If you get your
deserts, you'd get fifty lashes,” was his habitual reproof to his servants,
though, as a matter of fact, he had never been known to order one. His
anger was sometimes of the kind that appalls, but it usually vented itself
in a heightened redness of face or a single thundering oath; and a woman's
sob would melt his stoniest mood. It was only because his daughter had kept
out of his sight that he had never forgiven her, people said; but there
was, perhaps, something characteristic in the proof that he was most
relentless where he had most loved.
As for Dan's chastisement, he had struck him twice across the shoulders,
and when the boy had turned to him with the bitter smile which was Jane
Lightfoot's own, the Major had choked in his wrath, and, a moment later,
flung the whip aside. “I'll be damned,--I beg your pardon, sir,--I'll be
ashamed of myself if I give you another lick,” he said. “You are a
gentleman, and I shall trust you.”
He held out his hand, but he had not counted on the Montjoy blood. The boy
looked at him and stubbornly shook his head. “I can't shake hands yet
because I am hating you just now,” he answered. “Will you wait awhile,
sir?” and the Major choked again, half in awe, half in amusement.
“You don't bear malice, I reckon?” he ventured cautiously.
“I am not sure,” replied the boy, “I rather think I do.”
Then he put on his coat, and they went out to meet Mr. Blake and Dr. Crump,
two hale and jolly gentlemen who rode over every Thursday to spend the
night.
As the visitors came panting up the steps, the Major stood in the doorway
with outstretched hands.
“You are late, gentlemen, you are late,” was his weekly greeting, to which
they as regularly responded, “We could never come too early for our
pleasure, my dear Major; but there are professional duties, you know,
professional duties.”
After this interchange of courtesies, they would enter the house and settle
themselves, winter or summer, in their favourite chairs upon the
hearth-rug, when it was the custom of Mrs. Lightfoot to send in a
fluttering maid to ask if Mrs. Blake had done her the honour to accompany
her husband. As Mrs. Blake was never known to leave her children and her
pet poultry, this was merely a conventionalism by which the elder lady
meant to imply a standing welcome for the younger.
On this evening, Mr. Blake--the rector of the largest church in
Leicesterburg--straightened his fat legs and folded his hands as he did at
the ending of his sermons, and the others sat before him with the strained
and reverential faces which they put on like a veil in church and took off
when the service was over. That it was not a prayer, but a pleasantry of
which he was about to deliver himself, they quite understood; but he had a
habit of speaking on week days in his Sunday tones, which gave, as it were,
an official weight to his remarks. He was a fleshy wide-girthed gentleman,
with a bald head, and a face as radiant as the full moon.
“I was just asking the doctor when I was to have the honour of making the
little widow Mrs. Crump?” he threw out at last, with a laugh that shook him
from head to foot. “It is not good for man to live alone, eh, Major?”
“That sentence is sufficient to prove the divine inspiration of the
Scriptures,” returned the Major, warmly, while the doctor blushed and
stammered, as he always did, at the rector's mild matrimonial jokes. It
was twenty years since Mr. Blake began teasing Dr. Crump about his
bachelorship, and to them both the subject was as fresh as in its
beginning.
“I--I declare I haven't seen the lady for a week,” protested the doctor,
“and then she sent for me.”
“Sent for you?” roared Mr. Blake. “Ah, doctor, doctor!”
“She sent for me because she had heart trouble,” returned the doctor,
indignantly. The lady's name was never mentioned between them.
The rector laughed until the tears started.
“Ah, you're a success with the ladies,” he exclaimed, as he drew out a
neatly ironed handkerchief and shook it free from its folds, “and no
wonder--no wonder! We'll be having an epidemic of heart trouble next.”
Then, as he saw the doctor wince beneath his jest, his kindly heart
reproached him, and he gravely turned to politics and the dignity of
nations.
The two friends were faithful Democrats, though the rector always began his
very forcible remarks with: “A minister knows nothing of politics, and I am
but a minister of the Gospel. If you care, however, for the opinion of an
outsider--”
As for the Major, he had other leanings which were a source of unending
interest to them all. “I am a Whig, not from principle, but from prejudice,
sir,” he declared. “The Whig is the gentleman's party. I never saw a Whig
that didn't wear broadcloth.”
“And some Democrats,” politely protested the doctor, with a glance at his
coat.
The Major bowed.
“And many Democrats, sir; but the Whig party, if I may say so, is the
broadcloth party--the cloth stamps it; and besides this, sir, I think its
'parts are solid and will wear well.'”
Now when the Major began to quote Mr. Addison, even the rector was silent,
save for an occasional prompting, as, “I was reading the _Spectator_ until
eleven last night, sir,” or “I have been trying to recall the lines in _The
Campaign_ before. 'Twas then great Marlborough's mighty soul was proved.”
This was the best of the day to Dan, and, as he turned on his footstool, he
did not even glare at Champe, who, from the window seat, was regarding him
with the triumphant eye with which the young behold the downfall of a
brother. For a moment he had forgotten the whipping, but Champe had not; he
was thinking of it in the window seat.
But the Major was standing on the hearth-rug, and the boy's gaze went to
him. Tossing back his long white hair, and fixing his eagle glance on his
friends, the old gentleman, with a free sweep of his arm, thundered his
favourite lines:--
“So, when an angel by divine command
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land
(Such as of late o'er pale Britannia passed),
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.”
He had got so far when the door opened and the Governor entered--a little
hurriedly, for he was thinking of his supper.
“I am the bearer of an apology, my dear Major,” he said, when he had
heartily shaken hands all round. “It seems that Betty--I assure you she is
in great distress--set fire to your woodpile this afternoon, and that your
grandson was punished for her mischief. My dear boy,” he laid his hand on
Dan's shoulder and looked into his face with the winning smile which had
made him the most popular man in his State, “my dear boy, you are young to
be such a gentleman.”
A hot flush overspread Dan's face; he forgot the smart and the wounded
pride--he forgot even Champe staring from the window seat. The Governor's
voice was like salve to his hurt; the upright little man with the warm
brown eyes seemed to lift him at once to the plane of his own chivalry.
“Oh, I couldn't tell on a girl, sir,” he answered, and then his smothered
injury burst forth; “but she ought to be ashamed of herself,” he added
bluntly.
“She is,” said the Governor with a smile; then he turned to the others.
“Major, the boy is a Lightfoot!” he exclaimed.
“Ah, so I said, so I said!” cried the Major, clapping his hand on Dan's
head in a racial benediction. “'I'd know you were a Lightfoot if I met you
in the road' was what I said the first evening.”
“And a Virginian,” added Mr. Blake, folding his hands on his stomach and
smiling upon the group. “My daughter in New York wrote to me last week for
advice about the education of her son. 'Shall I send him to the school of
learning at Cambridge, papa?' she asked; and I answered, 'Send him there,
if you will, but, when he has finished with his books, by all means let him
come to Virginia--the school for gentlemen.'”
“The school for gentlemen!” cried the doctor, delightedly. “It is a prouder
title than the 'Mother of Presidents.'”
“And as honourably earned,” added the rector. “If you want polish, come to
Virginia; if you want chivalry, come to Virginia. When I see these two
things combined, I say to myself, 'The blood of the Mother of Presidents is
here.'”
“You are right, sir, you are right!” cried the Major, shaking back his
hair, as he did when he was about to begin the lines from _The Campaign_.
“Nothing gives so fine a finish to a man as a few years spent with the
influences that moulded Washington. Why, some foreigners are perfected by
them, sir. When I met General Lafayette in Richmond upon his second visit,
I remember being agreeably impressed with his dignity and ease, which, I
have no doubt, sir, he acquired by his association, in early years, with
the Virginia gentlemen.”
The Governor looked at them with a twinkle in his eye. He was aware of the
humorous traits of his friends, but, in the peculiar sweetness of his
temper, he loved them not the less because he laughed at them--perhaps the
more. In the rector's fat body and the Major's lean one, he knew that there
beat hearts as chivalrous as their words. He had seen the Major doff his
hat to a beggar in the road, and the rector ride forty miles in a snowstorm
to read a prayer at the burial of a slave. So he said with a pleasant
laugh, “We are surely the best judges, my dear sirs,” and then, as Mrs.
Lightfoot rustled in, they rose and fell back until she had taken her seat,
and found her knitting.
“I am so sorry not to see Mrs. Blake,” she said to the rector. “I have a
new recipe for yellow pickle which I must write out and send to her.” And,
as the Governor rose to go, she stood up and begged him to stay to supper.
“Mr. Lightfoot, can't you persuade him to sit down with us?” she asked.
“Where you have failed, Molly, it is useless for me to try,” gallantly
responded the Major, picking up her ball of yarn.
“But I must bear your pardon to my little girl, I really must,” insisted
the Governor. “By the way, Major,” he added, turning at the door, “what do
you think of the scheme to let the Government buy the slaves and ship them
back to Africa? I was talking to a Congressman about it last week.”
“Sell the servants to the Government!” cried the Major, hotly. “Nonsense!
nonsense! Why, you are striking at the very foundation of our society!
Without slavery, where is our aristocracy, sir?”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said the Governor lightly. “Well, we shall keep
them a while longer, I expect. Good night, madam, good night, gentlemen,”
and he went out to where his horse was standing.
The Major looked after him with a sigh. “When I hear a man talking about
the abolition of slavery,” he remarked gloomily, “I always expect him to
want to do away with marriage next--” he checked himself and coloured, as
if an improper speech had slipped out in the presence of Mrs. Lightfoot.
The old lady rose primly and, taking the rector's arm, led the way to
supper.
Dan was not noticed at the table,--it was a part of his grandmother's
social training to ignore children before visitors,--but when he went
upstairs that night, the Major came to the boy's room and took him in his
arms.
“I am proud of you, my child,” he said. “You are my grandson, every inch of
you, and you shall have the finest riding horse in the stables on your
birthday.”
“I'd rather have Big Abel, if you please, sir,” returned Dan. “I think Big
Abel would like to belong to me, grandpa.”
“Bless my soul!” cried the Major. “Why, you shall have Big Abel and his
whole family, if you like. I'll give you every darky on the place, if you
want them--and the horses to boot,” for the old gentleman was as unwise in
his generosity as in his wrath.
“Big Abel will do, thank you,” responded the boy; “and I'd like to shake
hands now, grandpa,” he added gravely; but before the Major left that night
he had won not only the child's hand, but his heart. It was the beginning
of the great love between them.
For from that day Dan was as the light of his grandfather's eyes. As the
boy strode manfully across the farm, his head thrown back, his hands
clasped behind him, the old man followed, in wondering pride, on his
footsteps. To see him stand amid the swinging cradles in the wheat field,
ordering the slaves and arguing with the overseer, was sufficient delight
unto the Major's day. “Nonsense, Molly,” he would reply half angrily to his
wife's remonstrances. “The child can't be spoiled. I tell you he's too fine
a boy. I couldn't spoil him if I tried,” and once out of his grandmother's
sight, Dan's arrogance was laughed at, and his recklessness was worshipped.
“Ah, you will make a man, you will make a man!” the Major had exclaimed
when he found him swearing at the overseer, “but you mustn't curse, you
really mustn't, you know. Why, your grandmother won't let me do it.”
“But I told him to leave that haystack for me to slide on,” complained the
boy, “and he said he wouldn't, and began to pull it down. I wish you'd send
him away, grandpa.”
“Send Harris away!” whistled the Major. “Why, where could I get another,
Dan? He has been with me for twenty years.”
“Hi, young Marster, who gwine min' de han's?” cried Big Abel, from behind.
“Do you like him, Big Abel?” asked the child, for the opinion of Big Abel
was the only one for which he ever showed respect. “It's because he's not
free, grandpa,” he had once explained at the Major's jealous questioning.
“I wouldn't hurt his feelings because he's not free, you know, and he
couldn't answer back,” and the Major had said nothing more.
Now “Do you like him, Big Abel?” he inquired; and to the negro's “He's done
use me moughty well, suh,” he said gravely, “Then he shall stay,
grandpa--and I'm sorry I cursed you, Harris,” he added before he left the
field. He would always own that he was wrong, if he could once be made to
see it, which rarely happened.
“The boy's kind heart will save him, or he is lost,” said the Governor,
sadly, as Dan tore by on his little pony, his black hair blown from his
face, his gray eyes shining.
“He has a kind heart, I know,” returned Mrs. Ambler, gently; “the servants
and the animals adore him--but--but do you think it well for Betty to be
thrown so much with him? He is very wild, and they deny him nothing. I wish
she went with Champe instead--but what do you think?”
“I don't know, I don't know,” answered the Governor, uneasily. “He told the
doctor to mind his own business, yesterday--and that is not unlike Betty,
herself, I am sorry to say--but this morning I saw him give his month's
pocket money to that poor free negro, Levi. I can't say, I really do not
know,” his eyes followed Betty as she flew out to climb behind Dan on the
pony's back. “I wish it were Champe, myself,” he added doubtfully.
For Betty--independent Betty--had become Dan's slave. Ever since the
afternoon of the burning woodpile, she had bent her stubborn little knees
to him in hero-worship. She followed closer than a shadow on his footsteps;
no tortures could wring his secrets from her lips. Once, when he hid
himself in the mountains for a day and night and played Indian, she kept
silence, though she knew his hiding-place, and a search party was out with
lanterns until dawn.
“I didn't tell,” she said triumphantly, when he came down again.
“No, you didn't tell,” he frankly acknowledged.
“So I can keep a secret,” she declared at last.
“Oh, yes, you can keep a secret--for a girl,” he returned, and added, “I
tell you what, I like you better than anybody about here, except grandpa
and Big Abel.”
She shone upon him, her eyes narrowing; then her face darkened. “Not better
than Big Abel?” she questioned plaintively.
“Why, I have to like Big Abel best,” he replied, “because he belongs to me,
you know--you ought to love the thing that belongs to you.”
“But I might belong to you,” suggested Betty. She smiled again, and,
smiling or grave, she always looked as if she were standing in a patch of
sunshine, her hair made such a brightness about her.
“Oh, you couldn't, you're white,” said Dan; “and, besides, I reckon Big
Abel and the pony are as much as I can manage. It's a dreadful weight,
having people belong to you.”
Then he loaded his gun, and Betty ran away with her fingers in her ears,
because she couldn't bear to have things killed.
A month later Dan and Champe settled down to study. The new tutor came--a
serious young man from the North, who wore spectacles, and read the Bible
to the slaves on the half-holidays. He was kindly and conscientious, and,
though the boys found him unduly weighed down by responsibility for the
souls of his fellows, they soon loved him in a light-hearted fashion. In a
society where even the rector harvested alike the true grain and the tares,
and left the Almighty to do His own winnowing, Mr. Bennett's free-handed
fight with the flesh and the devil was looked upon with smiling tolerance,
as if he were charging a windmill with a wooden sword.
On Saturdays he would ride over to Uplands, and discuss his schemes for the
uplifting of the negroes with the Governor and Mrs. Ambler; and once he
even went so far as to knock at Rainy-day Jones's door and hand him a
pamphlet entitled “The Duties of the Slaveholder.” Old Rainy-day, who was
the biggest bully in the county, set the dogs on him, and lit his pipe with
the pamphlet; but the Major, when he heard the story, laughed, and called
the young man “a second David.”
Mr. Bennett looked at him seriously through his glasses, and then his eyes
wandered to the small slave, Mitty, whose chief end in life was the finding
of Mrs. Lightfoot's spectacles. He was an earnest young man, but he could
not keep his eyes away from Mitty when she was in the room; and at the old
lady's, “Mitty, my girl, find me my glasses,” he felt like jumping from his
seat and calling upon her to halt. It seemed a survival of the dark ages
that one immortal soul should spend her life hunting for the spectacles of
another. To Mr. Bennett, a soul was a soul in any colour; to the Major the
sons of Ham were under a curse which the Lord would lighten in His own good
time.
But before many months, the young man had won the affection of the boys and
the respect of their grandfather, whose candid lack of logic was
overpowered by the reasons which Mr. Bennett carried at every finger tip.
He not only believed things, he knew why he believed them; and to the
Major, with whom feelings were convictions, this was more remarkable than
the courage with which he had handed his tract to old Rainy-day Jones.
As for Mr. Bennett, he found the Major a riddle that he could not read; but
the Governor's first smile had melted his reserve, and he declared Mrs.
Ambler to be “a Madonna by Perugino.”
Mrs. Ambler had never heard of Perugino, and the word “Madonna” suggested
to her vague Romanist snares, but her heart went out to the stranger when
she found that he was in mourning for his mother. She was not a clever
woman in a worldly sense, yet her sympathy, from the hourly appeals to it,
had grown as fine as intellect. She was hopelessly ignorant of ancient
history and the Italian Renaissance; but she had a genius for the
affections, and where a greater mind would have blundered over a wound, her
soft hand went by intuition to the spot. It was very pleasant to sit in a
rosewood chair in her parlour, to hear her gray silk rustle as she crossed
her feet, and to watch her long white fingers interlace.
So she talked to the young man of his mother, and he showed her the
daguerrotype of the girl he loved; and at last she confided to him her
anxieties for Betty's manners and the Governor's health, and her timid
wonder that the Bible “countenanced” slavery. She was rare and elegant like
a piece of fine point lace; her hands had known no harder work than the
delicate hemstitching, and her mind had never wandered over the nearer
hills.
As time went on, Betty was given over to the care of her governess, and she
was allowed to run wild no more in the meadows. Virginia, a pretty prim
little girl, already carried her prayer book in her hands when she drove to
church, and wore Swiss muslin frocks in the evenings; but Betty when she
was made to hem tablecloths on sunny mornings, would weep until her needle
rusted.
On cloudy days she would sometimes have her ambitions to be ladylike, and
once, when she had gone to a party in town and seen Virginia dancing while
she sat against the wall, she had come home to throw herself upon the
floor.
“It's not that I care for boys, mamma,” she wailed, “for I despise them;
but they oughtn't to have let me sit against the wall. And none of them
asked me to dance--not even Dan.”
“Why, you are nothing but a child, Betty,” said Mrs. Ambler, in dismay.
“What on earth does it matter to you whether the boys notice you or not?”
“It doesn't,” sobbed Betty; “but you wouldn't like to sit against the wall,
mamma.”
“You can make them suffer for it six years hence, daughter,” suggested the
Governor, revengefully.
“But suppose they don't have anything to do with me then,” cried Betty, and
wept afresh.
In the end, it was Uncle Bill who brought her to her feet, and, in doing
so, he proved himself to be the philosopher that he was.
“I tell you what, Betty,” he exclaimed, “if you get up and stop crying,
I'll give you fifty cents. I reckon fifty cents will make up for any boy,
eh?”
Betty lay still and looked up from the floor.
“I--I reckon a dol-lar m-i-g-h-t,” she gasped, and caught a sob before it
burst out.
“Well, you get up and I'll give you a dollar. There ain't many boys worth
a dollar, I can tell you.”
Betty got up and held out one hand as she wiped her eyes with the other.
“I shall never speak to a boy again,” she declared, as she took the money.
That was when she was thirteen, and a year later Dan went away to college.
VI
COLLEGE DAYS
“My dear grandpa,” wrote Dan during his first weeks at college, “I think I
am going to like it pretty well here after I get used to the professors.
The professors are a great nuisance. They seem to forget that a fellow of
seventeen isn't a baby any longer.
“The Arcades are very nice, and the maples on the lawn remind me of those
at Uplands, only they aren't nearly so fine. My room is rather small, but
Big Abel keeps everything put away, so I manage to get along. Champe sleeps
next to me, and we are always shouting through the wall for Big Abel. I
tell you, he has to step lively now.
“The night after we came, we went to supper at Professor Ball's. There was
a Miss Ball there who had a pair of big eyes, but girls are so silly.
Champe talked to her all the evening and walked out to the graveyard with
her the next afternoon. I don't see why he wants to spend so much of his
time with young ladies. It's because they think him good-looking, I reckon.
“We are the only men who have horses here, so I am glad you made me bring
Prince Rupert, after all. When I ride him into town, everybody turns to
look at him, and Batt Horsford, the stableman, says his trot is as clean as
a razor. At first I wished I'd brought my hunter instead, they made such a
fuss over Champe's, and I tell you he's a regular timber-topper.
“A week ago I rode to the grave of Mr. Jefferson, as I promised you, but I
couldn't carry the wreath for grandma because it would have looked
silly--Champe said so. However, I made Big Abel get down and pull a few
flowers on the way.
“You know, I had always thought that only gentlemen came to the University,
but whom do you think I met the first evening?--why, the son of old
Rainy-day Jones. What do you think of that? He actually had the impudence
to pass himself off as one of the real Joneses, and he was going with all
the men. Of course, I refused to shake hands with him--so did Champe--and,
when he wanted to fight me, I said I fought only gentlemen. I wish you
could have seen his face. He looked as old Rainy-day did when he hit the
free negro Levi, and I knocked him down.
“By the way, I wish you would please send me my half-year's pocket money in
a lump, if you can conveniently do so. There is a man here who is working
his way through Law, and his mother has just lost all her money, so, unless
some one helps him, he'll have to go out and work before he takes his
degree. I've promised to lend him my half-year's allowance--I said 'lend'
because it might hurt his feelings; but, of course, I don't want him to pay
it back. He's a great fellow, but I can't tell you his name--I shouldn't
like it in his place, you know.
“The worst thing about college life is having to go to classes. If it
wasn't for that I should be all right, and, anyway, I am solid on my Greek
and Latin--but I can't get on with the higher mathematics. Mr. Bennett
couldn't drive them into my head as he did into Champe's.
“I hope grandma has entirely recovered from her lumbago. Tell her Mrs. Ball
says she was cured by using red pepper plasters.
“Do you know, by the way, that I left my half-dozen best waistcoats--the
embroidered ones--in the bottom drawer of my bureau, at least Big Abel
swears that's where he put them. I should be very much obliged if grandma
would have them fixed up and sent to me--I can't do without them. A great
many gentlemen here are wearing coloured cravats, and Charlie Morson's
brother, who came up from Richmond for a week, has a pair of side whiskers.
He says they are fashionable down there, but I don't like them.
“With affectionate greeting to grandma and yourself,
“Your dutiful grandson,
“DANDRIDGE MONTJOY.”
“P.S. I am using my full name now--it will look better if I am ever
President. I wonder if Mr. Jefferson was ever called plain Tom.
“DAN.”
“N.B. Give my love to the little girls at Uplands.
“D.”
The Major read the letter aloud to his wife while she sat knitting by the
fireside, with Mitty holding the ball of yarn on a footstool at her feet.
“What do you think of that, Molly?” he asked when he had finished, his
voice quivering with excitement.
“Red pepper plasters!” returned the old lady, contemptuously. “As if I
hadn't been making them for Cupid for the last twenty years. Red pepper
plasters, indeed! Why, they're no better than mustard ones. I reckon I've
made enough of them to know.”
“I don't mean that, Molly,” explained the Major, a little crestfallen. “I
was speaking of the letter. That's a fine letter, now, isn't it?”
“It might be worse,” admitted Mrs. Lightfoot, coolly; “but for my part, I
don't care to have my grandson upon terms of equality with any of that
rascal Jones's blood. Why, the man whips his servants.”
“But he isn't upon any terms, my dear. He refused to shake hands with him,
didn't you hear that? Perhaps I'd better read the letter again.”
“That is all very well, Mr. Lightfoot,” said his wife, clicking her
needles, “but it can't prevent his being in classes with him, all the same.
And I am sure, if I had known the University was so little select, I should
have insisted upon sending him to Oxford, where his great-grandfather went
before him.”
“Good gracious, Molly! You don't wish the lad was across the ocean, do
you?”
“It matters very little where he is so long as he is a gentleman,” returned
the old lady, so sharply that Mitty began to unwind the worsted rapidly.
“Nonsense, Molly,” protested the Major, irritably, for he could not stand
opposition upon his own hearth-rug. “The boy couldn't be hurt by sitting in
the same class with the devil himself--nor could Champe, for that matter.
They are too good Lightfoots.”
“I am not uneasy about Champe,” rejoined his wife. “Champe has never been
humoured as Dan has been, I'm glad to say.”
The Major started up as red as a beet.
“Do you mean that I humour him, madam?” he demanded in a terrible voice.
“Do pray, Mr. Lightfoot, you will frighten Mitty to death,” said his wife,
reprovingly, “and it is really very dangerous for you to excite yourself
so--you remember the doctor cautioned you against it.” And, by the time the
Major was thoroughly depressed, she skilfully brought out her point. “Of
course you spoil the child to death. You know it as well as I do.”
The Major, with the fear of apoplexy in his mind, had no answer on his
tongue, though a few minutes later he showed his displeasure by ordering
his horse and riding to Uplands to talk things over with the Governor.
“I am afraid Molly is breaking,” he thought gloomily, as he rode along.
“She isn't what she was when I married her fifty years ago.”
But at Uplands his ill humour was dispelled. The Governor read the letter
and declared that Dan was a fine lad, “and I'm glad you haven't spoiled
him, Major,” he said heartily. “Yes, they're both fine lads and do you
honour.”
“So they do! so they do!” exclaimed the Major, delightedly. “That's just
what I said to Molly, sir. And Dan sends his love to the little girls,” he
added, smiling upon Betty and Virginia, who stood by.
“Thank you, sir,” responded Virginia, prettily, looking at the old man with
her dovelike eyes; but Betty tossed her head--she had an imperative little
toss which she used when she was angry. “I am only three years younger than
he is,” she said, “and I'm not a little girl any longer--Mammy has had to
let down all my dresses. I am fourteen years old, sir.”
“And quite a young lady,” replied the Major, with a bow. “There are not two
handsomer girls in the state, Governor, which means, of course, that there
are not two handsomer girls in the world, sir. Why, Virginia's eyes are
almost a match for my Aunt Emmeline's, and poets have immortalized hers. Do
you recall the verses by the English officer she visited in prison?--
“'The stars in Rebel skies that shine
Are the bright orbs of Emmeline.'”
“Yes, I remember,” said the Governor. “Emmeline Lightfoot is as famous as
Diana,” then his quick eyes caught Betty's drooping head, “and what of this
little lady?” he asked, patting her shoulder. “There's not a brighter smile
in Virginia than hers, eh, Major?”
But the Major was not to be outdone when there were compliments to be
exchanged.
“Her hair is like the sunshine,” he began, and checked himself, for at the
first mention of her hair Betty had fled.
It was on this afternoon that she brewed a dye of walnut juice and carried
it in secret to her room. She had loosened her braids and was about to
plunge her head into the basin when Mrs. Ambler came in upon her. “Why,
Betty! Betty!” she cried in horror.
Betty turned with a start, wrapped in her shining hair. “It is the only
thing left to do, mamma,” she said desperately. “I am going to dye it. It
isn't ladylike, I know, but red hair isn't ladylike either. I have tried
conjuring, and it won't conjure, so I'm going to dye it.”
“Betty! Betty!” was all Mrs. Ambler could say, though she seized the basin
and threw it from the window as if it held poison. “If you ever let that
stuff touch your hair, I--I'll shave your head for you,” she declared as
she left the room; but a moment afterward she looked in again to add, “Your
grandmamma had red hair, and she was the beauty of her day--there, now, you
ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
So Betty smiled again, and when Virginia came in to dress for supper, she
found her parading about in Aunt Lydia's best bombazine gown.
“This is how I'll look when I'm grown up,” she said, the corner of her eye
on her sister.
“You'll look just lovely,” returned Virginia, promptly, for she always said
the sweetest thing at the sweetest time.
“And I'm going to look like this when Dan comes home next summer,” resumed
Betty, sedately.
“Not in Aunt Lydia's dress?”
“You goose! Of course not. I'm going to get Mammy to make me a Swiss muslin
down to the ground, and I'm going to wear six starched petticoats because I
haven't any hoops. I'm just wild to wear hoops, aren't you, Virginia?”
“I reckon so,” responded Virginia, doubtfully; “but it will be hard to sit
down, don't you think?”
“Oh, but I know how,” said Betty. “Aunt Lydia showed me how to do it
gracefully. You give a little kick--ever so little and nobody sees it--and
then you just sink into your seat. I can do it well.”
“You were always clever,” exclaimed Virginia, as sweetly as before. She was
parting her satiny hair over her forehead, and the glass gave back a
youthful likeness of Mrs. Ambler. She was the beauty of the family, and she
knew it, which made her all the lovelier to Betty.
“I declare, your freckles are all gone,” she said, as her sister's head
looked over her shoulder. “I wonder if it is the buttermilk that has made
you so white?”
“It must be that,” admitted Betty, who had used it faithfully for the sixty
nights. “Aunt Lydia says it works wonders.” Then, as she looked at herself,
her eyes narrowed and she laughed aloud. “Why, Dan won't know me,” she
cried merrily.
But whatever hopes she had of Dan withered in the summer. When he came home
for the holidays, he brought with him an unmistakable swagger and a supply
of coloured neckerchiefs. On his first visit to Uplands he called Virginia
“my pretty child,” and said “Good day, little lady,” to Betty. He carried
himself like an Indian, as the Governor put it, and he was very lithe and
muscular, though he did not measure up to Champe by half a head. It was the
Montjoy blood in him, people thought, for the Lightfoots were all of great
height, and he had, too, a shock of his father's coarse black hair, which
flared stiffly above the brilliant Lightfoot eyes. As he galloped along the
turnpike on Prince Rupert, the travelling countrymen turned to look after
him, and muttered that “dare-devil Jack Montjoy had risen from his
grave--if he had a grave.”
Once he met Betty at the gate, and catching her up before him, dashed with
her as far as Aunt Ailsey's cabin and back again. “You are as light as a
fly,” he said with a laugh, “and not much bigger. There, take your hair out
of my eyes, or I'll ride amuck.”
Betty caught her hair in one hand and drew it across her breast. “This is
like--” she began gayly, and checked herself. She was thinking of “that
devil Jack Montjoy and Jane Lightfoot.”
“I must take my chance now,” said Dan, in his easy, masterful way. “You
will be too old for this by next year. Why, you will be in long dresses
then, and Virginia--have you noticed, by the way, what a beauty Virginia is
going to be?”
“She is just lovely,” heartily agreed Betty. “She's prettier than your
Great-aunt Emmeline, isn't she?”
“By George, she is. And I've been in love with Great-aunt Emmeline for ten
years because I couldn't find her match. I say, don't let anybody go off
with Virginia while I'm at college, will you?”
“All right,” said Betty, and though she smiled at him through her hair, her
smile was not so bright as it had been. It was all very well to hear
Virginia praised, she told herself, but she should have liked it better had
Dan been a little less emphatic. “I don't think any one is going to run off
with her,” she added gravely, and let the subject of her sister's beauty
pass.
But at the end of the week, when Dan went back to college, her loyal heart
reproached her, and she confided to Virginia that “he thought her a great
deal lovelier than Great-aunt Emmeline.”
“Really?” asked Virginia, and determined to be very nice to him when he
came home for the holidays.
“But what does he say about you?” she inquired after a moment.
“About me?” returned Betty. “Oh, he doesn't say anything about me, except
that I am kind.”
Virginia stooped and kissed her. “You are kind, dear,” she said in her
sweetest voice.
And “kind,” after all, was the word for Betty, unless Big Abel had found
one when he said, “She is des all heart.” It was Betty who had tramped
three miles through the snow last Christmas to carry her gifts to the free
negro Levi, who was “laid up” and could not come to claim his share; and it
was Betty who had asked as a present for herself the lame boy Micah, that
belonged to old Rainy-day Jones. She had met Micah in the road, and from
that day the Governor's life was a burden until he sent the negro up to her
door on Christmas morning. There was never a sick slave or a homeless dog
that she would not fly out to welcome, bareheaded and a little breathless,
with the kindness brimming over from her eyes. “She has her father's head
and her mother's heart,” said the Major to his wife, when he saw the girl
going by with the dogs leaping round her and a young fox in her arms. “What
a wife she would make for Dan when she grows up! I wish he'd fancy her.
They'd be well suited, eh, Molly?”
“If he fancies the thing that is suited to him, he is less of a man than I
take him to be,” retorted Mrs. Lightfoot, with a cynicism which confounded
the Major. “He will lose his head over her doll baby of a sister, I
suppose--not that she isn't a good girl,” she added briskly. “Julia Ambler
couldn't have had a bad child if she had tried, though I confess I am
surprised that she could have helped having a silly one; but Betty, why,
there hasn't been a girl since I grew up with so much sense in her head as
Betty Ambler has in her little finger.”
“When I think of you fifty years ago, I must admit that you put a high
standard, Molly,” interposed the Major, who was always polite when he was
not angry.
“She spent a week with me while you were away,” Mrs. Lightfoot went on in
an unchanged voice, though with a softened face, “and, I declare, she kept
house as well as I could have done it myself, and Cupid says she washed the
pink teaset every morning with her own hands, and she actually cured
Rhody's lameness with a liniment she made out of Jimson weed. I tell you
now, Mr. Lightfoot, that, if I get sick, Betty Ambler is the only girl I'm
going to have inside the house.”
“Very well, my dear,” said the Major, meekly, “I'll try to remember; and,
in that case, I reckon we'd as well drop a hint to Dan, eh, Molly?”
Mrs. Lightfoot looked at him a moment in silence. Then she said “Humph!”
beneath her breath, and took up her knitting from the little table at her
side.
But Dan was living fast at college, and the Major's hints were thrown away.
He read of “the Ambler girls who are growing into real beauties,” and he
skipped the part that said, “Your grandmother has taken a great fancy to
Betty and enjoys having her about.”
“Here's something for you, Champe,” he remarked with a laugh, as he tossed
the letter upon the table. “Gather your beauties while you may, for I
prefer bull pups. Did Batt Horsford tell you I'd offered him twenty-five
dollars for that one of his?”
Champe picked up the letter and unfolded it slowly. He was a tall, slender
young fellow, with curling pale brown hair and fine straight features. His
face, in the strong light of the window by which he stood, showed a tracery
of blue veins across the high forehead.
“Oh, shut up about bull pups,” he said irritably. “You are as bad as a
breeder, and yet you couldn't tell that thoroughbred of John Morson's from
a cross with a terrier.”
“You bet I couldn't,” cried Dan, firing up; but Champe was reading the
letter, and a faint flush had risen to his face. “The girl is like a spray
of golden-rod in the sunshine,” wrote the Major, with his old-fashioned
rhetoric.
“What is it he says, eh?” asked Dan, noting the flush and drawing his
conclusions.
“He says that Aunt Molly and himself will meet us at the White Sulphur next
summer.”
“Oh, I don't mean that. What is it he says about the girls; they are real
beauties aren't they? By the way, Champe, why don't you marry one of them
and settle down?”
“Why don't you?” retorted Champe, as Dan got up and called to Big Abel to
bring his riding clothes. “Oh, I'm not a lady's man,” he said lightly.
“I've too moody a face for them,” and he began to dress himself with the
elaborate care which had won for him the title of “Beau” Montjoy.
By the next summer, Betty and Virginia had shot up as if in a night, but
neither Champe nor Dan came home. After weeks of excited preparation, the
Major and Mrs. Lightfoot started, with Congo and Mitty, for the White
Sulphur, where the boys were awaiting them. As the months went on, vague
rumours reached the Governor's ears--rumours which the Major did not quite
disprove when he came back in the autumn. “Yes, the boy is sowing his wild
oats,” he said; “but what can you expect, Governor? Why, he is not yet
twenty, and young blood is hot blood, sir.”
“I am sorry to hear that he has been losing at cards,” returned the
Governor; “but take my advice, and let him pick himself up when he falls to
hurt. Don't back him up, Major.”
“Pooh! pooh!” exclaimed the Major, testily. “You're like Molly, Governor,
and, bless my soul, one old woman is as much as I can manage. Why, she
wants me to let the boy starve.”
The Governor sighed, but he did not protest. He liked Dan, with all his
youthful errors, and he wanted to put out a hand to hold him back from
destruction; but he feared to bring the terrible flush to the Major's face.
It was better to leave things alone, he thought, and so sighed and said
nothing.
That was an autumn of burning political conditions, and the excited slavery
debates in the North were reechoing through the Virginia mountains. The
Major, like the old war horse that he was, had already pricked up his ears,
and determined to lend his tongue or his sword, as his state might require.
That a fight could go on in the Union so long as Virginia or himself kept
out of it, seemed to him a possibility little less than preposterous.
“Didn't we fight the Revolution, sir? and didn't we fight the War of 1812?
and didn't we fight the Mexican War to boot?” he would demand. “And, bless
my soul, aren't we ready to fight all the Yankees in the universe, and to
whip them clean out of the Union, too? Why, it wouldn't take us ten days to
have them on their knees, sir.”
The Governor did not laugh now; the times were too grave for that. His
clear eyes had seen whither they were drifting, and he had thrown his
influence against the tide, which, he knew, would but sweep over him in the
end. “You are out of place in Virginia, Major,” he said seriously.
“Virginia wants peace, and she wants the Union. Go south, my dear sir, go
south.”
During the spring before he had gone south himself to a convention at
Montgomery, and he had spoken there against one of the greatest of the
Southern orators. His state had upheld him, but the Major had not. He came
home to find his old neighbour red with resentment, and refusing for the
first few days to shake the hand of “a man who would tamper with the honour
of Virginia.” At the end of the week the Major's hand was held out, but his
heart still bore his grievance, and he began quoting William L. Yancey, as
he had once quoted Mr. Addison. In the little meetings at Uplands or at
Chericoke, he would now declaim the words of the impassioned agitator as
vigorously as in the old days he had recited those of the polished
gentleman of letters. The rector and the doctor would sit silent and
abashed, and only the Governor would break in now and then with: “You go
too far, Major. There is a step from which there is no drawing back, and
that step means ruin to your state, sir.”
“Ruin, sir? Nonsense! nonsense! We made the Union, and we'll unmake it when
we please. We didn't make slavery; but, if Virginia wants slaves, by God,
sir, she shall have slaves!”
It was after such a discussion in the Governor's library that the old
gentleman rose one evening to depart in his wrath. “The man who sits up in
my presence and questions my right to own my slaves is a damned black
abolitionist, sir,” he thundered as he went, and by the time he reached his
coach he was so blinded by his rage that Congo, the driver, was obliged to
lift him bodily into his seat. “Dis yer ain' no way ter do, Ole Marster,”
said the negro, reproachfully. “How I gwine teck cyar you like Ole Miss
done tole me, w'en you let yo' bile git ter yo' haid like dis? 'Tain' no
way ter do, suh.”
The Major was too full for silence; and, ignoring the Governor, who had
hurried out to beseech him to return, he let his rage burst forth.
“I can't help it, Congo, I can't help it!” he said. “They want to take you
from me, do you hear? and that black Republican party up north wants to
take you, too. They say I've no right to you, Congo,--bless my soul, and
you were born on my own land!”
“Go 'way, Ole Marster, who gwine min' w'at dey say?” returned Congo,
soothingly. “You des better wrop dat ar neck'chif roun' yo' thoat er Ole
Miss'll git atter you sho' es you live!”
The Major wiped his eyes on the end of the neckerchief as he tied it about
his throat. “But, if they elect their President, he may send down an army
to free you,” he went on, with something like a sob of anger, “and I'd like
to know what we'd do then, Congo.”
“Lawd, Lawd, suh,” said Congo, as he wrapped the robe about his master's
knees. “Did you ever heah tell er sech doin's!” then, as he mounted the
box, he leaned down and called out reassuringly, “Don' you min', Ole
Marster, we'll des loose de dawgs on 'em, dat's w'at we'll do,” and they
rolled off indignantly, leaving the Governor half angry and half apologetic
upon his portico.
It was on the way home that evening that Congo spied in the sassafras
bushes beside the road a runaway slave of old Rainy-day Jones's, and
descended, with a shout, to deliver his brother into bondage.
“Hi, Ole Marster, w'at I gwine tie him wid?” he demanded gleefully.
The Major looked out of the window, and his face went white.
“What's that on his cheek, Congo?” he asked in a whisper.
“Dat's des whar dey done hit 'im, Ole Marster. How I gwine tie 'im?”
But the Major had looked again, and the awful redness rose to his brow.
“Shut up, you fool!” he said with a roar, as he dived under his seat and
brought out his brandy flask. “Give him a swallow of that--be quick, do you
hear? Pour it into your cup, sir, and give him that corn pone in your
pocket. I see it sticking out. There, now hoist him up beside you, and, if
I meet that rascal Jones, I'll blow his damn brains out!”
The Major doubtless would have fulfilled his oath as surely as his twelve
peers would have shaken his hand afterwards; but, by the time they came up
with Rainy-day a mile ahead, his wrath had settled and he had decided that
“he didn't want such dirty blood upon his hands.”
So he took a different course, and merely swore a little as he threw a roll
of banknotes into the road. “Don't open your mouth to me, you hell hound,”
he cried, “or I'll have you whipped clean out of this county, sir, and
there's not a gentleman in Virginia that wouldn't lend a hand. Don't open
your mouth to me, I tell you; here's the price of your property, and you
can stoop in the dirt to pick it up. There's no man alive that shall
question the divine right of slavery in my presence; but--but it is an
institution for gentlemen, and you, sir, are a damned scoundrel!”
With which the Major and old Rainy-day rode on in opposite ways.
BOOK SECOND
YOUNG BLOOD
I
THE MAJOR'S CHRISTMAS
On Christmas Eve the great logs blazed at Chericoke. From the open door the
red light of the fire streamed through the falling snow upon the broad
drive where the wheel ruts had frozen into ribbons of ice. The naked boughs
of the old elms on the lawn tapped the peaked roof with twigs as cold and
bright as steel, and the two high urns beside the steps had an iridescent
fringe around their marble basins.
In the hall, beneath swinging sprays of mistletoe and holly, the Major and
his hearty cronies were dipping apple toddy from the silver punch bowl half
hidden in its wreath of evergreens. Behind them the panelled parlour was
aglow with warmth, and on its shining wainscoting Great-aunt Emmeline,
under her Christmas garland, held her red apple stiffly away from the skirt
of her amber brocade.
The Major, who had just filled the rector's glass, let the ladle fall with
a splash, and hurried to the open door.
“They're coming, Molly!” he called excitedly, “I hear their horses in the
drive. No, bless my soul, it's wheels! The Governor's here, Molly! Fill
their glasses at once--they'll be frozen through!”
Mrs. Lightfoot, who had been watching from the ivied panes of the parlour,
rustled, with sharp exclamation, into the hall, and began hastily dipping
from the silver punch bowl. “I really think, Mr. Lightfoot, that the house
would be more comfortable if you'd be content to keep the front door
closed,” she found time to remark. “Do take your glass by the fire, Mr.
Blake; I declare, I positively feel the sleet in my face. Don't you think
it would be just as hospitable, Mr. Lightfoot, to open to them when they
knock?”
“What, keep the door shut on Christmas Eve, Molly!” exclaimed the Major
from the front steps, where the snow was falling on his bare head. “Why,
you're no better than a heathen. It's time you were learning your catechism
over again. Ah, here they are, here they are! Come in, ladies, come in. The
night is cold, but the welcome's warm.--Cupid, you fool, bring an umbrella,
and don't stand grinning there.--Here, my dear Miss Lydia, take my arm, and
never mind the weather; we've the best apple toddy in Virginia to warm you
with, and the biggest log in the woods for you to look at. Ah, come in,
come in,” and he led Miss Lydia, in her white wool “fascinator,” into the
house where Mrs. Lightfoot stood waiting with open arms and the apple
toddy. The Governor had insisted upon carrying his wife, lest she chill her
feet, and Betty and Virginia, in their long cloaks, fluttered across the
snow and up the steps. As they reached the hall, the Major caught them in
his arms and soundly kissed them. “It isn't Christmas every day, you know,”
he lamented ruefully, “and even our friend Mr. Addison wasn't steeled
against rosy cheeks, though he was but a poor creature who hadn't been to
Virginia. But come to the fire, come to the fire. There's eggnog to your
liking, Mr. Bill, and just a sip of this, Miss Lydia, to warm you up. You
may defy the wind, ma'am, with a single sip of my apple toddy.” He seized
the poker and, while Congo brought the glasses, prodded the giant log until
the flames leaped, roaring, up the chimney and the wainscoting glowed deep
red.
“What, not a drop, Miss Lydia?” he cried, in aggrieved tones, when he
turned his back upon the fire.
Miss Lydia shook her head, blushing as she untied her “fascinator.” She was
fond of apple toddy, but she regarded the taste as an indelicate one, and
would as soon have admitted, before gentlemen, a liking for cabbage.
“Don't drink it, dear,” she whispered to Betty, as the girl took her glass;
“it will give you a vulgar colour.”
Betty turned upon her the smile of beaming affection with which she always
regarded her family. She was standing under the mistletoe in her light blue
cloak and hood bordered with swan's-down, and her eyes shone like lamps in
the bright pallor of her face.
“Why, it is delicious!” she said, with the pretty effusion the old man
loved. “It is better than my eggnog, isn't it, papa?”
“If anything can be better than your eggnog, my dear,” replied the
Governor, courteously, “it is the Major's apple toddy.” The Major bowed,
and Betty gave a merry little nod. “If you hadn't put it so nicely, I
should never have forgiven you,” she laughed; “but he always puts it
nicely, Major, doesn't he? I made him the other day a plum pudding of my
very own,--I wouldn't even let Aunt Floretta seed the raisins,--and when it
came on burnt, what do you think he said? Why, I asked him how he liked it,
and he thought for a minute and replied, 'My dear, it's the very best burnt
plum pudding I ever ate.' Now wasn't that dear of him?”
“Ah, but you should have heard how he put things when he was in politics,”
said the Major, refilling his glass. “On my word, he could make the truth
sound sweeter than most men could make a lie.”
“Come, come, Major,” protested the Governor. “Julia, can't you induce our
good friend to forbear?”
“He knows I like to hear it,” said Mrs. Ambler, turning from a discussion
of her Christmas dinner with Mrs. Lightfoot.
“Then you shall hear it, madam,” declared the Major, “and I may as well say
at once that if the Governor hasn't told you about the reply he made to
Plaintain Dudley when he asked him for his political influence, you haven't
the kind of husband, ma'am, that Molly Lightfoot has got. Keep a secret
from Molly! Why, I'd as soon try to keep a keg full of brandy from
following an auger.”
“Auger, indeed!” exclaimed the little old lady, to whom the Major's
facetiousness was the only serious thing about him. “Your secrets are like
apples, sir, that hang to every passer-by, until I store them away. Auger,
indeed!”
“No offence, my dear,” was the Major's meek apology. “An auger is a very
useful implement, eh, Governor; and it's Plaintain Dudley, after all, that
we're concerned with. Do you remember Plaintain, Mrs. Ambler, a big ruddy
fellow, with ruffled shirts? Oh, he prided himself on his shirts, did
Plaintain!”
“A very becoming weakness,” said Mrs. Ambler, smiling at the Governor, who
was blushing above his tucks.
“Becoming? Well, well, I dare say,” admitted the Major. “Plaintain thought
so, at any rate. Why, I can see him now, on the day he came to the
Governor, puffing out his front, and twirling his white silk handkerchief.
'May I ask your opinion of me, sir?' he had the audacity to begin, and the
Governor! Bless my soul, ma'am, the Governor bowed his politest bow, and
replied with his pleasantest smile, 'My opinion of you, sir, is that were
you as great a gentleman as you are a scoundrel, you would be a greater
gentleman than my Lord Chesterfield.' Those were his words, ma'am, on my
oath, those were his words!”
“But he was a scoundrel!” exclaimed the Governor. “Why, he swindled women,
Major. It was always a mystery to me how you tolerated him.”
“And a mystery to Mrs. Lightfoot,” responded the Major, in a half whisper;
“but as I tell her, sir, you mustn't judge a man by his company, or a
'possum by his grin.” Then he raised a well-filled glass and gave a toast
that brought even Mr. Bill upon his feet, “To Virginia, the home of brave
men and,” he straightened himself, tossed back his hair, and bowed to the
ladies, “and of angels.”
The Governor raised his glass with a smile, “To the angels who take pity
upon the men,” he said.
“That more angels may take pity upon men,” added the rector, rising from
his seat by the fireside, with a wink at the doctor.
And the toast was drunk, standing, while the girls ran up the crooked stair
to lay aside their wraps in a three-cornered bedroom.
As Virginia threw off her pink cloak and twirled round in her flaring
skirts, Betty gave a little gasp of admiration and stood holding the
lighted candle, with its sprig of holly, above her head. The tall girlish
figure, in its flounces of organdy muslin, with the smooth parting of
bright brown hair and the dovelike eyes, had flowered suddenly into a
beauty that took her breath away.
“Why, you are a vision--a vision!” she cried delightedly.
Virginia stopped short in her twirling and settled the illusion ruche over
her slim white shoulders. “It's the first time I've dressed like this, you
know,” she said, glancing at herself in the dim old mirror.
“Ah, I'm not half so pretty,” sighed Betty, hopelessly, “Is the rose in
place, do you think?” She had fastened a white rose in the thick coil on
her neck, where it lay half hidden by her hair.
“It looks just lovely,” replied Virginia, heartily. “Do you hear some one
in the drive?” She went to the window, and looked out into the falling
snow, her bare shoulders shrinking from the frosted pane. “What a long ride
the boys have had, and how cold they'll be. Why, the ground is quite
covered with snow.” Betty, with the candle still in her hand, turned from
the mirror, and gave a quick glance through the sloping window, to the
naked elms outside. “Ah, poor things, poor things!” she cried.
“But they have their riding cloaks,” said Virginia, in her placid voice.
“Oh, I don't mean Dan and Champe and Big Abel,” answered Betty, “I mean the
elms, the poor naked elms that wear their clothes all summer, and are
stripped bare for the cold. How I should like to warm you, you dear
things,” she added, going to the window. Against the tossing branches her
hair made a glow of colour, and her vivid face was warm with tenderness.
“And Jane Lightfoot rode away on a night like this!” she whispered after a
pause.
“She wore a muslin dress and a coral necklace, you know,” said Virginia, in
the same low tone, “and she had only a knitted shawl over her head when she
met Jack Montjoy at the end of the drive. He wrapped her in his cape, and
they rode like mad to the town--and she was laughing! Uncle Shadrach met
them in the road, and he says he heard her laughing in the wind. She must
have been very wicked, mustn't she, Betty?”
But Betty was looking into the storm, and did not answer. “I wonder if he
were in the least like Dan,” she murmured a moment later.
“Well, he had black hair, and Dan has that,” responded Virginia, lightly;
“and he had a square chin, and Dan has that, too. Oh, every one says that
Dan's the image of his father, except for the Lightfoot eyes. I'm glad he
has the Lightfoot eyes, anyway. Are you ready to go down?”
Betty was ready, though her face had grown a little grave, and with a last
look at the glass, they caught hands and went sedately down the winding
stair.
In the hall below they met Mrs. Lightfoot, who sent Virginia into the
panelled parlour, and bore Betty off to the kitchen to taste the sauce for
the plum pudding. “I can't do a thing on earth with Rhody,” she remarked
uneasily, throwing a knitted scarf over her head as they went from the back
porch along the covered way that led to the brick kitchen. “She insists
that yours is the only palate in all the country she will permit to pass
judgment upon her sauce. I made the Major try it, and he thinks it needs a
dash more of rum, but Rhody says she shan't be induced to change it until
she has had your advice. Here, Rhody, open the door; I've brought your
young lady.”
The door swung back with a jerk upon the big kitchen, where before the
Christmas turkeys toasting on the spit, Aunt Rhody was striding to and fro
like an Amazon in charcoal. From the beginning of the covered way they had
been guided by the tones of penetrant contempt, with which she lashed the
circle of house servants who had gathered to her assistance. “You des lemme
alont now,” was the advice she royally offered. “Ef you gwine ax me w'at
you'd better do, I des tell you right now, you'd better lemme alont.
Ca'line, you teck yo' eyes off dat ar roas' pig, er I'll fling dis yer
b'ilin' lard right spang on you. I ain' gwine hev none er my cookin'
conjured fo' my ve'y face. Congo, you shet dat mouf er yourn, er I'll shet
hit wid er flat-iron, en den hit'll be shet ter stay.”
Then, as Mrs. Lightfoot and Betty came in, she broke off, and wiped her
large black hands on her apron, before she waved with pride to the shelves
and tables bending beneath her various creations. “I'se done stuff dat ar
pig so full er chestnuts dat he's fitten ter bus',” she exclaimed proudly.
“Lawd, Lawd, hit's a pity he ain' 'live agin des ter tase hese'f!”
“Poor little pig,” said Betty, “he looks so small and pink, Aunt Rhody, I
don't see how you have the heart to roast him.”
“I'se done stuff 'im full,” returned Aunt Rhody, in justification.
“I hope he's well done, Rhody,” briskly broke in Mrs. Lightfoot; “and be
sure to bake the hams until the juice runs through the bread crumbs. Is
everything ready for to-morrow?”
“Des es ready es ef 'twuz fer Kingdom Come, Ole Miss, en dar ain' gwine be
no better dinner on Jedgment Day nurr, I don' cyar who gwine cook hit. You
des tase dis yer sass--dat's all I ax, you des tase dis yer sass.”
“You taste it, Betty,” begged Mrs. Lightfoot, shrinking from the
approaching spoon; and Betty tasted and pronounced it excellent, “and there
never was an Ambler who wasn't a judge of 'sass,” she added.
Moved by the compliment, Aunt Rhody fell back and regarded the girl, with
her arms akimbo. “I d'clar, her eyes do des shoot fire,” she exclaimed
admiringly. “I dunno whar de beaux done hid deyse'ves dese days; hit's a
wonner dey ain' des a-busin' dey sides ter git yer. Marse Dan, now, whynt
he come a-prancin' roun' dese yer parts?”
Mrs. Lightfoot looked at Betty and saw her colour rise. “That will do,
Rhody,” she cautioned; “you will let the turkeys burn,” but as they moved
toward the door, Betty herself paused and looked back.
“I gave your Christmas gift to Uncle Cupid, Aunt Rhody,” she said; “he put
it under the joists in your cabin, so you mustn't look at it till morning.”
“Lawd, chile, I'se done got Christmas gifts afo' now,” replied Aunt Rhody,
ungratefully, “en I'se done got a pa'cel er no count ones, too. Folks dey
give Christmas gifts same es de Lawd he give chillun--dey des han's out
w'at dey's got on dey han's, wid no stiddyin' 'bout de tase. Sakes er live!
Ef'n de Lawd hadn't hed a plum sight ter git rid er, he 'ouldn't er sont
Ca'line all dose driblets, fo' he'd done sont 'er a husban'.”
“Husban', huh!” exclaimed Ca'line, with a snort from the fireplace.
“Husban' yo'se'f! No mo' niggerisms fer me, ma'am!”
“Hold your tongue, Ca'line,” said Mrs. Lightfoot, sternly; “and, Rhody, you
ought to be ashamed of yourself to talk so before your Miss Betty.”
“Husban', huh!” repeated the indignant Ca'line, under her breath.
“Hold your tongues, both of you,” cried the old lady, as she lifted her
silk skirt in both hands and swept from the kitchen.
When they reached the house again, they heard the Major's voice, on its
highest key, demanding: “Molly! Why, bless my soul, what's become of
Molly?” He was calling from the front steps, and the sound of tramping feet
rang in the drive below. Against the whiteness of the storm Big Abel's face
shone in the light from the open door, and about him, as he held the
horses, Dan and Champe and a guest or two were dismounting upon the steps.
As the old lady went forward, Champe rushed into the hall, and caught her
in his arms.
“On my word, you're so young I didn't know you,” he cried gayly. “If you
keep this up, Aunt Molly, there'll be a second Lightfoot beauty yet. You
grow prettier every day--I declare you do!”
“Hold your tongue, you scamp,” said the old lady, flushing with pleasure,
“or there'll be a second Ananias as well. Here, Betty, come and wish this
bad boy a Merry Christmas.”
Betty looked round with a smile, but as she did so, her eyes went beyond
Champe, and saw Dan standing in the doorway, his soft slouch hat in his
hand, and a powdering of snow on his dark hair. He had grown bigger and
older in the last few months, and the Lightfoot eyes, with the Lightfoot
twinkle in their pupils, gave an expression of careless humour to his pale,
strongly moulded face. The same humour was in his voice even as he held his
grandfather's hand.
“By George, we're glad to get here,” was his greeting. “Morson's been
cursing our hospitality for the last three miles. Grandpa, this is my
friend Morson--Jack Morson, you've heard me speak of him; and this is Bland
Diggs, you know of him, too.”
“Why, to be sure, to be sure,” cried the Major, heartily, as he held out
both hands. “You're welcome, gentlemen, as welcome as Christmas--what more
can I say? But come in, come in to the fire. Cupid, the glasses!”
“Ah, the ladies first,” suggested Dan, lightly; “grace before meat, you
know. So here you are, grandma, cap and all. And Virginia;--ye gods!--is
this little Virginia?”
His laughing eyes were on her as she stood, tall and lovely, beneath a
Christmas garland, and with the laughter still in them, they blazed with
approval of her beauty. “Oh, but do you know, how did you do it?” he
demanded with his blithe confidence, as if it mattered very little how his
words were met.
“It wasn't any trouble, believe me,” responded Virginia, blushing, “not
half so much trouble as you took to tie your neckerchief.”
Dan's hand went to his throat. “Then I may presume that it is mere natural
genius,” he exclaimed.
“Genius, to grow tall?”
“Well, yes, just that--to grow tall,” then he caught sight of Betty, and
held out his hand again. “And you, little comrade, you haven't grown up to
the world, I see.”
Betty laughed and looked him over with the smile the Major loved. “I
content myself with merely growing up to you,” she returned.
“Up to me? Why, you barely reach my shoulder.”
“Well, up to the greater part of you, at least.”
“Ah, up to my heart,” said Dan, and Betty coloured beneath the twinkle in
his eyes.
The colour was still in her face when the Major came out, with Mrs. Ambler
on his arm, and led the way to supper.
“All of us are hungry, and some of us have a day's ride behind us,” he
remarked, as, after the rector's grace, he stood waving the carving-knife
above the roasted turkey. “I'd like to know how often during the last hour
you've thought of this turkey, Mr. Morson?”
“It has had a fair share of my thoughts, I'm forced to admit, Major,”
responded Jack Morson, readily. He was a hearty, light-haired young fellow,
with a girlish complexion and pale blue eyes, as round as marbles. “As fair
a share as the apple toddy has had of Diggs's, I'll be bound.”
“Apple toddy!” protested Diggs, turning his serious face, flushed from the
long ride, upon the Major. “I was too busy thinking we should never get
here; and we were lost once, weren't we, Beau?” he asked of Dan.
“Well, I for one am safely housed for the night, doctor,” declared the
rector, with an uneasy glance through the window, “and I trust that Mrs.
Blake's reproach will melt before the snow does. But what's that about
being lost, Dan?”
“Oh, we got off the road,” replied Dan; “but I gave Prince Rupert the rein
and he brought us in. The sense that horse has got makes me fairly ashamed
of going to college in his place; and I may as well warn you, Mr. Blake,
that when I get ready to go to Heaven, I shan't seek your guidance at
all--I'll merely nose Prince Rupert at the Bible and give him his head.”
“It's a comfort to know, at least, that you won't be trusting to your own
deserts, my boy,” responded the rector, who dearly loved his joke, as he
helped himself to yellow pickle.
“Let us hope that the straight and narrow way is a little clearer than the
tavern road to-night,” said Champe. “I'm afraid you'll have trouble getting
back, Governor.”
“Afraid!” took up the Major, before the Governor could reply. “Why, where
are your manners, my lad? It will be no ill wind that keeps them beneath
our roof. We'll make room for you, ladies, never fear; the house will
stretch itself to fit the welcome, eh, Molly?”
Mrs. Lightfoot, looking a little anxious, put forward a hearty assent; but
the Governor laughed and threw back the Major's hospitality as easily as it
was proffered.
“I know that your welcome's big enough to hold us, my dear Major,” he said;
“but Hosea's driving us, you see, and he could take us along the turnpike
blindfold. Why, he actually discovered in passing just before the storm
that somebody had dug up a sugar berry bush from the corner of your old
rail fence.”
“And we really must get back,” insisted Mrs. Ambler, “we haven't even fixed
the servants' Christmas, and Betty has to fill the stockings for the
children in the quarters.”
“Then if you will go, go you shall,” cried the Major, as heartily as he had
pressed his invitation. “You shall get back, ma'am, if I have to go before
you with a shovel and clear the snow away. So just a bit more of this roast
pig, just a bit, Governor. My dear Miss Lydia, I beg you to try that spiced
beef--and you, Mr. Bill?--Cupid, Mr. Bill will have a piece of roast pig.”
By the time the Tokay was opened, the Major had grown very jolly, and he
began to exchange jokes with the Governor and the rector. Mr. Bill and the
doctor, neither of whom could have told a story for his life, listened with
a kind of heavy gravity; and the young men, as they rattled off a college
tale or two, kept their eyes on Betty and Virginia.
Betty, leaning back in her high mahogany chair, and now and then putting in
a word with the bright effusion which belonged to her, gave ear half to the
Major's anecdotes, and half to a jest of Jack Morson's. Before her branched
a silver candelabrum, and beyond it, with the light in his face, Dan was
sitting. She watched him with a frank curiosity from eyes, where the smile,
with which she had answered the Major, still lingered in a gleam of
merriment. There was a puzzled wonder in her mind that Dan--the Dan of her
childhood--should have become for her, of a sudden, but a strong,
black-haired stranger from whom she shrank with a swift timidity. She
looked at Champe's high blue-veined forehead and curling brown hair; he was
still the big boy she had played with; but when she went back to Dan, the
wonder returned with a kind of irritation, and she felt that she should
like to shake him and have it out between them as she used to do before he
went away. What was the meaning of it? Where the difference? As he sat
across from her, with his head thrown back and his eyes dark with laughter,
her look questioned him half humorously, half in alarm. From his broad brow
to his strong hand, playing idly with a little heap of bread crumbs, she
knew that she was conscious of his presence--with a consciousness that had
quickened into a living thing.
To Dan, himself, her gaze brought but the knowledge that her smile was upon
him, and he met her question with lifted eyebrows and perplexed amusement.
What he had once called “the Betty look” was in her face,--so kind a look,
so earnest yet so humorous, with a sweet sane humour at her own
bewilderment, that it held his eyes an instant before they plunged back to
Virginia--an instant only, but long enough for him to feel the thrill of an
impulse which he did not understand. Dear little Betty, he thought,
tenderly, and went back to her sister.
The next moment he was telling himself that “the girl was a tearing
beauty.” He liked that modest droop of her head and those bashful soft
eyes, as if, by George, as if she were really afraid of him. Or was it
Champe or Jack Morson that she bent her bewitching glance upon? Well,
Champe, or Morson, or himself, in a week they would all be over head and
ears in love with her, and let him win who might. It was mere folly, of
course, to break one's heart over a girl, and there was no chance of that
so long as he had his horses and the bull pups to fall back upon; but she
was deucedly pretty, and if he ever came to the old house to live it would
be rather jolly to have her about. He would be twenty-one by this time next
year, and a man of twenty-one was old enough to settle down a bit. In the
meantime he laughed and met Virginia's eye, and they both blushed and
looked away quickly.
But when they left the dining room an hour later, it was not Virginia that
Dan sought. He had learned the duties of hospitality in the Major's school,
and so he sat down beside Miss Lydia and asked her about her window garden,
while Jack Morson made desperate love to his beautiful neighbour. Once,
indeed, he drew Betty aside for an instant, but it was only to whisper:
“Look here, you'll be real nice to Diggs, won't you? He's bashful, you
know, and besides he's awfully poor, and works like the devil. You make him
enjoy his holidays, and I--well, yes, I'll let that fox get away next week,
I declare I will.”
“All right,” agreed Betty, “it's a bargain. Mr. Diggs shall have a merry
Christmas, and the fox shall have his life. You'll keep faith with me?”
“Sworn,” said Dan, and he went back to Miss Lydia, while Betty danced a
reel with young Diggs, who fell in love with her before he was an hour
older. The terms cost him his heart, perhaps, but there was a life at
stake, and Betty, who had not a touch of the coquette in her nature, would
have flirted open-eyed with the rector could she have saved a robin from
the shot. As for Diggs, he might have been a family portrait or a Christmas
garland for all the sentiment she gave him.
When she went upstairs some hours later to put on her wraps, she had
forgotten, indeed, that Diggs or his emotion was in existence. She tied on
her blue hood with the swan's-down, and noticed, as she did so, that the
white rose was gone from her hair. “I hope I lost it after supper,” she
thought rather wistfully, for it was becoming; and then she slipped into
her long cloak and started down again. It was not until she reached the
bend in the staircase, where the tall clock stood, that she looked over the
balustrade and saw Dan in the hall below with the white rose in his hand.
She had come so softly that he had not heard her step. The light from the
candelabra was full upon him, and she saw the half-tender, half-quizzical
look in his face. For an instant he held the white rose beneath his eyes,
then he carefully folded it in his handkerchief and hid it in the pocket of
his coat. As he did so, he gave a queer little laugh and went quickly back
into the panelled parlour, while Betty glowed like a flower in the darkened
bend of the staircase.
When they called her and she came down the bright colour was still in her
face, and her eyes were shining happily under the swan's-down border of her
hood. “This little lady isn't afraid of the cold,” said the Major, as he
pinched her cheeks. “Why, she's as warm as a toast, and, bless my soul, if
I were thirty years younger, I'd ride twenty miles tonight to catch a
glimpse of her in that bonny blue hood. Ah, in my day, men were men, sir.”
Dan, who had come back from escorting Miss Lydia to the carriage, laughed
and held out his arms.
“Let me carry you, Betty; I'll show grandpa that there's still a man
alive.”
“No, sir, no,” said Betty, as she stood on tiptoe and held her cheek to the
Major. “You haven't a chance when your grandfather's by. There, I'll let
you carry the sleeping draught for Aunt Pussy; but my flounces, no, never!”
and she ran past him and slipped into the carriage beside Mrs. Ambler and
Miss Lydia.
In a moment Virginia came out under an umbrella that was held by Jack
Morson, and the carriage rolled slowly along the drive, while the young men
stood, bareheaded, in the falling snow.
“Keep a brave heart, Morson,” said Champe, with a laugh, as he ran back
into the house, where the Major waited to bar the door, “remember, you've
known her but three hours, and stand it like a man. Well I'm off to bed,”
and he lighted his candle and, with a gay “good night,” went whistling up
the stair.
In Dan's bedroom, where he had crowded for the holidays, he found his
cousin, upon the hearth-rug, looking abstractedly into the flames.
As Champe entered he turned, with the poker in his hand, and spoke out of
the fulness of his heart:--
“She's a beauty, I declare she is.”
Champe broke short his whistling, and threw off his coat.
“Well, I dare say she was fifty years ago,” he rejoined gravely.
“Oh, don't be an utter ass; you know I mean Virginia.”
“My dear boy, I had supposed Miss Lydia to be the object of your
attentions. You mustn't be a Don Juan, you know, you really mustn't. Spare
the sex, I entreat.”
Dan aimed a blow at him with a boot that was lying on the rug. “Shut up,
won't you,” he growled.
“Well, Virginia is a beauty,” was Champe's amiable response. “Jack Morson
swears Aunt Emmeline's picture can't touch her. He's writing to his father
now, I don't doubt, to say he can't live without her. Go down, and he'll
read you the letter.”
Dan's face grew black. “I'll thank him to mind his own business,” he
grumbled.
“Oh, he thinks he's doing it.”
“Well, his business isn't either of the Ambler girls, and I'll have him to
know it. What right has he got, I'd like to know, to come up here and fall
in love with our neighbours.”
“Oh, Beau, Beau! Why, it was only last week you ran him away from Batt
Horsford's daughter. Are you going in for a general championship?”
“The devil! Sally Horsford's a handsome girl, and a good girl, too; and
I'll fight any man who says she isn't. By George, a woman's a woman, if she
is a stableman's daughter!”
“Bravo!” cried Champe, with a whistle, “there spoke the Lightfoot.”
“She's a good girl,” repeated Dan, furiously, as he flung the other boot at
his cousin. Champe caught the boot, and carefully set it beside the door.
“Well, she's welcome to be, as far as I'm concerned,” he replied calmly.
“Turn not your speaking eye upon me. I harbour no dark intent, Sir
Galahad.”
“Damn Sir Galahad!” said Dan, and blew out the light.
II
BETTY DREAMS BY THE FIRE
Betty, lying back in the deep old carriage as it rolled through the storm,
felt a glow at her heart as if a lamp were burning there, shut in from the
night. Above the wind and the groaning of the wheels, she heard Hosea
calling to the horses, but the sound reached her through muffled ears.
“Git along dar!” cried Hosea, with sudden spirit, “dar ain' no oats dis
side er home, en dar ain' no co'n, nurr. Git along dar! 'Tain' no use
a-mincin'. Git along dar!”
The snow beat softly on the windows, and the Governor's profile was
relieved, fine and straight, against the frosted glass. “Are you asleep,
daughter?” he asked, turning to where the girl lay in her dark corner.
“Asleep!” She came back with a start, and caught his hand above the robe in
her demonstrative way. “Why, who can sleep on Christmas Eve? there's too
much to do, isn't there, mamma? Twenty stockings to fill and I don't know
how many bundles to tie up. Oh, no, I shan't sleep tonight.”
“We might get up early to-morrow and do them,” suggested Virginia, nodding
in her pink hood.
“You, at least, must go to bed, dear,” insisted Mrs. Ambler. “Betty and I
will fix the things.”
“Indeed, you shall go to bed, mamma,” said Betty, sternly. “Papa and I
shall make Christmas this year. You'll help me, won't you, papa?”
“Well, my dear, I don't see how I can help myself,” returned the Governor;
“I wasn't born to be the father of a Betty for nothing.”
“Get along dar!” sang out Hosea again. “'Tain' no use a-mincin', gemmun.
Dar ain' no fiddlin' roun'. Git along dar!”
Miss Lydia had fallen asleep, with her head on her breast, but the sound
aroused her, and she opened her eyes and sat up very straight.
“Why, I declare I'd almost dropped off,” she said. “Are we nearly there,
Peyton?”
“I think so,” replied the Governor, “but the snow's so thick I can't see;”
he opened the window and put out his head. “Are we nearly there, Hosea?”
“We des done pas' de clump er cedars, suh,” yelled Hosea through the storm.
“I'ud a knowd 'em ef dey'd come a-struttin' down de road--dey cyarn fool
me. Den we got ter pas' de wil' cher'y and de gap in de fence, en dar we
are.”
“Yes, we're nearly there,” said the Governor, as he drew in his head, and
Miss Lydia slept again until the carriage turned into the drive and stopped
before the portico.
Uncle Shadrach, in the open doorway, was grinning with delight. “Ef'n de
snow had er kep' you, dar 'ouldn't a been no Christmas for de res' er us,”
he declared.
“Oh, the snow couldn't keep us, Shadrach,” returned the Governor, as he
gave him his overcoat, and set himself to unfastening his wife's wraps. “We
were too anxious to get home. There, Julia, you go to bed, and leave Betty
and myself to manage things. Don't say I can't do it. I tell you I've been
Governor of Virginia, and I'll not be daunted by an empty stocking. Now go
away, and you, too, Virginia--you're as sleepy as a kitten. Miss Lydia,
shall I take Mrs. Lightfoot's mixture to Miss Pussy, or will you?”
Miss Lydia took the pitcher, and Betty put her arm about her mother and led
her upstairs, holding her hand and kissing it as she went. She was always
lavish with little ways of love, but to-night she felt tenderer than
ever--she felt that she should like to take the world in her arms and hold
it to her bosom. “Dearest, sweetest,” she said, and her voice was full and
tremulous, though still with its crisp brightness of tone. It was as if she
caressed with her whole being, with those hidden possibilities of passion
which troubled her yet, only as the vibration of strong music, making her
joy pensive and her sadness sweet. She felt that she was walking in a
pleasant and vivid dream; she was happy, she could not tell why; nor could
she tell why she was sorrowful.
In Mrs. Ambler's room they found Mammy Riah, awaiting her mistress's
return.
“Put her to bed, Mammy,” she said; “she is all chilled by the drive,” and
she gave her mother over to the old negress, and ran down again to the
dining room, where the Governor was standing surrounded by the Christmas
litter.
“Do you expect to straighten out all these things, daughter?” he asked
hopelessly.
“Why, there's hardly anything left to do,” was Betty's cheerful assurance.
“You just sit down at the table and put the nuts into the toes of those
stockings, and I'll count out these print frocks.”
The Governor obediently sat down and went to work. “I am moved to offer
thanks that we are not as the beasts that have four legs,” he remarked
thoughtfully. “I shouldn't care to fill stockings for quadrupeds, Betty.”
“Why, you goose, there's only one stocking for each child.”
“Ah, but with four feet our expectations might be doubled,” suggested the
Governor. “You can't convince me that it isn't a merciful providence, my
dear.”
When the stockings were filled and the packages neatly tied up and
separated, Uncle Shadrach came with a hamper, and Betty went out to the
kitchen to prepare for the morning gathering of the field hands and their
families. Returning after the work was over, she lingered a moment in the
path to the house, looking far across the white country. The snow had
ceased, and a single star was shining, through a rift in the scudding
clouds, straight overhead. From the northwest the wind blew hard, and the
fleecy covering on the ground was fast freezing a foot deep in ice. With a
shiver she drew her cloak about her and ran indoors and upstairs to where
Virginia lay asleep in the high, white bed.
In the great brick fireplace the logs had fallen apart, and she softly
pushed them together again as she threw on a knot of resinous pine. The
blaze shot up quickly, and blowing out the candle upon the bureau, she
undressed by the firelight, crooning gently as she did so in a voice that
was lower than the singing flames. With the glow on her bared arms and her
hair unbound upon her shoulders, she sat close against the chimney; and
while Virginia slept in the tester bed, went dreaming out into the night.
At first her dreams went back into her childhood, and somehow, she knew not
why, she could not bring back her childhood but Dan came with it. She
fancied herself in all kinds of impossible places, but she had no sooner
got safely into them than she looked up and Dan was there before her,
standing very still and laughing at her with his eyes. It was the same
thing even when she was a baby. Her earliest memory was of a May morning
when they took her out into a field of buttercups, and told her that she
might pluck her arms full if she could, and then, as she stretched out her
little hands and began to gather very fast, she looked across to where the
waving yellow buttercups stood up against the blue spring sky. That memory
had always been her own before; but now, when she went back to it, she knew
that all the time she had been gathering buttercups for Dan. And she had
plucked faster and faster only that she might have a bigger bunch for him
when the gathering was done. She saw herself working bonnetless in the
sunshine, her baby face red, her lips breathless, working so hard, she did
not know for whom. Oh, how funny that he should have been somewhere all the
time!
And again on the day when they gave her her first doll, and she let it fall
and cried her heart out over its broken pink face. She knew, at last, that
somewhere in that ugly town Dan had dropped his toy; and it was for that
she was crying, not for her own poor doll. Yes, all her life she had had
two griefs to weep for, and two joys to be glad over. She had been really a
double self from her babyhood up--from her babyhood up! It had been always
up, up, up--like a lark that rises to the sun. She had all her life been
rising to the sun, and she was warmed at last.
Then she asked herself if it were happiness, after all, this new
restlessness of hers. The melancholy of the early spring was there--the
roving impulse that comes on April afternoons when the first buds are on
the trees and the air is keen with the smell of the newly turned earth. She
felt that it was time for the spring to come again; she wanted to walk
alone in the woods and to watch the swallows flying from the north. And
again she wanted only to lie close upon the hearth and to hear the flames
leap up the chimney. One of her selves cried to be up and roaming; the
other to turn over on the rug and sleep again.
But gradually her thoughts returned to him, and she went over, bit by bit,
what he had said last evening, asking herself if he had meant much at this
time, or little at another. It seemed to her that she found new meanings
now in things that she had once overlooked. She read words in his eyes
which he had never spoken; and, one by one, she brought back each sentence,
each look, each gesture, holding it up to her remembrance, and laying it
aside to give place to the next. Oh, there were so many, so many!
And then from the past her dreams went groping out into the future,
becoming dimmer, and shaping themselves into unreal forms. Scattered
visions came drifting through her mind,--of herself in romantic adventures,
and of Dan--always of Dan--appearing like the prince in the fairy tale, at
the perilous moment. She saw herself on the breast of a great river, borne,
while she stretched her hands at a white rose-bush blooming in the clouds,
to a cataract which she could not see, though she heard its thunder far
ahead. She tried to call, but no sound came, for the water filled her
mouth. The river went on and on, and the falling of the cataract was in her
ears, when she felt Dan's arm about her, and saw his eyes laughing at her
above the waters.
“Betty!” called Virginia, suddenly, rising on her elbow and rubbing her
eyes. “Betty, is it morning?”
Betty awoke with a cry, and stood up in the firelight.
“Oh, no, not yet,” she answered.
“What are you doing? Aren't you coming to bed?”
“I--I was just thinking,” stammered Betty, twisting her hair into a rope;
“yes, I'm coming now,” and she crossed the room and climbed into the bed
beside her sister.
“I believe I fell asleep by the fire,” she said, as she turned over.
III
DAN AND BETTY
On the last day of the year the young men from Chericoke, as they rode down
the turnpike, came upon Betty bringing holly berries from the wood. She was
followed by two small negroes laden with branches, and beside her ran her
young setters, Peyton and Bill.
As Dan came up with her, he checked his horse and swung himself to the
ground. “Thank God I've passed the boundary!” he exclaimed over his
shoulder to the others. “Ride on, my lads, ride on! Don't prate of the
claims of hospitality to me. My foot is on my neighbours' heath; I'm host
to no man.”
“Come, now, Beau,” remonstrated Jack Morson, looking down from his saddle;
“I see in Miss Betty's eyes that she wants me to carry that holly--I swear
I do.”
“Then you see more than is written,” declared Champe, from the other side,
“for it's as plain as day that one eye says Diggs and one Lightfoot--isn't
it, Betty?”
Betty looked up, laughing. “If you are so skilled in foreign tongues, what
can I answer?” she asked. “Only that I've been a mile after this holly for
the party to-night, and I wouldn't trust it to all of you together--for
worlds.”
“Oh, go on, go on,” said Dan, impatiently, “doesn't that mean that she'll
trust it to me alone? Good morning, my boys, God be with you,” and he led
Prince Rupert aside while the rest rode by.
When they were out of sight he turned to one of the small negroes, his hand
on the bridle. “Shall we exchange burdens, O eater of 'possums?” he asked
blandly. “Will you permit me to tote your load, while you lead my horse to
the house? You aren't afraid of him, are you?”
The little negro grinned. “He do look moughty glum, suh,” he replied, half
fearfully.
“Glum! Why, the amiability in that horse's face is enough to draw tears.
Come up, Prince Rupert, your highness is to go ahead of me; it's to oblige
a lady, you know.”
Then, as Prince Rupert was led away, Dan looked at Betty.
“Shall it be the turnpike or the meadow path?” he inquired, with the gay
deference he used toward women, as if a word might turn it to a jest or a
look might make it earnest.
“The meadow, but not the path,” replied the girl; “the path is asleep under
the snow.” She cast a happy glance over the white landscape, down the long
turnpike, and across the broad meadow where a cedar tree waved like a snowy
plume. “Jake, we must climb the wall,” she added to the negro boy, “be
careful about the berries.”
Dan threw his holly into the meadow and lifted Betty upon the stone wall.
“Now wait a moment,” he cautioned, as he went over. “Don't move till I tell
you. I'm managing this job--there, now jump!”
He caught her hands and set her on her feet beside him. “Take your fence,
my beauties,” he called gayly to the dogs, as they came bounding across the
turnpike.
Betty straightened her cap and took up her berries.
“Your tender mercies are rather cruel,” she complained, as she did so.
“Even my hair is undone.”
“Oh, it's all the better,” returned Dan, without looking at her. “I don't
see why girls make themselves so smooth, anyway. That's what I like about
you, you know--you've always got a screw loose somewhere.”
“But I haven't,” cried Betty, stopping in the snow.
“What! if I find a curl where it oughtn't to be, may I have it?”
“Of course not,” she answered indignantly.
“Well, there's one hanging over your ear now. Shall I put it straight with
this piece of holly? My hands are full, but I think I might manage it.”
“Don't touch me with your holly!” exclaimed Betty, walking faster; then in
a moment she turned and stood calling to the dogs. “Have you noticed what
beauties Bill and Peyton have grown to be?” she questioned pleasantly.
“There weren't any boys to be named after papa and Uncle Bill, so I called
the dogs after them, you know. Papa says he would rather have had a son
named Peyton; but I tell him the son might have been wicked and brought his
hairs in sorrow to the grave.”
“Well, I dare say, you're right,” he stopped with a sweep of his hand, and
stood looking to where a flock of crows were flying over the dried spectres
of carrot flowers that stood up above the snow; “That's fine, now, isn't
it?” he asked seriously.
Betty followed his gesture, then she gave a little cry and threw her arms
round the dogs. “The poor crows are so hungry,” she said. “No, no, you
mustn't chase them, Bill and Peyton, it isn't right, you see. Here, Jake,
come and hold the dogs, while I feed the crows.” She drew a handful of corn
from the pocket of her cloak, and flung it out into the meadow.
“I always bring corn for them,” she explained; “they get so hungry, and
sometimes they starve to death right out here. Papa says they are
pernicious birds; but I don't care--do you mind their being pernicious?”
“I? Not in the least. I assure you I trouble myself very little about the
morals of my associates. I'm not fond of crows; but it is their voices
rather than their habits I object to. I can't stand their eternal
'cawing!'--it drives me mad.”
“I suppose foxes are pernicious beasts, also,” said Betty, as she walked
on; “but there's an old red fox in the woods that I've been feeding for
years. I don't know anything that foxes like to eat except chickens, but I
carry him a basket of potatoes and turnips and bread, and pile them up
under a pine tree; it's just as well for him to acquire the taste for them,
isn't it?”
She smiled at Dan above her fur tippet, and he forgot her words in watching
the animation come and go in her face. He fell to musing over her decisive
little chin, the sensitive curves of her nostrils and sweet wide mouth, and
above all over her kind yet ardent look, which gave the peculiar beauty to
her eyes.
“Ah, is there anything in heaven or earth that you don't like?” he asked,
as he gazed at her.
“That I don't like? Shall I really tell you?”
He bent toward her over his armful of holly.
“I have a capacious breast for secrets,” he assured her.
“Then you will never breathe it?”
“Will you have me swear?” he glanced about him.
“Not by the inconstant moon,” she entreated merrily.
“Well, by my 'gracious self'; what's the rest of it?”
She coloured and drew away from him. His eyes made her self-conscious, ill
at ease; the very carelessness of his look disconcerted her.
“No, do not swear,” she begged. “I shall trust you with even so weighty a
confidence. I do not like--”
“Oh, come, why torture me?” he demanded.
She made a little gesture of alarm. “From fear of the wrath to come,” she
admitted.
“Of my wrath?” he regarded her with amazement. “Oh, don't you like
_me_?” he exclaimed.
“You! Yes, yes--but--have mercy upon your petitioner. I do not like your
cravats.”
She shut her eyes and stood before him with lowered head.
“My cravats!” cried Dan, in dismay, as his hand went to his throat, “but my
cravats are from Paris--Charlie Morson brought them over. What is the
matter with them?”
“They--they're too fancy,” confessed Betty. “Papa wears only white, or
black ones you know.”
“Too fancy! Nonsense! do you want to send me back to grandfather's stocks,
I wonder? It's just pure envy--that's what it is. Never mind, I'll give you
the very best one I've got.”
Betty shook her head. “And what should I do with it, pray?” she asked.
“Uncle Shadrach wouldn't wear it for worlds--he wears only papa's clothes,
you see. Oh, I might give it to Hosea; but I don't think he'd like it.”
“Hosea! Well, I declare,” exclaimed Dan, and was silent.
When he spoke a little later it was somewhat awkwardly.
“I say, did Virginia ever tell you she didn't like my cravats?” he
inquired.
“Virginia!” her voice was a little startled. “Oh, Virginia thinks they're
lovely.”
“And you don't?”
“No, I don't.”
“Well, you are a case,” he said, and walked on slowly.
They were already in sight of the house, and he did not speak again until
they had passed the portico and entered the hall. There they found Virginia
and the young men, who had ridden over ahead of them, hanging evergreens
for the approaching party. Jack Morson, from the top of the step-ladder,
was suspending a holly wreath above the door, while Champe was entwining
the mahogany balustrade in running cedar.
“Oh, Betty, would it be disrespectful to put mistletoe above General
Washington's portrait?” called Virginia, as they went into the hall.
“I don't think he'd mind--the old dear,” answered Betty, throwing her
armful of holly upon the floor. “There, Dan, the burden of the day is
over.”
“And none too soon,” said Dan, as he tossed the holly from him. “Diggs, you
sluggard, what are you sitting there in idleness for? Miss Pussy, can't you
set him to work?”
Miss Pussy, who was bustling in and out with a troop of servants at her
heels, found time to reply seriously that she really didn't think there was
anything she could trust him with. “Of course, I don't mind your amusing
yourselves with the decorations,” she added briskly, “but the cooking is
quite a different thing, you know.”
“Amusing myself!” protested Dan, in astonishment. “My dear lady, do you
call carrying a wagon load of brushwood amusement? Now, I'll grant, if you
please, that Morson is amusing himself on the step-ladder.”
“Keep off,” implored Morson, in terror; “if you shake the thing, I'm gone,
I declare I am.”
He nailed the garland in place and came down cautiously. “Now, that's what
I call an artistic job,” he complacently remarked.
“Why, it's lovely,” said Virginia, smiling, as he turned to her. “It's
lovely, isn't it, Betty?”
“As lovely as a crooked thing can be,” laughed Betty. She was looking
earnestly at Virginia, and wondering if she really liked Jack Morson so
very much. The girl was so bewitching in her red dress, with the flush of
a sudden emotion in her face, and the shyness in her downcast eyes.
“Oh, that isn't fair, Virginia,” called Champe from the steps. “Save your
favour for the man that deserves it--and look at me.” Virginia did look at
him, sending him the same radiant glance.
“But I've many 'lovelies' left,” she said quickly; “it's my favourite
word.”
“A most appropriate taste,” faltered Diggs, from his chair beneath the hall
clock.
Champe descended the staircase with a bound.
“What do I hear?” he exclaimed. “Has the oyster opened his mouth and
brought forth a compliment?”
“Oh, be quiet,” commanded Dan, “I shan't hear Diggs made fun of, and it's
time to get back, anyway. Well, loveliest of lovely ladies, you must put on
your prettiest frock to-night.”
Virginia's blush deepened. Did she like Dan so very much? thought Betty.
“But you mustn't notice me, please,” she begged, “all the neighbours are
coming, and there are so many girls,--the Powells and the Harrisons and the
Dulaneys. I am going to wear pink, but you mustn't notice it, you know.”
“That's right,” said Jack Morson, “make him do his duty by the County, and
keep your dances for Diggs and me.”
“I've done my duty by you, sir,” was Dan's prompt retort, “so I'll begin to
do my pleasure by myself. Now I give you fair warning, Virginia, if you
don't save the first reel for me, I'll dance all the rest with Betty.”
“Then it will be a Betty of your own making,” declared Betty over her
shoulder, “for this Betty doesn't dance a single step with you to-night, so
there, sir.”
“Your punishment be on your own head, rash woman,” said Dan, sternly, as he
took up his riding-whip. “I'll dance with Peggy Harrison,” and he went out
to Prince Rupert, lifting his hat, as he mounted, to Miss Lydia, who stood
at her window above. A moment later they heard his horse's hoofs ringing in
the drive, and his voice gayly whistling:--
“They tell me thou'rt the favor'd guest.”
When the others joined him in the turnpike, the four voices took up the
air, and sent the pathetic melody fairly dancing across the snow.
“Do I thus haste to hall and bower
Among the proud and gay to shine?
Or deck my hair with gem and flower
To flatter other eyes than thine?
Ah, no, with me love's smiles are past;
Thou hadst the first, thou hadst the last.”
The song ended in a burst of laughter, and up the white turnpike, beneath
the melting snow that rained down from the trees, they rode merrily back to
Chericoke.
In the carriage way they found the Major, wrapped in his broadcloth cape,
taking what he called a “breath of air.”
“Well, gentlemen, I hope you had a pleasant ride,” he remarked, following
them into the house. “You didn't see your way to stop by Uplands, I
reckon?”
“That we did, sir,” said Diggs, who was never bashful with the Major. “In
fact, we made ourselves rather useful, I believe.”
“They're charming young ladies over there, eh?” inquired the Major,
genially; and a little later when Dan and he were alone, he put the same
question to his grandson. “They're delightful girls, are they not, my boy?”
he ventured incautiously. “You have noticed, I dare say, how your
grandmother takes to Betty--and she's not a woman of many fancies, is your
grandmother.”
“Oh, but Virginia!” exclaimed Dan, with enthusiasm. “I wish you could have
seen her in her red dress to-day. You don't half realize what a thundering
beauty that girl is. Why, she positively took my breath away.”
The Major chuckled and rubbed his hands together.
“I don't, eh?” he said, scenting a romance as an old war horse scents a
battle. “Well, well, maybe not; but I see where the wind blows anyway, and
you have my congratulations on either hand. I shan't deny that we old folks
had a leaning to Betty; but youth is youth, and we shan't oppose your
fancy. So I congratulate you, my boy, I congratulate you.”
“Ah, she wouldn't look at me, sir,” declared Dan, feeling that the pace was
becoming a little too impetuous. “I only wish she would; but I'd as soon
expect the moon to drop from the skies.”
“Not look at you! Pooh, pooh!” protested the old gentleman, indignantly.
“Proper pride is not vanity, sir; and there's never been a Lightfoot yet
that couldn't catch a woman's eye, if I do say it who should not. Pooh,
pooh! it isn't a faint heart that wins the ladies.”
“I know you to be an authority, my dear grandpa,” admitted the young man,
lightly glancing into the gilt-framed mirror above the mantel. “If there's
any of your blood in me, it makes for conquest.” From the glass he caught
the laughter in his eyes and turned it on his grandfather.
“It ill becomes me to rob the Lightfoots of one of their chief
distinctions,” said the Major, smiling in his turn. “We are not a proud
people, my boy; but we've always fought like men and made love like
gentlemen, and I hope that you will live up to your inheritance.”
Then, as his grandson ran upstairs to dress, he followed him as far as Mrs.
Lightfoot's chamber, and informed her with a touch of pomposity: “That it
was Virginia, not Betty, after all. But we'll make the best of it, my
dear,” he added cheerfully. “Either of the Ambler girls is a jewel of
priceless value.”
The little old lady received this flower of speech with more than ordinary
unconcern.
“Do you mean to tell me, Mr. Lightfoot, that the boy has begun already?”
she demanded, in amazement.
“He doesn't say so,” replied the Major, with a chuckle; “but I see what he
means--I see what he means. Why, he told me he wished I could have seen her
to-day in her red dress--and, bless my soul, I wish I could, ma'am.”
“I don't see what good it would do you,” returned his wife, coolly. “But
did he have the face to tell you he was in love with the girl, Mr.
Lightfoot?”
“Have the face?” repeated the Major, testily. “Pray, why shouldn't he have
the face, ma'am? Whom should he tell, I'd like to know, before he tells his
grandfather?” and with a final “pooh, pooh!” he returned angrily to his
library and to the _Richmond Whig_, a paper he breathlessly read and
mightily abused.
Dan, meanwhile, upstairs in his room with Champe, was busily sorting his
collection of neckwear.
“Look here, Champe, I'll give you all these red ties, if you want them,” he
generously concluded. “I believe, after all, I'll take to wearing white or
black ones again.”
“What?” asked Champe, in astonishment, turning on his heel. “Have the skies
fallen, or does Beau Montjoy forsake the fashions?”
“Confound the fashions!” retorted Dan, impatiently. “I don't care a jot for
the fashions. You may have all these, if you choose,” and he tossed the
neckties upon the bed.
Champe picked up one and examined it with interest.
“O woman,” he murmured as he did so, “your hand is small but mighty.”
IV.
LOVE IN A MAZE
Despite Virginia's endeavour to efface herself for her guests, she shone
unrivalled at the party, and Dan, who had held her hand for an ecstatic
moment under the mistletoe, felt, as he rode home in the moonlight
afterwards, that his head was fairly on fire with her beauty. She had been
sweetly candid and flatteringly impartial. He could not honestly assert
that she had danced with him oftener than with Morson, or a dozen others,
but he had a pleasant feeling that even when she shook her head and said,
“I cannot,” her soft eyes added for her, “though I really wish to.” There
was something almost pitiable, he told himself in the complacency with
which that self-satisfied ass Morson would come and take her from him. As
if he hadn't sense enough to discover that it was merely because she was
his hostess that she went with him at all. But some men would never
understand women, though they lived to be a thousand, and got rejected once
a day.
Out in the moonlight, with the Governor's wine singing in his blood, he
found that his emotions had a way of tripping lightly off his tongue. There
were hot words with Diggs, who hinted that Virginia was not the beauty of
the century, and threats of blows with Morson, who too boldly affirmed that
she was. In the end Champe rode between them, and sent Prince Rupert on his
way with a touch of the whip.
“For heaven's sake, keep your twaddle to yourselves!” he exclaimed
impatiently, “or take my advice, and make for the nearest duck pond. You've
both gone over your depth in the Governor's Madeira, and I advise you to
keep quiet until you've had your heads in a basin of ice water. There, get
out of my road, Morson. I can't sit here freezing all night.”
“Do you dare to imply that I am drunk, sir?” demanded Morson, in a fury.
“Bear witness, gentlemen, that the insult was unprovoked.”
“Oh, insult be damned!” retorted Champe. “If you shake your fist at me
again, I'll pitch you head over heels into that snowdrift.”
“Pitch whom, sir?” roared Morson, riding at the wall, when Diggs caught his
bridle and roughly dragged him back.
“Come, now, don't make a beast of yourself,” he implored.
“Who's a beast?” was promptly put by Morson; but leaving it unanswered,
Diggs wheeled his horse about and started up the turnpike. “You've let Beau
get out of sight,” he said. “We'd better catch up with him,” and he set off
at a gallop.
Dan, who had ridden on at Champe's first words, did not even turn his head
when the three came abreast with him. The moonlight was in his eyes, and
the vision of Virginia floated before him at his saddle bow. He let the
reins fall loosely on Prince Rupert's neck, and as the hoofs rang on the
frozen road, thrust his hands for warmth into his coat. In another dress,
with his dark hair blown backward in the wind, he might have been a
cavalier fresh from the service of his lady or his king, or riding
carelessly to his death for the sake of the drunken young Pretender.
But he was only following his dreams, and they hovered round Virginia,
catching their rosy glamour from her dress. In the cold night air he saw
her walking demurely through the lancers, her skirt held up above her satin
shoes, her coral necklace glowing deeper pink against her slim white
throat. Mistletoe and holly hung over her, and the light of the candles
shone brighter where her radiant figure passed. He caught the soft flash of
her shy brown eyes, he heard her gentle voice speaking trivial things with
profound tenderness. His hand still burned from the light pressure of her
finger tips. Oh, his day had come, he told himself, and he was furiously in
love at last.
As for going back to college, the very idea was absurd. At twenty years it
was quite time for him to settle down and keep open house like other men.
Virginia, in rose pink, flitted up the crooked stair and across the white
panels of the parlor, and with a leap, his heart went after her. He saw
Great-aunt Emmeline lean down from her faded canvas as if to toss her apple
at the young girl's feet. Ah, poor old beauty, hanging in a gilded frame,
what was her century of dust to a bit of living flesh that had bright eyes
and was coloured like a flower?
When he was safely married he would have his wife's portrait hung upon the
opposite wall, only he rather thought he should have the dogs in and let
her be Diana, with a spear instead of an apple in her hand. Two beauties in
one family--that was something to be proud of even in Virginia.
It was at this romantic point that Champe shattered his visions by shooting
a jest at him about the “love sick swain.”
“Oh, be off, and let a fellow think, won't you?” he retorted angrily.
“Do you hear him call it thinking?” jeered Diggs, from the other side.
“He doesn't call it mooning, oh, no,” scoffed Champe.
“Oh, there's nothing half so sweet in life,” sang Morson, striking an
attitude that almost threw him off his horse.
“Shut up, Morson,” commanded Diggs, “you ought to be thankful if you had
enough sense left to moon with.”
“Sense, who wants sense?” inquired Morson, on the point of tears. “I have
heart, sir.”
“Then keep it bottled up,” rejoined Champe, coolly, as they turned into the
drive at Chericoke.
In Dan's room they found Big Abel stretched before the fire asleep; and as
the young men came in, he sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Hi! young Marsters, hit's ter-morrow!” he exclaimed.
“To-morrow! I wish it were to-morrow,” responded Dan, cheerfully. “The fire
makes my head spin like a top. Here, come and pull off my coat, Big Abel,
or I'll have to go to bed with my clothes on.”
Big Abel pulled off the coat and brushed it carefully; then he held out his
hand for Champe's.
“I hope dis yer coat ain' gwine lose hit's set 'fo' hit gits ter me,” he
muttered as he hung them up. “Seems like you don' teck no cyar yo' clothes,
nohow, Marse Dan. I'se de wuss dress somebody dis yer side er de po' w'ite
trash. Wat's de use er bein' de quality ef'n you ain' got de close?”
“Stop grumbling, you fool you,” returned Dan, with his lordly air. “If it's
my second best evening suit you're after, you may take it; but I tell you
now, it's the last thing you're going to get out of me till summer.”
Big Abel took down the second best suit of clothes and examined them with
an interest they had never inspired before. “I d'clar you sutney does set
hard,” he remarked after a moment, and added, tentatively, “I dunno whar de
shuts gwine come f'om.”
“Not from me,” replied Dan, airily; “and now get out of here, for I'm going
to sleep.”
But when he threw himself upon his bed it was to toss with feverish
rose-coloured dreams until the daybreak.
His blood was still warm when he came down to breakfast; but he met his
grandfather's genial jests with a boyish attempt at counter-buff.
“Oh, you needn't twit me, sir,” he said with an embarrassed laugh; “to wear
the heart upon the sleeve is hereditary with us, you know.”
“Keep clear of the daws, my son, and it does no harm,” responded the Major.
“There's nothing so becoming to a gentleman as a fine heart well worn, eh,
Molly?”
He carefully spread the butter upon his cakes, for his day of love-making
was over, and his eye could hold its twinkle while he watched Dan fidget in
his seat.
Mrs. Lightfoot promptly took up the challenge. “For my part I prefer one
under a buttoned coat,” she replied briskly; “but be careful, Mr.
Lightfoot, or you will put notions into the boys' heads. They are at the
age when a man has a fancy a day and gets over it before he knows it.”
“They are at the age when I had my fancy for you, Molly,” gallantly
retorted the Major, “and I seem to be carrying it with me to my grave.”
“It would be a dull wit that would go roving from Aunt Molly,” said Champe,
affectionately; “but there aren't many of her kind in the world.”
“I never found but one like her,” admitted the Major, “and I've seen a good
deal in my day, sir.”
The old lady listened with a smile, though she spoke in a severe voice.
“You mustn't let them teach you how to flatter, Mr. Morson,” she said
warningly, as she filled the Major's second cup of coffee--“Cupid, Mr.
Morson will have a partridge.”
“The man who sits at your table will never question your supremacy, dear
madam,” returned Jack Morson, as he helped himself to a bird. “There is
little merit in devotion to such bounty.”
“Shall I kick him, grandma?” demanded Dan. “He means that we love you
because you feed us, the sly scamp.”
Mrs. Lightfoot shook her head reprovingly. “Oh, I understand you, Mr.
Morson,” she said amiably, “and a compliment to my housekeeping never goes
amiss. If a woman has any talent, it will come out upon her table.”
“You're right, Molly, you're right,” agreed the Major, heartily. “I've
always held that there was nothing in a man who couldn't make a speech or
in a woman who couldn't set a table.”
Dan stirred restlessly in his chair, and at the first movement of Mrs.
Lightfoot he rose and went out into the hall. An hour later he ordered
Prince Rupert and started joyously to Uplands.
As he rode through the frosted air he pictured to himself a dozen different
ways in which it was possible that he might meet Virginia. Would she be
upon the portico or in the parlour? Was she still in pink or would she wear
the red gown of yesterday? When she gave him her hand would she smile as
she had smiled last night? or would she stand demurely grave with down
dropped lashes?
The truth was that she did none of the things he had half expected of her.
She was sitting before a log fire, surrounded by a group of Harrisons and
Powells, who had been prevailed upon to spend the night, and when he
entered she gave him a sleepy little nod from the corner of a rosewood
sofa. As she lay back in the firelight she was like a drowsy kitten that
had just awakened from a nap. Though less radiant, her beauty was more
appealing, and as she stared at him with her large eyes blinking, he wanted
to stoop down and rock her off to sleep. He regarded her calmly this
morning, for, with all his tenderness, she did not fire his brain, and the
glory of the vision had passed away. Half angrily he asked himself if he
were in love with a pink dress and nothing more?
An hour afterward he came noisily into the library at Chericoke and aroused
the Major from his Horace by stamping distractedly about the room.
“Oh, it's all up with me, sir,” he began despondently. “I might as well go
out and hang myself. I don't know what I want and yet I'm going mad because
I can't get it.”
“Come, come,” said the Major, soothingly. “I've been through it myself,
sir, and since your grandmother's out of earshot, I'd as well confess that
I've been through it more than once. Cheer up, cheer up, you aren't the
first to dare the venture--_Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona_, you know.”
His assurance was hardly as comforting as he had intended it to be. “Oh, I
dare say, there've been fools enough before me,” returned Dan, impatiently,
as he flung himself out of the room.
He grew still more impatient when the day came for him to return to
college; and as they started out on horseback, with Zeke and Big Abel
riding behind their masters, he declared irritably that the whole system of
education was a nuisance, and that he “wished the ark had gone down with
all the ancient languages on board.”
“There would still be law,” suggested Morson, pleasantly. “So cheer up,
Beau, there's something left for you to learn.”
Then, as they passed Uplands, they turned, with a single impulse, and
cantered up the broad drive to the portico. Betty and Virginia were in the
library; and as they heard the horses, they came running to the window and
threw it open.
“So you will come back in the summer--all of you,” said Virginia,
hopefully, and as she leaned out a white camellia fell from her bosom to
the snow beneath. In an instant Jack Morson was off his horse and the
flower was in his hand. “We'll bring back all that we take away,” he
answered gallantly, his fair boyish face as red as Virginia's.
Dan could have kicked him for the words, but he merely said savagely, “Have
you left your pocket handkerchief?” and turned Prince Rupert toward the
road. When he looked back from beneath the silver poplars, the girls were
still standing at the open window, the cold wind flushing their cheeks and
blowing the brown hair and the red together.
Virginia was the first to turn away. “Come in, you'll take cold,” she said,
going to the fire. “Peggy Harrison never goes out when the wind blows, you
know, she says it's dreadful for the complexion. Once when she had to come
back from town on a March day, she told me she wore six green veils. I
wonder if that's the way she keeps her lovely colour?”
“Well, I wouldn't be Peggy Harrison,” returned Betty, gayly, and she added
in the same tone, “so Mr. Morson got your camellia, after all, didn't he?”
“Oh, he begged so hard with his eyes,” answered Virginia. “He had seen me
give Dan a white rose on Christmas Eve, you know, and he said it wasn't
fair to be so unfair.”
“You gave Dan a white rose?” repeated Betty, slowly. Her face was pale, but
she was smiling brightly.
Virginia's soft little laugh pealed out. “And it was your rose, too,
darling,” she said, nestling to Betty like a child. “You dropped it on the
stair and I picked it up. I was just going to take it to you because it
looked so lovely in your hair, when Dan came along and he would have it,
whether or no. But you don't mind, do you, just a little bit of white
rosebud?” She put up her hand and stroked her sister's cheek. “Men are so
silly, aren't they?” she added with a sigh.
For a moment Betty looked down upon the brown head on her bosom; then she
stooped and kissed Virginia's brow. “Oh, no, I don't mind, dear,” she
answered, “and women are very silly, too, sometimes.”
She loosened Virginia's arms and went slowly upstairs to her bedroom, where
Petunia was replenishing the fire. “You may go down, Petunia,” she said as
she entered. “I am going to put my things to rights, and I don't want you
to bother me--go straight downstairs.”
“Is you gwine in yo' chist er draws?” inquired Petunia, pausing upon the
threshold.
“Yes, I'm going into my chest of drawers, but you're not,” retorted Betty,
sharply; and when Petunia had gone out and closed the door after her, she
pulled out her things and began to straighten rapidly, rolling up her
ribbons with shaking fingers, and carefully folding her clothes into
compact squares. Ever since her childhood she had always begun to work at
her chest of drawers when any sudden shock unnerved her. After a great
happiness she took up her trowel and dug among the flowers of the garden;
but when her heart was heavy within her, she shut her door and put her
clothes to rights.
Now, as she worked rapidly, the tears welled slowly to her lashes, but she
brushed them angrily away, and rolled up a sky-blue sash. She had worn the
sash at Chericoke on Christmas Eve, and as she looked at it, she felt, with
the keenness of pain, a thrill of her old girlish happiness. The figure of
Dan, as he stood upon the threshold with the powdering of snow upon his
hair, rose suddenly to her eyes, and she flinched before the careless
humour of his smile. It was her own fault, she told herself a little
bitterly, and because it was her own fault she could bear it as she should
have borne the joy. There was nothing to cry over, nothing even to regr
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