THE NIGHT
The scattered houses closed together in groups, the road descended
gradually into a hollow, and emerging on the opposite side, became a
street, and the street slouched lazily downhill to where a railroad
track ran straight as a seam across the bare country. Quickening his
steps, Ordway came presently to the station--a small wooden building
newly painted a brilliant yellow--and pushed his way with difficulty
through a crowd of Negroes that had gathered closely beside the waiting
train.
"Thar's a good three hundred of the critters going to a factory in the
North," remarked a man behind him, "an' yit they don't leave more'n a
speck of white in the county. Between the crows an' the darkies I'll be
blamed if you can see the colour of the soil."
The air was heavy with hot, close smells--a mingling of smoke, tobacco,
dust and humanity. A wailing sound issued from the windows of the cars
where the dark faces were packed tightly together, and a tall Negro,
black as ebony, in a red shirt open at the throat, began strumming
excitedly upon a banjo. Near him a mulatto woman lifted a shrill soprano
voice, while she stood beating the air distractedly with her open
palms. On the other side of the station a dog howled, and the engine
uttered an angry whistle as if impatient of the delay.
After five years of prison discipline, the ugly little town appeared to
Ordway to contain an alluring promise of freedom. At the instant the
animation in the scene spoke to his blood as if it had been beauty, and
movement seemed to him to possess some peculiar aesthetic quality apart
from form or colour. The brightly dyed calicos on the Negro women; the
shining black faces of the men, smooth as ebony; the tragic primitive
voices, like voices imprisoned in the soil; the strumming of the rude
banjo; the whistling engine and the howling dog; the odours of smoke and
dust and fertilisers--all these things blended in his senses to form an
intoxicating impression of life. Nothing that could move or utter sounds
or lend a spot of colour appeared common or insignificant to his
awakened brain. It was all life, and for five years he had been starved
in every sense and instinct.
The main street--Warehouse Street, as he found later that it was
called--appeared in the distance as a broad river of dust which ran from
the little station to where the warehouses and small shops gave place to
the larger dwellings which presided pleasantly over the neighbouring
fields. As Ordway followed the board sidewalk, he began idly reading the
signs over the shops he passed, until "Kelly's Saloon," and "Baker's
General Store" brought him suddenly upon a dark oblong building which
ran back, under a faded brick archway. Before the entrance several men
were seated in cane chairs, which they had tilted conveniently against
the wall, and at Ordway's approach they edged slightly away and sat
regarding him over their pipes with an expression of curiosity which
differed so little in the different faces that it appeared to result
from some internal automatic spring.
"I beg your pardon," he began after a moment's hesitation, "but I was
told that I might find work in Baxter's warehouse."
"Well, it's a first-rate habit not to believe everything you're told,"
responded an enormous man, in half-soiled clothes, who sat smoking in
the middle of the archway. "I can't find work myself in Baxter's
warehouse at this season. Ain't that so, boys?" he enquired with a
good-natured chuckle of his neighbours.
"Are you Mr. Baxter?" asked Ordway shortly.
"I'm not sure about the Mister, but I'm Baxter all right." He had
shifted his pipe to the extreme corner of his mouth as he spoke, and now
removing it with what seemed an effort, he sat prodding the ashes with
his stubby thumb. His face, as he glanced down, was overspread by a
flabbiness which appeared to belong to expression rather than to
feature.
"Then there's no chance for me?" enquired Ordway.
"You might try the cotton mills--they's just down the next street. If
there's a job to be had in town you'll most likely run up against it
there."
"It's no better than a wild goose chase you're sending him on, Baxter,"
remarked a smaller member of the group, whose head protruded
unexpectedly above Baxter's enormous shoulder; "I was talking to Jasper
Trend this morning and he told me he was turning away men every day.
Whew! but this wind is getting too bitter for me, boys."
"Oh, there's no harm can come of trying," insisted the cheerful giant,
pushing back his chair as the others retreated out of the wind, "if hope
doesn't fill the stomach it keeps the heart up, and that's something."
His great laugh rolled out, following Ordway along the street as he went
in pursuit of the fugitive opportunity which disported itself now in the
cotton factory at the foot of the hill. When he reached the doors the
work of the day was already over, and a crowd of operatives surged
through the entrance and overflowed into the two roads which led by
opposite ways into the town. Drawing to one side of the swinging doors,
he stood watching the throng a moment before he could summon courage to
enter the building and inquire for the office of the manager. When he
did so at last it was with an almost boyish feeling of hesitation.
The manager--a small, wiry man with a wart on the end of his long
nose--was hurriedly piling papers into his desk before closing the
factory and going home to supper. His hands moved impatiently, almost
angrily, for he remembered that he had already worked overtime and that
the muffins his wife had promised him for supper would be cold. At any
other hour of the day he would have received Ordway with politeness--for
he was at heart a well-disposed and even a charitable person--but it
happened that his dinner had been unsatisfactory (his mutton had been
served half raw by a new maid of all-work) and he had particularly set
his hopes upon the delicious light muffins in which his wife excelled.
So when he saw Ordway standing between him and his release, his face
grew black and the movements of his hands passed to jerks of frantic
irritation.
"What do you want? Say it quick--I've no time to talk," he began, as he
pushed the last heap of papers inside, and let the lid of his desk fall
with a bang.
"I'm looking for work," said Ordway, "and I was told at Baxter's
warehouse----"
"Darn Baxter. What kind of work do you want?"
"I'll take anything--I can do bookkeeping or----"
"Well, I don't want a bookkeeper."
He locked his desk, and turning to take down his hat, was incensed
further by discovering that it was not on the hook where he had placed
it when he came in. Finding it at last on a heap of reports in the
corner, he put it on his head and stared at Ordway, with his angry eyes.
"You must have come a long way--haven't you? Mostly on foot?"
"A good distance."
"Why did you select Tappahannock? Was there any reason?"
"I wanted to try the town, that was all."
"Well, I tell you what, my man," concluded the manager, while his rage
boiled over in the added instants of his delay; "there have been a
blamed sight too many of your kind trying Tappahannock of late--and the
best thing you can do is to move on to a less particular place. When we
want bookkeepers here we don't pick 'em up out of the road."
Ordway swallowed hard, and his hands clinched in a return of one of his
boyish spasms of temper. His vision of the new life was for an instant
defaced and clouded; then as he met the angry little eyes of the man
before him, he felt that his rage went out of him as suddenly as it had
come. Turning without a word, he passed through the entrance and out
into the road, which led back, by groups of negro hovels, into the main
street of the town.
His anger gave place to helplessness; and it seemed to him, when he
reached presently the larger dwellings upon the hill, and walked slowly
past the squares of light that shone through the unshuttered windows,
that he was more absolutely alone than if he had stood miles away from
any human habitation. The outward nearness had become in his thoughts
the measure of the inner distance. He felt himself to be detached from
humanity, yet he knew that in his heart there existed a stronger bond
than he had ever admitted in the years of his prosperity. The generous
impulses of his youth were still there, but had not sorrow winnowed them
from all that was base or merely selfish? Was the lesson that he had
learned in prison to be wholly lost? Did the knowledge he had found
there count for nothing in his life--the bitterness of shame, the agony
of remorse, the companionship with misery? He remembered a Sunday in the
prison when he had listened to a sermon from a misshapen little
preacher, whose face was drawn sideways by a burn which he had suffered
during an epileptic seizure in his childhood. In spite of his grotesque
features the man had drawn Ordway by some invisible power which he had
felt even then to be the power of faith. Crippled, distorted, poorly
clad, the little preacher, he felt, had found the great possession which
he was still seeking--this man believed with a belief that was larger
than the external things which he had lost. When he shut his eyes now he
could still see the rows of convicts in the chapel, the pale, greenish
light in which each face resembled the face of a corpse, the open Bible
in its black leather binding, and beside it the grotesque figure of the
little preacher who had come, like his Master, to call not the righteous
but sinners to repentance.
The sun had dropped like a ball below the gray horizon, and the raw
March wind, when it struck him now, brought no longer the exhilaration
of the afternoon. A man passed him, comfortable, well-fed, wheezing
slightly, with his fat neck wrapped in a woollen muffler, and as he
stopped before a whitewashed gate, which opened into the garden
surrounding a large, freshly painted house, Ordway touched his arm and
spoke to him in a voice that had fallen almost to a whisper.
At his words, which were ordinary enough, the man turned on him a face
which had paled slightly from surprise or fear. In the twilight Ordway
could see his jaw drop while he fumbled awkwardly with his gloved hands
at the latch of the gate.
"I don't know what you mean--I don't know" he repeated in a wheezing
voice, "I'm sorry, but I really don't know," he insisted again as if in
a helpless effort to be understood. Once inside the garden, he closed
the gate with a bang behind him, and went rapidly up the gravelled walk
to the long piazza where the light of a lamp under a red shade streamed
through the open door.
Turning away Ordway followed the street to the end of the town, where it
passed without distinct change of character into the country road. On
this side the colour of the soil had paled until it looked almost
blanched under the rising moon. Though the twilight was already in
possession of the fields a thin red line was still visible low in the
west, and beneath this the scattered lights in negro cabins shone like
obscure, greenish glow-worms, hidden among clumps of sassafras or in
stretches of dried broomsedge. As Ordway looked at these humble
dwellings, it seemed to him that they might afford a hospitality denied
him by the more imposing houses of the town. He had already eaten of the
Negro's charity, and it was possible that before dawn he might be
compelled to eat of it again.
Beneath his feet the long road called to him as it wound a curving white
line drawn through the vague darkness of the landscape. Somewhere in a
distant pasture a bull bellowed, and the sound came to him like the
plaintive voice of the abandoned fields. While he listened the response
of his tired feet to the road appeared to him as madness, and stopping
short, he turned quickly and looked back in the direction of
Tappahannock. But from the spot on which he stood the lights of the town
offered little promise of hospitality, so after an uncertain glance, he
moved on again to a bare, open place where two roads met and crossed at
the foot of a blasted pine. A few steps farther he discovered that a
ruined gate stood immediately on his right, and beyond the crumbling
brick pillars, he made out dimly the outlines of several fallen bodies,
which proved upon nearer view to be the prostrate forms of giant cedars.
An avenue had once led, he gathered, from the gate to a house situated
somewhere at the end of the long curve, for the great trees lying across
the road must have stood once as the guardians of an estate of no little
value. Whether the cedars had succumbed at last to age or to the axe of
the destroyer, it was too dark at the moment for him to ascertain; but
the earth had claimed them now, magnificent even in their ruin, while
under the dim tent of sky beyond, he could still discern their living
companions of a hundred years. So impressive was the past splendour of
this approach that the house seemed, when he reached it, almost an
affront to the mansion which his imagination had reared. Broad, low,
built of brick, with two long irregular wings embedded in English ivy,
and a rotting shingled roof that sloped over dormered windows, its most
striking characteristic as he first perceived it under the moonlight was
the sentiment which is inevitably associated with age and decay. Never
imposing, the dwelling was now barely habitable, for the roof was
sagging in places over the long wings, a chimney had fallen upon one of
the moss-covered eaves, the stone steps of the porch were hollowed into
dangerous channels, and the ground before the door was strewn with
scattered chips from a neighbouring wood pile.
The air of desolation was so complete that at first Ordway supposed the
place to be uninhabited, but discovering a light presently in one of the
upper windows, he ascended the steps and beat with the rusted knocker on
the panel of the door. For several minutes there was no answer to his
knock. Then the sound of shuffling footsteps reached him from the
distance, drawing gradually nearer until they stopped immediately beyond
the threshold.
"I ain' gwine open dis yer do' ef'n hits oner dem ole hants," said a
voice within, while a sharp point of light pierced through the keyhole.
An instant later, in response to Ordway's assurance of his bodily
reality, the bolt creaked back with an effort and the door opened far
enough to admit the slovenly head and shoulders of an aged negress.
"Miss Meely she's laid up en she cyar'n see ner comp'ny, Marster," she
announced with the evident intention of retreating as soon as her
message was delivered.
Her purpose, however, was defeated, for, slipping his heavy boot into
the crack of the door, Ordway faced her under the lamp which she held
high above her head. In the shadows beyond he could see dimly the bare
old hall and the great winding staircase which led to the painted
railing of the gallery above.
"Can you give me shelter for the night?" he asked, "I am a stranger in
the county, and I've walked thirty miles to-day."
"Miss Meely don' wan'ner comp'ny," replied the negress, while her head,
in its faded cotton handkerchief, appeared to swing like a pendulum
before his exhausted eyes.
"Who is Miss Meely?" he demanded, laying his hand upon her apron as she
made a sudden terrified motion of flight.
"Miss Meely Brooke--Marse Edward's daughter. He's daid."
"Well, go and ask her. I'll wait here on the porch until you return."
Her eyelids flickered in the lamplight, and he saw the whites of her
eyes leap suddenly into prominence. Then the door closed again, the bolt
shot back into place, and the shuffling sound grew fainter as it passed
over the bare floor. A cold nose touched Ordway's hand, and looking down
he saw that an old fox-hound had crept into the porch and was fawning
with pleasure at his feet. He was conscious of a thrill of gratitude
for the first demonstrative welcome he had received at Tappahannock; and
while he stood there with the hound leaping upon his chest, he felt
that, in spite of "Miss Meely," hidden somewhere behind the closed door,
the old house had not lost utterly the spirit of hospitality. His hand
was still on the dog's head when the bolt creaked again and the negress
reappeared upon the threshold.
"Miss Meely she sez she's moughty sorry, suh, but she cyarn' hev ner
strange gent'mun spendin' de night in de house. She reckons you mought
sleep in de barn ef'n you wanter."
As the door opened wider, her whole person, clad in a faded woollen
dress, patched brightly in many colours, emerged timidly and followed
him to the topmost step.
"You des go roun' ter de back en den thoo' de hole whar de gate used ter
be, en dar's de barn. Nuttin' ain' gwine hu't you lessen hits dat ar ole
ram 'Lejab."
"Well, he shall not find me unprepared," responded Ordway, with a kind
of desperate gaiety, and while the old hound still leaped at his side,
he found his way into a little path which led around the corner of the
house, and through the tangled garden to the barn just beyond the fallen
gateposts. Here the dog deserted him, running back to the porch, where a
woman's voice called; and stumbling over a broken ploughshare or two, he
finally reached the poor shelter which Miss Meely's hospitality
afforded.
It was very dark inside, but after closing the door to shut out the
wind, he groped his way through the blackness to a pile of straw in one
corner. The place smelt of cattle, and opposite to the spot on which he
lay, he distinguished presently a soft, regular sound which he concluded
to be caused by the breathing of a cow. Evidently the barn was used as a
cattleshed also, though his observation of the mansion did not lead him
to suppose that "Miss Meely" possessed anything approaching a herd. He
remembered the old negress's warning allusion to the ram, but so far at
least the darkness had revealed nothing that could prove hostile to his
company. His head ached and his will seemed suddenly benumbed, so
stretching himself at full length in the straw he fell, after a few
troubled moments, into the deep and dreamless sleep of complete physical
exhaustion.
An instant afterwards, it seemed to him, he was aroused by a light which
flashed into his face from the opening door. A cold wind blew over him,
and as he struggled almost blindly back into consciousness, he saw that
a girl in a red cape stood holding a lantern above her head in the
centre of the barn. At his first look the red cape warmed him as if it
had been flame; then he became aware that a voice was speaking to him in
a peculiar tone of cheerful authority. And it seemed to him that the red
cape and the rich voice expressed the same dominant quality of
personality.
"I thought you must be hungry," said the voice with energy, "so I've
brought your supper."
Even while he instinctively grasped the tray she held out, he observed
with quickened attention that the hands which offered him the food had
toiled out of doors in good and bad weather--though small and shapely
they were chapped from cold and roughened by marks of labour.
"You'd better drink your coffee while it's hot," said the voice again.
The practical nature of her advice put him immediately at his ease.
"It's the first hot thing I've had for a week," he responded.
"Then it will be all the better for you," replied the girl, while she
reached up to hang the lantern from a rusted nail in the wall.
As the light fell over her, the red cape slipped a little from her
shoulder and she put up her hand to catch it together on her bosom. The
movement, slight as it was, gave Ordway a chance to observe that she
possessed a kind of vigorous grace, which showed in the roundness of her
limbs and in the rebellious freedom of her thick brown hair. The airy
little curls on her temples stood out, he noticed, as if she had been
walking bareheaded in the wind. At his first look it did not occur to
him that she was beautiful; what impressed him most was the quality of
radiant energy which revealed itself in every line of her face and
figure--now sparkling in her eyes, now dimpling in her cheek, now
quickening her brisk steps across the floor, and now touching her eyes
and mouth like an edge of light. It may have been merely the effect of
the red cape on a cold night, but as she moved back and forth into the
dark corners of the barn, she appeared to him to gather both warmth and
animation out of the gloom.
As she did not speak again during her work, he found himself forced to
observe the same friendly silence. The ravenous hunger of the afternoon
had returned to him with the odour of the food, and he ate rapidly,
sitting up on his straw bed, while she took up a bucket and a piece of
wood sharpened at one end and prepared a bran mash for the cow quartered
in a stall in one corner. When a little later she gathered up an armful
of straw to replenish the animal's bed, Ordway pushed the tray aside and
made a movement as if to assist her; but stopping an instant in her
task, she waved him aside with the easy dignity of perfect capability.
"I can do it myself, thank you," she said, smiling; and then, glancing
at his emptied plate, she added carelessly, "I'll send back presently
for the tray and lantern--good-night!"
Her tone had changed perceptibly on the last word, for its businesslike
authority had given place to the musical Southern drawl so familiar to
his ears in childhood. In that simple phrase, accompanied by the
gracious bend of her whole person, she had put unconsciously generations
of social courtesy--of racial breeding.
"Thank you--good-night," he answered, rising, and drawing back with his
hand on the heavy latch.
Then before she could reach the door and pass through, a second lantern
flashed there out of the blackness beyond, and the terrified face of a
Negro urchin was thrust into the full glare of light.
"Fo' de good Lawd, Miss Em'ly, dat ar ole ram done butt Sis Mehitable
clean inter de smoke 'us."
Perfectly unruffled by the news the girl looked at Ordway, and then held
out her small, strong hand for the lantern.
"Very well, I'll come and shut him up," she responded quietly, and
holding the red cape together on her bosom, she stepped over the
threshold and followed the Negro urchin out into the night.