THE RETURN TO TAPPAHANNOCK
At sunrise he came out of the barn, and washed his face and hands at the
well, where he found a coarse towel on the moss-covered trough. The day
was breaking clear, but in the fine golden light the house and lawn
appeared even more desolate than they had done under the full moon.
Before the war the place had been probably a comfortable, unpretentious
country mansion. Some simple dignity still attached to its bowers of ivy
and its ancient cedars, but it was easy to imagine that for thirty years
no shingle had been added to its crumbling roof, and hardly a ship
gathered from the littered walk before the door. At the end of the
avenue six great trees had fallen a sacrifice, he saw now, to the mere
lust for timber--for freshly cut and still odorous with sap, the huge
trunks lay directly across the approach over which they had presided
through the tragic history of the house. Judged by what it must have
been in a fairly prosperous past, the scene was sad enough even to the
eyes of a stranger; and as Ordway walked slowly down the dim, fragrant
curve of the avenue, he found it difficult to place against so sombre a
background, a figure as full of life and animation as that of the girl
he had seen in the barn on the evening before. She appeared to his
imagination as the embodiment of youth amid surroundings whose only
remaining beauties were those of age.
Though he had resolved yesterday not to return to Tappahannock, he found
himself presently retracing, almost without an effort of will, the road
which he had travelled so heavily in the night. Something between
sunrise and sunset had renewed his courage and altered his
determination. Was it only the wasted strength which had returned to him
in his sleep? Or was it--he hesitated at the thought--the flush of shame
which had burned his face when the girl's lantern had flashed over him
out of the darkness? In that pitiless illumination it was as if not only
his roughened surface, but his secret sin was laid bare; and he had felt
again all the hideous publicity that had touched him and put him as one
apart in the court-room. Though he had outgrown the sin, he knew now
that he must carry the scar of it until his death; and he knew, also,
that the reality of his punishment had been in the spirit and not in the
law.
For a while he walked rapidly in the direction of Tappahannock; then
sitting down in the sunshine upon the roadside, he ate the piece of
cornbread he had saved last night from his supper. It would be several
hours at least before he might hope to find the warehouses open for the
day, so he sat patiently eating his bread under the bared boughs of a
young peach-tree, while he watched the surface of the long white road
which appeared to hold for him as much despondency as freedom. A farmer
driving a spotted cow to market spoke to him presently in a friendly
voice; and rising to his feet, he overtook the man and fell into the
jogging pace which was rendered necessary by the reluctance of the
animal to proceed.
"I declar' the sense in them thar critters do beat all," remarked the
farmer, after an ineffectual tug at the rope he held. "She won't be
drove no more 'n a woman will--her head is what she wants no matter whar
it leads her."
"Can you tell me," inquired Ordway, when they had started again upon the
advance, "the name of the old house I passed a mile or so along the
road?"
"Oh, you mean Cedar Hill, I reckon!--thar now, Betsey, that thar toad
ain't a turnip!"
"Cedar Hill, is it? Well, they appear to be doing their level best to
get rid of the cedars."
"Mr. Beverly did that--not Miss Em'ly. Miss Em'ly dotes on them trees
jest the same as if they were made of flesh and blood."
"But the place belongs to Mr. Beverly, I presume?"
"If thar's a shingle of it that ain't mortgaged, I reckon it
does--though for that matter Miss Em'ly is overseer and manager, besides
teachin' every day in the public school of Tappahannock. Mr. Beverly's
got a soft heart in his body--all the Brookes had that they say--but the
Lord who made him knows that he ain't overblessed with brains. He used
to speculate with most of the family money, but as luck would have it he
always speculated wrong. Then he took to farmin', but he's got such a
slow gentlemanly way about him that nothin' he puts in the ground ever
has spirit enough to come up agin. His wife's just like him--she was
Miss Amelia Meadows, his second cousin from the up-country, and when the
children kept on comin' so thick and fast, as is the Lord's way with po'
folks, people said thar warn't nothin' ahead of 'em but starvation. But
Miss Em'ly she come back from teachin' somewhar down South an' undertook
to run the whole place single-handed. Things are pickin' up a little
now, they say--she's got a will of her own, has Miss Em'ly, but thar
ain't anybody in these parts that wouldn't work for her till they
dropped. She sent for me last Monday to help her mend her henhouse, and
though I was puttin' a new roof over my wife's head, I dropped
everything I had and went. That was the day Mr. Beverly cut down the
cedars."
"So Miss Emily didn't know of it?"
"She was in school, suh--you see she teaches in Tappahannock from nine
till three, so Mr. Beverly chose that time to sell the avenue to young
Tom Myers. He's a sly man, is Mr. Beverly, for all his soft, slow ways,
and if Young Tom had been on time he'd have had half the avenue belted
before Miss Em'ly got back from school. But he got in some mess or other
at the store, and he was jest hewin' like thunder at his sixth cedar,
when up come Miss Em'ly on that old white horse she rides. Good Lord! I
hope I'll never see anybody turn so white agin as she did when her eyes
lighted on them fallen trees. 'Beverly,' she called out in a loud, high
voice, 'have you dared to sell the cedars?' Mr. Beverly looked a little
sick as if his stomach had gone aginst him of a sudden, but he stood
right up on the trunk of a tree, and mumbled something about presarvin'
useless timber when the children had no shoes an' stockings to thar
feet. Then Miss Em'ly gave him a look that scorched like fire, and she
rode straight up to Myers on her old horse and said as quiet as death:
'Put up your axe, Tom, I'll give you back your money. How much have you
paid him down?' When Young Tom looked kind of sheepish and said: 'a
hundred dollars,' I saw her eyelids flicker, but she didn't hesitate an
instant. 'You shall have it within an hour on my word of honour,' she
answered, 'can you wait?' 'I reckon I can wait all day, Miss,' said
Young Tom--and then she jumped down from her horse, and givin' me the
bridle, caught up her skirt and ran indoors. In a minute she came flying
out agin and before we had time to catch our breath she was ridin' for
dear life back to town. 'You'd better go on with yo' work,' said Mr.
Beverly in his soft way, but Young Tom picked up his axe, and sat down
on the big stump behind him. 'I reckon I can take her word better 'n
yours, Mr. Beverly,' he answered, 'an' 'I reckon you can, too, Young
Tom,' said I----."
"But how did she raise the money?" inquired Ordway.
"That's what nobody knows, suh, except her and one other. Some say she
sold a piece of her mother's old jewelry--a locket or something she had
put by--and some believe still that she borrowed it from Robert Baxter
or Jasper Trend. Whichever way it was, she came ridin' up within the
hour on her old white horse with the notes twisted tight in her
handkerchief. She was mighty quiet, then, but when it was over, great
Lord, what a temper she was in. I declar' she would have struck Mr.
Beverly with the sour gum twig she used for a whip if I hadn't slipped
in between 'em an' caught her arm. Then she lashed him with her tongue
till he seemed to wither and shrink all over."
"And served him right, God bless her!" said Ordway.
"That's so, suh, but Mr. Beverly ain't a bad man--he's jest soft."
"Yet your Miss Emily still sticks to him, it seems?"
"If she didn't the farm wouldn't hold together a week. What she makes
from teachin' is about all they have to live on in my opinion. Last
summer, too, she started raisin' garden things an' poultry, an' she'd
have got quite a thrivin' business if she had had any kind of help. Then
in July she tried her hand at puttin' up preserves and jellies to send
to them big stores in the North."
Ordway remembered the cheerful authority in her voice, the little cold
red hands that had offered him his supper; and his heart contracted as
it did at the memory of his daughter Alice. Yet it was not pity alone
that moved him, for mingled with the appeal to his sympathy there was
something which awoke in him the bitter agony of remorse. So the girl
in the red cape could endure poverty such as this with honour! At the
thought his past sin and his present disgrace appeared to him not only
as crime but as cowardliness. He recalled the angry manager of the
cotton mills, but there was no longer resentment in his mind either
against the individual or against society. Instead it seemed to him that
all smaller emotions dissolved in a tenderness which placed this girl
and Alice apart with the other good and inspiring memories of his life.
As he walked on in silence a little incident of ten years before
returned to his thoughts, and he remembered the day he had found his
child weeping beside a crippled beggar on his front steps.
When, a little later, they reached Tappahannock, the farmer turned with
his reluctant cow into one of the smaller paths which led across the
common on the edge of the town. As it was still too early to apply for
work, Ordway sat down on a flat stone before an iron gate and watched
the windows along the street for any signs of movement or life within.
At length several frowsy Negro maids leaned out while the wooden
shutters swung slowly back against the walls; then a milk wagon driven
by a small boy clattered noisily round the corner, and in response to
the shrill whistle of the driver, the doors opened hurriedly and the
Negro maids rushed, with outstretched pitchers, down the gravelled walks
to the iron gates. Presently an appetising odour of bacon reached
Ordway's nostrils; and in the house across the street a woman with her
hair done up on pins, came to the window and began grinding coffee in a
wooden mill. Not until eight o'clock did the town open its gates and
settle itself to the day's work.
When the doors of the warehouses were fastened back, Ordway turned into
the main street again, and walked slowly downhill until he came to the
faded brick archway where the group of men had sat smoking the evening
before. Now there was an air of movement in the long building which had
appeared as mere dim vacancy at the hour of sunset. Men were passing in
and out of the brick entrance, from which a thin coat of whitewash was
peeling in splotches; covered wagons half filled with tobacco were
standing, unhitched, along the walls; huge bags of fresh fertilisers
were thrown carelessly in corners; and in the centre of the great floor,
an old Negro, with a birch broom tied together with coloured string, was
sweeping into piles the dried stems left after yesterday's sales. As he
swept, a little cloud of pungent dust rose before the strokes of his
broom and floated through the brick archway out into the street.
This morning there was even less attention paid to Ordway's presence
than there had been at the closing hour. Planters hurried back and forth
preparing lots for the opening sale; a wagon drove into the building,
and the driver got down over the muddy wheel and lifted out several
willow crates through which Ordway could catch a glimpse of the yellow
sun-cured leaf. The old Negro swept briskly, piling the trash into heaps
which would finally be ground into snuff or used as a cheap grade of
fertiliser. Lean hounds wandered to and fro, following the covered
wagons and sniffing suspiciously at the loose plants arranged in
separate lots in the centre of the floor.
"Is Baxter here this morning?" Ordway asked presently of a countryman
who lounged on a pile of bags near the archway.
"I reckon you'll find him in his office," replied the man, as he spat
lazily out into the street; "that thar's his door," he added, pointing
to a little room on the right of the entrance--"I seed him go in an' I
ain't seed him come out."
Nodding his thanks for the information, Ordway crossed the building and
rapped lightly on the door. In response to a loud "come in," he turned
the knob and stood next instant face to face with the genial giant of
the evening before.
"Good-morning, Mr. Baxter, I've come back again," he said.
"Good-morning!" responded Baxter, "I see you have."
In the full daylight Baxter appeared to have increased in effect if not
in quantity, and as Ordway looked at him now, he felt himself to be in
the presence less of a male creature than of an embodied benevolent
impulse. His very flabbiness of feature added in a measure to the
expansive generosity of mouth and chin; and slovenly, unwashed,
half-shaven as he was, Baxter's spirit dominated not only his fellow
men, but the repelling effect of his own unkempt exterior. To meet his
glance was to become suddenly intimate; to hear him speak was to feel
that he had shaken you by the hand.
"I hoped you might have come to see things differently this morning,"
said Ordway.
Baxter looked him over with his soft yet penetrating eyes, his gaze
travelling slowly from the coarse boots covered with red clay to the
boyish smile on the dark, weather-beaten face.
"You did not tell me what kind of work you were looking for," he
observed at last. "Do you want to sweep out the warehouse or to keep the
books?"
Ordway laughed. "I prefer to keep the books, but I can sweep out the
warehouse," he replied.
"You can--can you?" said Baxter. His pipe, which was never out of his
hand except when it was in his mouth, began to turn gray, and putting it
between his teeth, he sucked hard at the stem for a minute.
"You're an educated man, then?"
"I've been to college--do you mean that?"
"You're fit for a clerk's position?"
"I am sure of it."
"Where did you work last?"
Ordway's hesitation was barely perceptible.
"I've been in business," he answered.
"On your own hook?" inquired Baxter.
"Yes, on my own hook."
"But you couldn't make a living at it?"
"No; I gave it up for several reasons."
"Well, I don't know your reasons, my man," observed Baxter, drily, "but
I like your face."
"Thank you," said Ordway, and he laughed again with the sparkling gaiety
which leaped first to his blue eyes.
"And so you expect me to take you without knowing a darn thing about
you?" demanded Baxter.
Ordway nodded gravely.
"Yes, I hope that is what you will do," he answered.
"I may ask your name, I reckon, mayn't I?--if you have no particular
objection."
"I don't mind telling you it's Smith," said Ordway, with his gaze on a
huge pamphlet entitled "Smith's Almanac" lying on Baxter's desk. "Daniel
Smith."
"Smith," repeated Baxter. "Well, it ain't hard to remember. If I warn't
a blamed fool, I'd let you go," he added thoughtfully, "but there ain't
much doubt, I reckon, about my being a blamed fool."
He rose from his chair with difficulty, and steadying his huge body,
moved to the door, which he flung open with a jerk.
"If you've made up your mind dead sure to butt in, you might as well
begin with the next sale," he said.