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JOHN MARCH, SOUTHERNER
BY GEORGE W. CABLE
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1894
Copyright, 1894, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
THE CAXTON PRESS
NEW YORK
CONTENTS
I. SUEZ
II. TO A GOOD BOY
III. TWO FRIENDS
IV. THE JUDGE'S SON MAKES TWO LIFE-LONG ACQUAINTANCES, AND IS OFFERED A
THIRD
V. THE MASTER'S HOME-COMING
VI. TROUBLE
VII. EXODUS
VIII. SEVEN YEARS OF SUNSHINE
IX. LAUNCELOT HALLIDAY
X. FANNIE
XI. A BLEEDING HEART
XII. JOHN THINKS HE IS NOT AFRAID
XIII. FOR FANNIE
XIV. A MORTGAGE ON JOHN
XV. ARRIVALS AT ROSEMONT
XVI. A GROUP OF NEW INFLUENCES
XVII. THE ROSEMONT ATMOSPHERE
XVIII. THE PANGS OF COQUETRY
XIX. MR. RAVENEL SHOWS A "MORE EXCELLENT WAY"
XX. FANNIE SUGGESTS
XXI. MR. LEGGETT'S CHICKEN-PIE POLICY
XXII. CLIMBING LOVER'S LEAP
XXIII. A SUMMONS FOR THE JUDGE
XXIV. THE GOLDEN SPIKE
XXV. BY RAIL
XXVI. JOHN INSULTS THE BRITISH FLAG
XXVII. TO SUSIE--FROM PUSSIE
XXVIII. INFORMATION FOR SALE
XXIX. RAVENEL ASKS
XXX. ANOTHER ODD NUMBER
XXXI. MR. FAIR VENTURES SOME INTERROGATIONS
XXXII. JORDAN
XXXIII. THE OPPORTUNE MOMENT
XXXIV. DAPHNE AND DINWIDDIE: A PASTEL IN PROSE
XXXV. A WIDOW'S ULTIMATUM
XXXVI. A NEW SHINGLE IN SUEZ
XXXVII. WISDOM AND FAITH KISS EACH OTHER
XXXVIII. RUBBING AGAINST MEN
XXXIX. SAME AFTERNOON
XL. ROUGH GOING
XLI. SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY
XLII. JOHN HEADS A PROCESSION
XLIII. ST. VALENTINE'S DAY
XLIV. ST. VALENTINE'S: EVENING
XLV. A LITTLE VOYAGE OF DISCOVERIES
XLVI. A PAIR OF SMUGGLERS
XLVII. LEVITICUS
XLVIII. DELILAH
XLIX. MEETING OF STOCKHOLDERS
L. THE JAMBOREE
LI. BUSINESS
LII. DARKNESS AND DOUBT
LIII. SWEETNESS AND LIGHT
LIV. AN UNEXPECTED PLEASURE
LV. HOME-SICKNESS ALLEVIATED
LVI. CONCERNING SECOND LOVE
LVII. GO ON, SAYS BARBARA
LVIII. TOGETHER AGAIN
LIX. THIS TIME SHE WARNS HIM
LX. A PERFECT UNDERSTANDING
LXI. A SICK MAN AND A SICK HORSE
LXII. RAVENEL THINKS HE MUST
LXIII. LETTERS AND TELEGRAMS
LXIV. JUDICIOUS JOHANNA
LXV. THE ENEMY IN THE REAR
LXVI. WARM HEARTS, HOT WORDS, COOL FRIENDS
LXVII. PROBLEM: IS AN UNCONFIRMED DISTRUST NECESSARILY A DEAD ASSET?
LXVIII. FAREWELL, WIDEWOOD
LXIX. IN YANKEE LAND
LXX. ACROSS THE MEADOWS
LXXI. IN THE WOODS
LXXII. MY GOOD GRACIOUS, MISS BARB
LXXIII. IMMEDIATELY AFTER CHAPEL
LXXIV. COMPLETE COLLAPSE OF A PERFECT UNDERSTANDING
LXXV. A YEAR'S VICISSITUDES
LXXVI. AGAINST OVERWHELMING NUMBERS
LXXVII. "LINES OF LIGHT ON A SULLEN SEA"
LXXVIII. BARBARA FINDS THE RHYME
JOHN MARCH, SOUTHERNER
I.
SUEZ
In the State of Dixie, County of Clearwater, and therefore in the very
heart of what was once the "Southern Confederacy," lies that noted seat
of government of one county and shipping point for three, Suez. The
pamphlet of a certain land company--a publication now out of print and
rare, but a copy of which it has been my good fortune to
secure--mentions the battle of Turkey Creek as having been fought only a
mile or so north of the town in the spring of 1864. It also strongly
recommends to the attention of both capitalist and tourist the beautiful
mountain scenery of Sandstone County, which adjoins Clearwater a few
miles from Suez on the north, and northeast, as Blackland does, much
farther away, on the southwest.
In the last year of our Civil War Suez was a basking town of twenty-five
hundred souls, with rocky streets and breakneck sidewalks, its dwellings
dozing most months of the twelve among roses and honeysuckles behind
anciently whitewashed, much-broken fences, and all the place wrapped in
that wide sweetness of apple and acacia scents that comes from whole
mobs of dog-fennel. The Pulaski City turnpike entered at the northwest
corner and passed through to the court-house green with its hollow
square of stores and law-offices--two sides of it blackened ruins of
fire and war. Under the town's southeasternmost angle, between yellow
banks and over-hanging sycamores, the bright green waters of Turkey
Creek, rambling round from the north and east, skipped down a gradual
stairway of limestone ledges, and glided, alive with sunlight, into that
true Swanee River, not of the maps, but which flows forever, "far, far
away," through the numbers of imperishable song. The river's head of
navigation was, and still is, at Suez.
One of the most influential, and yet meekest among the "citizens"--men
not in the army--whose habit it was to visit Suez by way of the
Sandstone County road, was Judge Powhatan March, of Widewood. In years
he was about fifty. He was under the medium stature, with a gentle and
intellectual face whose antique dignity was only less attractive than
his rich, quiet voice.
His son John--he had no other child--was a fat-cheeked boy in his eighth
year, oftenest seen on horseback, sitting fast asleep with his hands
clutched in the folds of the Judge's coat and his short legs and browned
feet spread wide behind the saddle. It was hard straddling, but it was
good company.
One bright noon about the close of May, when the cotton blooms were
opening and the cornsilk was turning pink; when from one hot pool to
another the kildee fluttered and ran, and around their edges arcs of
white and yellow butterflies sat and sipped and fanned themselves, like
human butterflies at a seaside, Judge March--with John in his accustomed
place, headquarters behind the saddle--turned into the sweltering shade
of a tree in the edge of town to gossip with an acquaintance on the
price of cotton, the health of Suez and the last news from
Washington--no longer from Richmond, alas!
"Why, son!" he exclaimed, as by and by he lifted the child down before a
hardware, dry-goods, drug and music store, "what's been a-troublin' you?
You a-got tear marks on yo' face!" But he pressed the question in vain.
"Gimme yo' han'ke'cher, son, an' let me wipe 'em off."
But John's pockets were insolvent as to handkerchiefs, and the Judge
found his own no better supplied. So they changed the subject and the
son did not have to confess that those dusty rivulet beds, one on either
cheek, were there from aching fatigue of a position he would rather have
perished in than surrender.
This store was the only one in Suez that had been neither sacked nor
burned. In its drug department there had always been kept on sale a
single unreplenished, undiminished shelf of books. Most of them were
standard English works that took no notice of such trifles as children.
But one was an exception, and this world-renowned volume, though
entirely unillustrated, had charmed the eyes of Judge March ever since
he had been a father. Year after year had increased his patient
impatience for the day when his son should be old enough to know that
book's fame. Then what joy to see delight dance in his brave young eyes
upon that volume's emergence from some innocent concealment--a gift from
his father!
Thus far, John did not know his a-b-c's. But education is older than
alphabets, and for three years now he had been his father's constant,
almost confidential companion. Why might not such a book as this, even
now, be made a happy lure into the great realm of letters? Seeing the
book again to-day, reflecting that the price of cotton was likely to go
yet higher, and touched by the child's unexplained tears, Judge March
induced him to go from his side a moment with the store's one
clerk--into the lump-sugar section--and bought the volume.
II.
TO A GOOD BOY
In due time the Judge and his son started home.
The sun's rays, though still hot, slanted much as the two rose into oak
woodlands to the right of the pike and beyond it. Here the air was cool
and light. As they ascended higher, and oaks gave place to chestnut and
mountain-birch, wide views opened around and far beneath. In the south
spread the green fields and red fallows of Clearwater, bathed in the
sheen of the lingering sun. Miles away two white points were the spires
of Suez.
The Judge drew rein and gazed on five battle-fields at once. "Ah, son,
the kingdom of romance is at hand. It's always at hand when it's within
us. I'll be glad when you can understand that, son."
His eyes came round at last to the most western quarter of the landscape
and rested on one part where only a spray had dashed when war's fiery
deluge rolled down this valley. "Son, if there wa'n't such a sort o'
mist o' sunshine between, I could show you Rosemont College over yondeh.
You'll be goin' there in a few years now. That'll be fine, won't it,
son?"
A small forehead smote his back vigorously, not for yea, but for
slumber.
"Drowsy, son?" asked the Judge, adding a backward caress as he moved on
again. "I didn't talk to you enough, did I? But I was thinkin' about
you, right along." After a silence he stopped again.
"Awake now, son?" He reached back and touched the solid little head.
"See this streak o' black land where the rain's run down the road? Well,
that means silveh, an' it's ow lan'."
They started once more. "It may not mean much, but we needn't care, when
what doesn't mean silveh means dead loads of other things. Make haste
an' grow, son; yo' peerless motheh and I are only wait'n'--" He ceased.
In the small of his back the growing pressure of a diminutive bad hat
told the condition of his hidden audience. It lifted again.
"'Evomind, son, I can talk to you just as well asleep. But I can tell
you somepm that'll keep you awake. I was savin' it till we'd get home to
yo' dear motheh, but yo' ti-ud an' I don't think of anything else
an'--the fact is, I'm bringing home a present faw you." He looked behind
till his eyes met a brighter pair. "What you reckon you've been sitt'n'
on in one of them saddle pockets all the way fum Suez?"
John smiled, laid his cheek to his father's back and whispered, "A
kitt'n."
"Why, no, son; its somepm powerful nice, but--well, you might know it
wa'n't a kitt'n by my lett'n' you sit on it so long. I'd be proud faw
you to have a kitt'n, but, you know, cats don't suit yo' dear motheh's
high strung natu'e. You couldn't be happy with anything that was a
constant tawment to her, could you?"
The head lying against the questioner's back nodded an eager yes!
"Oh, you think you might, son, but I jes' know you couldn't. Now, what
I've got faw you is ever so much nicer'n a kitt'n. You see, you
a-growin' so fast you'll soon not care faw kitt'ns; you'll care for what
I've got you. But don't ask what it is, faw I'd hate not to tell you,
and I want yo' dear motheh to be with us when you find it out."
It was fairly twilight when their horse neighed his pleasure that his
crib was near. Presently they dismounted in a place full of stumps and
weeds, where a grove had been till Halliday's brigade had camped there.
Beyond a paling fence and a sandy, careworn garden of altheas and
dwarf-box stood broadside to them a very plain, two-story house of
uncoursed gray rubble, whose open door sent forth no welcoming gleam.
Its windows, too, save one softly reddened by a remote lamp, reflected
only the darkling sky. This was their home, called by every mountaineer
neighbor "a plumb palace."
As they passed in, the slim form of Mrs. March entered at the rear door
of the short hall and came slowly through the gloom. John sprang, and
despite her word and gesture of nervous disrelish, clutched, and smote
his face into, her pliant crinoline. The husband kissed her forehead,
and, as she staggered before the child's energy, said:
"Be gentle, son." He took a hand of each. "I hope you'll overlook a
little wildness in us this evening, my dear." They turned into a front
room. "I wonder he restrains himself so well, when he knows I've brought
him a present--not expensive, my deah, I assho' you, nor anything you
can possible disapprove; only a B-double-O-K, in fact. Still, son, you
ought always to remember yo' dear mother's apt to be ti-ud."
Mrs. March sank into the best rocking-chair, and, while her son kissed
her diligently, said to her husband, with a smile of sad reproach:
"John can never know a woman's fatigue."
"No, Daphne, deah, an' that's what I try to teach him."
"Yes, Powhatan, but there's a difference between teaching and
terrifying."
"Oh! Oh! I was fah fum intend'n' to be harsh."
"Ah! Judge March, you little realize how harsh your words sometimes
are." She showed the back of her head, although John plucked her sleeves
with vehement whispers. "What _is_ it child?"
Her irritation turned to mild remonstrance. "You shouldn't interrupt
your father, no matter how long you have to wait."
"Oh, I'd finished, my deah," cried the Judge, beaming upon wife and son.
"And now," he gathered up the saddle-bags, "now faw the present!"
John leaped--his mother cringed.
"Oh, Judge March--before supper?"
"Why, of co'se not, my love, if you----"
"Ah, Powhatan, please! Please don't say if I." The speaker smiled
lovingly--"I don't deserve such a rebuke!" She rose.
"Why, my deah!"
"No, I was not thinking of I, but of others. There's the tea-bell.
Servants have rights, Powhatan, and we shouldn't increase their burdens
by heartless delays. That may not be the law, Judge March, but it's the
gospel."
"Oh, I quite agree with you, Daphne, deah!" But the father could not
help seeing the child's tearful eyes and quivering mouth. "I'll tell you
mother, son--There's no need faw anybody to be kep' wait'n'. We'll go to
suppeh, but the gift shall grace the feast!" He combed one soft hand
through his long hair. John danced and gave a triple nod.
Mrs. March's fatigue increased. "Please yourself," she said. "John and I
can always make your pleasure ours. Only, I hope he'll not inherit a
frivolous impatience."
"Daphne, I----" The Judge made a gesture of sad capitulation.
"Oh, Judge March, it's too late to draw back now. That were cruel!"
John clambered into his high chair--said grace in a pretty rhyme of his
mother's production--she was a poetess--and ended with:
"Amen, double-O-K. I wish double-O-K would mean firecrackers;
firecrackers and cinnamon candy!" He patted his wrists together and
glanced triumphantly upon the frowsy, barefooted waitress while Mrs.
March poured the coffee.
The Judge's wife, at thirty-two, was still fair. Her face was thin, but
her languorous eyes were expressive and her mouth delicate. A certain
shadow about its corners may have meant rigidity of will or only a habit
of introspection, but it was always there.
She passed her husband's coffee, and the hungry child, though still all
eyes, was taking his first gulp of milk, when over the top of his mug he
saw his father reach stealthily down to his saddle-bags and straighten
again.
"Son."
"Suh!"
"Go on with yo' suppeh, son." Under the table the paper was coming off
something. John filled both cheeks dutifully, but kept them so,
unchanged, while the present came forth. Then he looked confused and
turned to his mother. Her eyes were on her husband in deep dejection, as
her hand rose to receive the book from the servant. She took it, read
the title, and moaned:
"Oh! Judge March, what is your child to do with 'Lord Chesterfield's
Letters to his Son?'"
John waited only for her pitying glance. Then the tears burst from his
eyes and the bread and milk from his mouth, and he cried with a great
and continuous voice, "I don't like presents! I want to go to bed!"
Even when the waitress got him there his mother could not quiet him. She
demanded explanations and he could not explain, for by that time he had
persuaded himself he was crying because his mother was not happy. But he
hushed when the Judge, sinking down upon the bedside, said, as the
despairing wife left the room,
"I'm sorry I've disappointed you so powerful, son. I know just how you
feel. I made--" he glanced round to be sure she was gone--"just as bad a
mistake one time, trying to make a present to myself."
The child lay quite still, vaguely considering whether that was any good
reason why he should stop crying.
"But 'evomind, son, the ve'y next time we go to town we'll buy some
cinnamon candy."
The son's eyes met the father's in a smile of love, the lids declined,
the lashes folded, and his spirit circled softly down into the
fathomless under-heaven of dreamless sleep.
III.
TWO FRIENDS
It was nearly four o'clock of a day in early June. The sun shone
exceptionally hot on the meagre waters of Turkey Creek, where it warmed
its sinuous length through the middle of its wide battle-field. The
turnpike, coming northward from Suez, emerged, white, dusty, and badly
broken, on the southern border of this waste, and crossed the creek at
right angles. Eastward, westward, the prospect widened away in soft
heavings of fallow half ruined by rains. The whole landscape seemed
bruised and torn, its beauty not gone, but ravished. A distant spot of
yellow was wheat, a yet farther one may have been rye. Off on the right
a thin green mantle that only half clothed the red shoulder of a rise
along the eastern sky was cotton, the sometime royal claimant,
unsceptred, but still potent and full of beauty. About the embers of a
burned dwelling, elder, love-pop, and other wild things spread
themselves in rank complacency, strange bed-fellows adversity had thrust
in upon the frightened sweet-Betsy, phlox and jonquils of the ruined
garden. Here the ground was gay with wild roses, and yonder blue, pink,
white, and purple with expanses of larkspur.
A few steps to the left of the pike near the wood's strong shade, a
beautiful brown horse in gray and yellow trappings suddenly lifted his
head from the clover and gazed abroad.
"He knows there's been fighting here," said a sturdy voice from the
thicket of ripe blackberries behind; "he sort o' smells it."
"Reckon he hears something," responded a younger voice farther from the
road. "Maybe it's C'nelius's yodle; he's been listening for it for a
solid week."
"He's got a good right to," came the first voice again; "worthless as
that boy is, nobody ever took better care of a horse. I wish I had just
about two dozen of his beat biscuit right now. He didn't have his equal
in camp for beat biscuit."
"When sober," suggested the younger speaker, in that melodious Southern
drawl so effective in dry satire; but the older voice did not laugh. One
does not like to have another's satire pointed even at one's nigger.
The senior presently resumed a narrative made timely by the two having
just come through the town. "You must remember I inherited no means and
didn't get my education without a long, hard fight. A thorough clerical
education's no mean thing to get."
"Couldn't the church help you?"
"Oh--yes--I, ch--I did have church aid, but----Well, then I was three
years a circuit rider and then I preached four years here in Suez. And
then I married. Folks laugh about preachers always marrying fortunes--it
was a mighty small fortune Rose Montgomery brought me! But she was Rose
Montgomery, and I got her when no other man had the courage to ask for
her. You know an ancestor of hers founded Suez. That's how it got its
name. His name was Ezra and hers was Susan, don't you see?"
"I think I make it out," drawled the listener.
"But she didn't any more have a fortune than I did. She and her mother,
who died about a year after, were living here in town just on the wages
of three or four hired-out slaves, and----"
The younger voice interrupted with a question indolently drawn out: "Was
she as beautiful in those days as they say?"
"Why, allowing for some natural exaggeration, yes."
"You built Rosemont about the time her mother died, didn't you?"
"Yes, about three years before the war broke out. It was the only piece
of land she had left; too small for a plantation, but just the thing for
a college."
"It is neatly named," pursued the questioner; "who did it?"
"I," half soliloquized the narrator, wrapped in the solitude of his own
originality.
He moved into view, a large man of forty, unmilitary, despite his good
gray broadcloth and wealth of gold braid, though of commanding and most
comfortable mien. His upright coat-collar, too much agape, showed a
clerical white cravat. His right arm was in a sling. He began to pick
his way out of the brambles, dusting himself with a fine handkerchief.
The horse came to meet him.
At the same time his young companion stepped upon a fallen tree, and
stood to gaze, large-eyed, like the horse, across the sun-bathed scene.
He seemed scant nineteen. His gray shirt was buttoned with locust
thorns, his cotton-woolen jacket was caught under an old cartridge belt,
his ragged trousers were thrust into bursted boots, and he was thickly
powdered with white and yellow dust. His eyes swept slowly over the
battle-ground to some low, wooded hills that rose beyond it against the
pale northwestern sky.
"Major," said he.
The Major was busy lifting himself carefully into the saddle and
checking his horse's eagerness to be off. But the youth still gazed, and
said again, "Isn't that it?"
"What?"
"Rosemont."
"It is!" cried the officer, standing in his stirrups, and smiling fondly
at a point where, some three miles away by the line of sight, a dark
roof crowned by a white-railed lookout peeped over the tree-tops. "It's
Rosemont--my own Rosemont! The view's been opened by cutting the woods
off that hill this side of it. Come!"
Soon a wreath of turnpike dust near the broken culvert over Turkey Creek
showed the good speed the travelers made. The ill-shod youth and
delicately-shod horse trudged side by side through the furnace heat of
sunshine. So intolerable were its rays that when an old reticule of
fawn-skin with bright steel chains and mountings, well-known receptacle
of the Major's private papers and stationery, dropped from its
fastenings at the back of the saddle and the dismounted soldier stooped
to pick it up, the horseman said: "Don't stop; let it go; it's empty. I
burned everything in it the night of the surrender, even my wife's
letters, don't you know?"
"Yes," said the youth, trying to open it, "I remember. Still, I'll take
its parole before I turn it loose."
"That part doesn't open," said the rider, smiling, "it's only
make-believe. Here, press in and draw down at the same time. There!
nothing but my card that I pasted in the day I found the thing in some
old papers I was looking over. I reckon it was my wife's grandmother's.
Oh, yes, fasten it on again, though like as not I will give it away to
Barb as soon as I get home. It's my way."
And the Reverend John Wesley Garnet, A.M., smiled at himself
self-lovingly for being so unselfish about reticules.
"You need two thumbs to tie those leather strings, Jeff-Jack." Jeff-Jack
had lost one, more than a year before, in a murderous onslaught where
the Major and he had saved each other's lives, turn about, in almost the
same moment. But the knot was tied, and they started on.
"Speakin' o' Barb, some of the darkies told her if she didn't stop
chasing squir'ls up the campus trees and crying when they put shoes on
her feet to take her to church, she'd be turned into a boy. What d' you
reckon she said? She and Johanna--Johanna's her only playmate, you
know--danced for joy; and Barb says, says she, 'An' den kin I doe in
swimmin'?' Mind you, she's only five years old!" The Major's laugh came
abundantly. "Mind you, she's only five!"
The plodding youth whiffed gayly at the heat, switched off his bad
cotton hat, and glanced around upon the scars of war. He was about to
speak lightly; but as he looked upon the red washouts in the forsaken
fields, and the dried sloughs in and beside the highway, snaggy with
broken fence-rails and their margins blackened by teamsters'
night-fires, he fell to brooding on the impoverishment of eleven States,
and on the hundreds of thousands of men and women sitting in the ashes
of their desolated hopes and the lingering fear of unspeakable
humiliations. Only that morning had these two comrades seen for the
first time the proclamation of amnesty and pardon with which the
president of the triumphant republic ushered into a second birth the
States of "the conquered banner."
"Major," said the young man, lifting his head, "you must open Rosemont
again."
"Oh, I don't know, Jeff-Jack. It's mighty dark for us all ahead." The
Major sighed with the air of being himself a large part of the fallen
Confederacy.
"Law, Major, we've got stuff enough left to make a country of yet!"
"If they'll let us, Jeff-Jack. If they'll only let us; but will they?"
"Why, yes. They've shown their hand."
"You mean in this proclamation?"
"Yes, sir. Major, 'we-uns' can take that trick."
The two friends, so apart in years, exchanged a confidential smile. "Can
we?" asked the senior.
"Can't we?" The young soldier walked on for several steps before he
added, musingly, and with a cynical smile, "I've got neither land,
money, nor education, but I'll help you put Rosemont on her feet
again--just to sort o' open the game."
The Major gathered himself, exaltedly. "Jeff-Jack, if you will, I'll
pledge you, here, that Rosemont shall make your interest her watchword
so long as her interests are mine." The patriot turned his eyes to show
Jeff-Jack their moisture.
The young man's smile went down at the corners, satirically, as he said,
"That's all right," and they trudged on through the white dust and heat,
looking at something in front of them.
IV.
THE JUDGE'S SON MAKES TWO LIFE-TIME ACQUAINTANCES, AND IS OFFERED A
THIRD
They had been ascending a long slope and were just reaching its crest
when the Major exclaimed, under his voice, "Well, I'll be hanged!"
Before them stood three rusty mules attached to a half load of corn in
the shuck, surmounted by a coop of panting chickens. The wheels of the
wagon were heavy with the dried mud of the Sandstone County road. The
object of the Major's contempt was a smallish mulatto, who was mounting
to the saddle of the off-wheel mule. He had been mending the rotten
harness, and did not see the two soldiers until he lifted again his long
rein of cotton plough-line. The word to go died on his lips.
"Why, Judge March!" Major Garnet pressed forward to where, at the team's
left, the owner of these chattels sat on his ill-conditioned horse.
"President Garnet! I hope yo' well, sir? Aw at least," noticing the lame
arm, "I hope yo' mendin'."
"Thank you, Brother March, I'm peart'nin, as they say." The Major smiled
broadly until his eye fell again upon the mulatto. The Judge saw him
stiffen.
"C'nelius only got back Sad'day," he said. The mulatto crouched in his
saddle and grinned down upon his mule.
"He told me yo' wound compelled slow travel, sir; yes, sir. Perhaps I
ought to apologize faw hirin' him, sir, but it was only pending yo'
return, an' subjec' to yo' approval, sir."
"You have it, Brother March," said Major Garnet suavely, but he flashed
a glance at the teamster that stopped his grin, though he only said,
"Howdy, Cornelius."
"Brother March, let me make you acquainted with one of our boys. You
remember Squire Ravenel, of Flatrock? This is the only son the war's
left him. Adjutant, this is Judge March of Widewood, the famous Widewood
tract. Jeff-Jack was my adjutant, Brother March, for a good while,
though without the commission."
The Judge extended a beautiful brown hand; the ragged youth grasped it
with courtly deference. The two horses had been arrogantly nosing each
other's muzzles, and now the Judge's began to work his hinder end around
as if for action. Whereupon:
"Why, look'e here, Brother March, what's this at the back of your
saddle?"
The Judge smiled and laid one hand behind him. "That's my John--Asleep,
son?--He generally is when he's back there, and he's seldom anywhere
else. Drive on, C'nelius, I'll catch you."
As the wagon left them the child opened his wide eyes on Jeff-Jack, and
Major Garnet said:
"He favors his mother, Brother March--though I haven't seen--I declare
it's a shame the way we let our Southern baronial sort o' life make us
such strangers--why, I haven't seen Sister March since our big union
camp meeting at Chalybeate Springs in '58. Sonnie-boy, you ain't
listening, are you?" The child still stared at Jeff-Jack. "Mighty
handsome boy, Brother March--stuff for a good soldier--got a little
sweetheart at my house for you, sonnie-boy! Rosemont College and
Widewood lands wouldn't go bad together, Brother March, ha, ha, ha! Your
son has his mother's favor, but with something of yours, too, sir."
Judge March stroked the tiny, bare foot. "I'm proud to hope he'll favo'
his mother, sir, in talents. You've seen her last poem: 'Slaves to ow
own slaves--Neveh!' signed as usual, Daphne Dalrymple? Dalrymple's one
of her family names. She uses it to avoid publicity. The Pulaski City
_Clarion_ reprints her poems and calls her 'sweetest of Southland
songsters.' Major Garnet, I wept when I read it! It's the finest thing
she has ever written!"
"Ah! Brother March," the Major had seen the poem, but had not read it,
"Sister March will never surpass those lines of her's on, let's see;
they begin--Oh! dear me, I know them as well as I know my horse--How
does that----"
"I know what you mean, seh. You mean the ballad of Jack Jones!
"'Ho! Southrons, hark how one brave lad
Three Yankee standards----'"
"Captured!" cried the Major. "That's it; why, my sakes! Hold on,
Jeff-Jack, I'll be with you in just a minute. Why, I know it as--why, it
rhymes with 'cohorts enraptured!'--I--why, of course!--Ah! Jeff-Jack it
was hard on you that the despatches got your name so twisted. It's a
plumb shame, as they say." The Major's laugh grew rustic as he glanced
from Jeff-Jack, red with resentment, to Judge March, lifted half out of
his seat with emotion, and thence to the child, still gazing on the
young hero of many battles and one ballad.
"Well, that's all over; we can only hurry along home now, and----"
"Ah! President Garnet, _is_ it all over, seh? _Is_ it, Mr. Jones?"
"Can't say," replied Jeff-Jack, with his down-drawn smile, and the two
pairs went their opposite ways.
As the Judge loped down the hot turnpike after his distant wagon, his
son turned for one more gaze on the young hero, his hero henceforth, and
felt the blood rush from every vein to his heart and back again as Mr.
Ravenel at the last moment looked round and waved him farewell. Later he
recalled Major Garnet's offer of his daughter, but:
"I shall never marry," said John to himself.
V.
THE MASTER'S HOME-COMING
The Garnet estate was far from baronial in its extent. Rosemont's whole
area was scarcely sixty acres, a third of which was wild grove close
about three sides of the dwelling. The house was of brick, large, with
many rooms in two tall stories above a basement. At the middle of the
north front was a square Greek porch with wide steps spreading to the
ground. A hall extended through and let out upon a rear veranda that
spanned the whole breadth of the house. Here two or three wooden pegs
jutted from the wall, on which to hang a saddle, bridle, or gourd, and
from one of which always dangled a small cowhide whip. Barbara and
Johanna, hand in hand--Johanna was eleven and very black--often looked
on this object with whispering awe, though neither had ever known it put
to fiercer use than to drive chickens out of the hall. Down in the yard,
across to the left, was the kitchen. And lastly, there was that railed
platform on the hip-roof, whence one could see, in the northeast, over
the tops of the grove, the hills and then the mountains; in the
southeast the far edge of Turkey Creek battle-ground; and in the west,
the great setting sun, often, from this point, commended to Barbara as
going to bed quietly and before dark.
The child did not remember the father. Once or twice during the war when
otherwise he might have come home on furlough, the enemy had intervened.
Yet she held no enthusiastic unbelief in his personal reality, and
prayed for him night and morning: that God would bless him and keep him
from being naughty--"No, that ain't it--an' keep him f'om bein'--no,
don't tell me!--and ast him why he don't come see what a sweet mom-a I'm
dot!"
People were never quite done marveling that even Garnet should have won
the mistress of this inheritance, whom no one else had ever dared to
woo. Her hair was so dark you might have called it black--her eyes were
as blue as June, and all the elements of her outward beauty were but the
various testimonies of a noble mind. She had been very willing for
Rosemont to be founded here. There was a belief in her family that the
original patentee--he that had once owned the whole site of Suez and
more--had really from the first intended this spot for a college site,
and when Garnet proposed that with his savings they build and open upon
it a male academy, of which he should be principal, she consented with
an alacrity which his vanity never ceased to resent, since it involved
his leaving the pulpit. For Principal Garnet was very proud of his moral
character.
On the same afternoon in which John March first saw the Major and
Jeff-Jack, Barbara and Johanna were down by the spring-house at play.
This structure stood a good two hundred yards from the dwelling, where a
brook crossed the road. Three wooded slopes ran down to it, and beneath
the leafy arches of a hundred green shadows that only at noon were
flecked with sunlight, the water glassed and crinkled scarce ankle deep
over an unbroken floor of naked rock.
The pair were wading, Barbara in the road, Johanna at its edge, when
suddenly Barbara was aware of strange voices, and looking up, was
fastened to her footing by the sight of two travelers just at hand. One
was on horseback; the other, a youth, trod the stepping stones, ragged,
dusty, but bewilderingly handsome. Johanna, too, heard, came, and then
stood like Barbara, awe-stricken and rooted in the water. The next
moment there was a whirl, a bound, a splash--and Barbara was alone.
Johanna, with three leaping strides, was out of the water, across the
fence, and scampering over ledges and loose stones toward the house, mad
with the joy of her news:
"Mahse John Wesley! Mahse John Wesley!"--up the front steps, into the
great porch and through the hall--"Mahse John Wesley! Mahse John Wesley!
De waugh done done! De waugh ove' dis time fo' sho'! Glory!
Glory!"--down the back steps, into the kitchen--"Mahse John
Wesley!"--out again and off to the stables--"Mahse John Wesley!" While
old Virginia ran from the kitchen to her cabin rubbing the flour from
her arms and crying, "Tu'n out! tu'n out, you laazy black niggers! Mahse
John Wesley Gyarnet a-comin' up de road!"
Barbara did not stir. She felt the soldier's firm hands under her arms,
and her own form, straightened and rigid, rising to the glad lips of the
disabled stranger who bent from the saddle; but she kept her eyes on the
earth. With her dripping toes stiffened downward and the youth clasping
her tightly, they moved toward the house. In the grove gate the horseman
galloped ahead; but Barbara did not once look up until at the
porch-steps she saw yellow Willis, the lame ploughman, smiling and
limping forward round the corner of the house; Trudie, the house girl,
trying to pass him by; Johanna wildly dancing; Aunt Virginia, her hands
up, calling to heaven from the red cavern of her mouth; Uncle Leviticus,
her husband, Cornelius's step-father, holding the pawing steed; gladness
on every face, and the mistress of Rosemont drawing from the horseman's
arm to welcome her ragged guest.
Barbara gazed on the bareheaded men and courtesying women grasping the
hand of their stately master.
"Howdy, Mahse John Wesley. Welcome home, sah. Yass, sah!"
"Howdy, Mahse John Wesley. Yass, sah; dass so, sot free, but niggehs
yit, te-he!--an' Rosemont niggehs yit!" Chorus, "Dass so!" and much
laughter.
"Howdy, Mahse John Wesley. Miss Rose happy now, an' whensomever she
happy, us happy. Yass, sah. De good Lawd be praise! Now is de waugh over
an' finish' an' eended an' gone!" Chorus, "Pra-aise Gawd!"
The master replied. He was majestically kind. He commended their
exceptional good sense and prophesied a reign of humble trust and
magnanimous protection.--"But I see you're all--" he smiled a gracious
irony--"anxious to get back to work."
They laughed, pushed and smote one another, and went, while he mounted
the stairs; they, strangers to the sufferings of his mind, and he as
ignorant as many a far vaster autocrat of the profound failure of his
words to satisfy the applauding people he left below him.
In the hall Jeff-Jack let Barbara down. Thump-thump-thump--she ran to
find Johanna. A fear and a hope quite filled her with their strife, the
mortifying fear that at the brook Mr. Ravenel had observed--and the
reinspiring hope that he had failed to observe--that she was without
shoes! She remained away for some time, and came back shyly in softly
squeaking leather. As he took her on his knee she asked, carelessly:
"Did you ever notice I'm dot socks on to-day?" and when he cried "No!"
and stroked them, she silently applauded her own tact.
Virginia and her mistress decided that the supper would have to be
totally reconsidered--reconstructed. Jeff-Jack and Barbara, the reticule
on her arm, walked in the grove where the trees were few. The flat
out-croppings of gray and yellow rocks made grotesque figures in the
grass, and up from among the cedar sprouts turtle-doves sprang with that
peculiar music of their wings, flew into distant coverts, and from one
such to another tenderly complained of love's alarms and separations.
When Barbara asked her escort where his home was, he said it was going
to be in Suez, and on cross-examination explained that Flatrock was only
a small plantation where his sister lived and took care of his father,
who was old and sick.
He seemed to Barbara to be very easily amused, even laughing at some
things she said which she did not intend for jokes at all. But since he
laughed she laughed too, though with more reserve. They picked wild
flowers. He gave her forget-me-nots.
They did not bring their raging hunger into the house again until the
large tea-bell rang in the porch, and the air was rife with the
fragrance of Aunt Virginia's bounty: fried ham, fried eggs, fried
chicken, strong coffee, and hot biscuits--of fresh Yankee flour from
Suez. No wine, and no tonic before sitting down. In the pulpit and out
of it Garnet had ever been an ardent advocate of total abstinence. He
never, even in his own case, set aside its rigors except when chilled or
fatigued, and always then took ample care not to let his action, or any
subsequent confession, be a temptation in the eyes of others who might
be weaker than he.
Barbara sat opposite Jeff-Jack. What of that? Johanna, standing behind
mom-a's chair, should not have smiled and clapped her hands to her
mouth. Barbara ignored her. As she did again, after supper, when,
silent, on the young soldier's knee, amid an earnest talk upon interests
too public to interest her, she could see her little nurse tiptoeing
around the door out in the dim hall, grinning in white gleams of summer
lightning, beckoning, and pointing upstairs. The best way to treat such
things is to take no notice of them.
In the bright parlor the talk was still on public affairs. The war was
over, but its issues were still largely in suspense and were not
questions of boundaries or dynasties; they underlay every Southern
hearthstone; the possibilities of each to-morrow were the personal
concern and distress of every true Southern man, of every true Southern
woman.
Thus spoke Garnet. His strong, emotional voice was the one most heard.
Ravenel held Barbara, and responded scarcely so often as her mother,
whose gentle self-command rested him. Not such was its effect upon the
husband. His very flesh seemed to feel the smartings of trampled
aspirations and insulted rights. More than once, under stress of his
sincere though florid sentences, he rose proudly to his feet with a hand
laid unconsciously on his freshly bandaged arm, as though all the pain
and smart of the times were centring there, and tried good-naturedly to
reflect the satirical composure of his late adjutant. But when he sought
to make light of "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," he could
not quite hide the exasperation of a spirit covered with their
contusions; and when he spoke again, he frowned.
Mrs. Garnet observed Ravenel with secret concern. Men like Garnet,
addicted to rhetoric, have a way of always just missing the vital truth
of things, and this is what she believed this stripling had, in the
intimacies of the headquarter's tent, discerned in him, and now so
mildly, but so frequently, smiled at. "Major Garnet," she said, and
silently indicated that some one was waiting in the doorway. The Major,
standing, turned and saw, faltering with conscious overboldness on the
threshold, a tawny figure whose shoulders stared through the rags of a
coarse cotton shirt; the man of all men to whom he was just then the
most unprepared to show patience.
VI.
TROUBLE
Outside it was growing dark. The bright red dot that, from the railed
housetop, you might have seen on the far edge of Turkey Creek
battle-ground, was a watch-fire beside the blackberry patch we know of.
Here sat Judge March guarding his wagon and mules. One of them was sick.
The wagon, under a load of barreled pork and general supplies, had
slumped into a hole and suffered a "general giving-way." While in Suez
the Judge had paid Cornelius off, written a note to be given by him to
Major Garnet, and agreed, in recognition of his abundant worthlessness,
to part with him from date, finally.
Yet the magnanimous Cornelius, still with him when the wagon broke, went
back to Suez for help and horse medicine, but trifled so sadly, or so
gayly, that at sunset there was no choice but to wait till morning.
John, however, had to be sent home. But how? On the Judge's horse,
behind Cornelius? The father hesitated. But the mulatto showed such
indignant grief and offered such large promises, the child, of course,
siding with the teamster, and after all, they could reach Widewood so
soon after nightfall, that the Judge sent them. From Widewood,
Cornelius, alone, was to turn promptly back----
"Well, o' co'se, sah! Ain't I always promp'?"--
Promptly back by way of Rosemont, leave the note there and then bring
the Judge's horse to him at the camp-fire. If lights were out at
Rosemont he could give the letter to some servant to be delivered next
morning.
"Good-bye, son. I can't hear yo' prayers to-night. I'll miss it myself.
But if yo' dear motheh ain't too ti-ud maybe she'll hear 'em."
It suited Cornelius to turn aside first to Rosemont.
"You see, Johnnie, me an' Majo' Gyarnet is got some ve'y urgen' business
to transpiah. An' den likewise an' mo'oveh, here's de triflin' matteh o'
dis letteh. What contents do hit contain? I's done yo' paw a powerful
favo', an' yit I has a sneakin' notion dat herein yo' paw express
hisseff wid great lassitude about me. An' thus, o' co'se, I want to know
it befo' han,' caze ef a man play you a trick you don't want to pay him
wid a favo'. Trick fo' trick, favo' fo' favo', is de rule of Cawnelius
Leggett, Esquire, freedman, an' ef I fines, when Majo' Gyarnet read
dis-yeh letteh, dat yo' paw done intercallate me a trick, I jist
predestinatured to git evm wid bofe of'm de prompes' way I kin. You
neveh seed me mad, did you? Well, when you see Cawnelius Leggett mad you
wants to run an' hide. He wou'n't hu't a chile no mo'n he'd hu't a
chicken, but ef dere's a _man_ in de way--jis' on'y in de _way_--an'
specially a _white_ man--Lawd! he betteh teck a tree!"
The windows of Rosemont had for some time been red with lamplight when
they fastened their horse to a swinging limb near the spring-house and
walked up through the darkening grove to the kitchen. Virginia received
her son with querulous surprise. "Gawd's own fool," she called him, "fuh
runnin' off, an' de same fool double' an' twisted fo' slinkin' back."
But when he arrogantly showed the Judge's letter she lapsed into silent
disdain while she gave him an abundant supper. After a time the child
was left sitting beside the kitchen fire, holding an untasted biscuit.
Throughout the yard and quarters there was a stillness that was not
sleep, though Virginia alone was out-of-doors, standing on the moonlit
veranda looking into the hall.
She heard Major Garnet ask, with majestic forbearance, "Well, Cornelius,
what do you want?"
The teamster advanced with his ragged hat in one hand and the letter in
the other. The Major, flushing red, lifted his sound arm, commandingly,
and the mulatto stopped. "Boy, can it be that in my presence and in the
presence of your mistress you dare attempt to change the manners you
were raised to?"
Cornelius opened his mouth with great pretense of ignorance, but----
"Go back and drop that hat outside the door, sir!" The servant went.
"Now, bring me that letter!" The bearer brought it and stood waiting
while the Major held it under his lame arm and tore it open.
Judge March wrote that he had found a way to dispense with Cornelius at
once, but his main wish was to express the hope--having let a better
opportunity slip--that President Garnet as the "person best fitted in
all central Dixie to impart to Southern youth a purely Southern
education," would reopen Rosemont at once, and to promise his son to the
college as soon as he should be old enough.
But for two things the Major might have felt soothed. One was a feeling
that Cornelius had in some way made himself unpleasant to the Judge, and
this grew to conviction as his nostrils caught the odor of strong drink.
He handed the note to his wife.
"Judge March is always complimentary. Read it to Jeff-Jack. Cornelius,
I'll see you for a moment on the back gallery." His wife tried to catch
his eye, but a voice within him commended him to his own self-command,
and he passed down the hall, the mulatto following. Johanna, crouching
and nodding against the wall, straightened up as he passed. His footfall
sounded hope to the strained ear of the Judge's son in the kitchen.
Virginia slipped away. In the veranda, under the moonlight, Garnet
turned and said, in a voice almost friendly:
"Cornelius."
"Yass, sah."
"Cornelius, why did you go off and hire yourself out, sir?"
At the last word the small listener in the kitchen trembled.
"Dass jess what I 'How to 'splain to you, sah."
"It isn't necessary. Cornelius, you know that if ever one class of human
beings owed a lifelong gratitude to another, you negroes owe it to your
old masters, don't you? Stop! don't you dare to say no? Here you all
are; never has one of you felt a pang of helpless hunger or lain one day
with a neglected fever. Food, clothing, shelter, you've never suffered a
day's doubt about them! No other laboring class ever were so free from
the cares of life. Your fellow-servants have shown some gratitude;
they've stayed with their mistress till I got home to arrange with them
under these new conditions. But you--you! when I let you push on ahead
and leave me sick and wounded and only half way home--your home and
mine, Cornelius--with your promise to wait here till I could come and
retain you on wages--you, in pure wantonness, must lift up your heels
and prance away into your so-called new liberty. You're a fair sample of
what's to come, Cornelius. You've spent your first wages for whiskey.
Silence, you perfidious reptile!
"Oh, Cornelius, you needn't dodge in that way, sir, I'm not going to
take you to the stable; thank God I'm done whipping you and all your
kind, for life! Cornelius, I've only one business with you and it's only
one word! Go! at once! forever! You should go if it were
only----Cornelius, I've been taking care of my own horse! Don't you dare
to sleep on these premises to-night. Wait! Tell me what you've done to
offend Judge March?"
"Why, Mahse John Wesley, I ain't done nothin' to Jedge Mahch; no, sah,
neither defensive nor yit offensive. An' yit mo', I ain't dream o;
causin' you sich uprisin' he'plessness. Me and Jedge Mahch"--he began to
swell--"has had a stric'ly private disparitude on the subjec' o' extry
wages, account'n o' his disinterpretations o' my plans an' his ign'ance
o' de law." He tilted his face and gave himself an argumentative frown
of matchless insolence. "You see, my deah seh----"
Garnet was wearily turning his head from side to side as if in
unspeakable pain; a sudden movement of his free arm caused the mulatto
to flinch, but the ex-master said, quietly:
"Go on, Cornelius."
"Yass. You see, Major, sence dis waugh done put us all on a sawt of
equality----" The speaker flinched again.