_viper_! if it were not for dishonoring my own roof I'd thrash you right
here. I've a good notion----"
"Ow! leggo me! I ain't gwine to 'low no daym rebel----"
Ravenel, stroking Barbara and talking to Mrs. Garnet, saw his hostess
start and then try to attend to his words, while out on the veranda rang
notes of fright and pain.
"Oh! don't grabble my whole bres' up dat a-way, sah! Please sah! Oh!
don't! You ain't got no mo' right! Oh! Lawd! Mahse John Wesley! Oh! good
Lawdy! yo' ban' bites like a _dawg_!"
Ravenel paused in his talk to ask Barbara about the sandman, but the
child stared wildly at her mother. Johanna reappeared in the door with a
scared face; Barbara burst into loud weeping, and her nurse bore her
away crying and bending toward her mother, while from the veranda the
wail poured in.
"Oh! Oh! don't resh me back like that! Oh! Oh! my Gawd! Oh! you'll bre'k
de balusters! Oh! my Gawd-A'mighty, my back; Mahse John Wesley, you
a-breakin' _my back_! Oh, good Lawd 'a' mussy! my po' back! my po' back!
Oh! don't dra--ag--you ain't a-needin' to drag me. I'll walk, Mahse John
Wesley, I'll walk! Oh! you a-scrapin' my knees off! Oh! dat whip ain't
over dak! You can't re'ch it down!--ef I bite----" There was a silent
instant and the mulatto screamed.
With sinking knees a small form slipped from the kitchen and
ran--fell--rose--and ran again across the moonlight and into the grove
toward the spring-house.
Barbara's crying increased. Ravenel said:
"Don't let me keep you from the baby"--while outside:
"Oh! I didn't mean to bite you, sweet Mahse John Wesley. 'Fo' Gawd
I--oh!--o--oh--h--you broke my knees!"
"If you'll excuse me," said the mother, and went upstairs.
"Oh! mussy! mussy! yo' foot a-mashing my whole breas' in'! Oh, my Gawd!
De Yankees 'll git win' o' dis an' you'll go to jail!"
The lash fell. "O--oh!--o--oh! Oh, Lawd!" Jeff-Jack sat still and once or
twice smiled. "Oh, Lawd 'a' mussy! my back! Ow! It bu'us like
fiah!--o--oh! oh!--ow!"
"It doesn't hurt as bad as it ought to, Cornelius," and the blows came
again.
"Ow! Dey won't git win' of it! 'Deed an 'deedy dey won't,
sweet Mahse John Wesley!--oh!--o--oh!--Ow!--Oh, Lawd, come
down! Dey des _shan't_ git win' of it! 'fo' Gawd dey shan't!
Ow!--oh!--oh!--oh!--a--ah--oo--oo!"
"Now, go!" said Garnet. Cornelius leaped up, ran with his eyes turned
back on the whip, and fell again, wallowing like a scalded dog. "Oh, my
po' back, my po' back! M--oh! it's a-bu'nin' up--oh!"
The Major advanced with the broken whip uplifted. Cornelius ran backward
to the steps and rolled clear to the ground. The whip was tossed after
him. With a gnashing curse he snatched it up and hurried off, moaning
and writhing, into the darkness, down by the spring-house.
Garnet smiled in scorn, far from guessing that soon, almost as soon as
yonder receding clatter of hoofs should pass into silence, the venomous
thing from which he had lifted his heel would coil and strike, and that
another back, a little one that had never felt the burden of a sin or a
task, or aught heavier than the sun's kiss, was to take its turn at
writhing and burning like fire.
The memory of that hour, when it was over and home was reached, was
burnt into the child's mind forever. It was then late. Mrs. March,
"never strong," and,--with a sigh,--"never anxious," had retired. Her
two handmaids, freedwomen, were new to the place, but already fond of
her son. Cornelius found them waiting uneasily at the garden-fence. He
had lingered and toiled with the Judge and his broken wagon, he said,
"notwithstanding we done dissolve," until he had got the worst "misery
in his back" he had ever suffered. When they received John from him and
felt the child's tremblings, he warned them kindly that the less asked
about it the better for the reputations of both the boy and his father.
"You can't 'spute the right an' custody of a man to his own son's
chastisement, naw yit to 'low to dat son dat ef ever he let his maw git
win' of it, he give him double an' thribble."
When the women told him he lied he appealed to John, and the child
nodded his head. About midnight Cornelius handed the horse over to Judge
March, reassuring him of his son's safety and comfort, and hurried off,
much pleased with the length of his own head in that he had not stolen
the animal. John fell asleep almost as soon as he touched the pillow.
Then the maid who had undressed him beckoned the other in. Candle in
hand she led the way to the trundle-bed drawn out from under the Judge's
empty four-poster, and sat upon its edge. The child lay chest downward.
She lifted his gown, and exposed his back.
"Good Gawd!" whispered the other.
VII.
EXODUS
As Major Garnet's step sounded again in the hall, Barbara's crying came
faintly down through the closed doors. He found Ravenel sitting by the
lamp, turning the spotted leaves of Heber's poems.
"Mrs. Garnet putting Barb to bed?" he asked, and slowly took an easy
chair. His arm was aching cruelly.
"Yes." The young guest stretched and smiled.
The host was silent. He was willing to stand by what he had done, but
that this young friend with lower moral pretensions wholly approved it
made his company an annoyance. What he craved was unjust censure. "I
reckon you'd like to go up, too, wouldn't you? It's camp bedtime."
"Yes, got to come back to sleeping indoors--might as well begin."
On the staircase they met Johanna, with a lighted candle. The Major
said, as kindly as a father, "I'll take that."
As she gave it her eyes rolled whitely up to his, tears slipped down her
black cheeks, he frowned, and she hurried away. At his guest's door he
said a pleasant good-night, and then went to his wife's room.
Only moonlight was there. From a small, dim chamber next to it came
Barbara's softened moan. The mother sang low a child hymn. The father
sat down at a window, and strove to meditate. But his arm ached. The
mother sang on, and presently he found himself waiting for the fourth
stanza. It did not come; the child was still; but his memory supplied
it:
"And soon, too soon, the wintry hour
Of man's maturer age
May shake the soul with sorrow's power,
And stormy passion's rage."
He felt, but put aside, the implication of reproach to himself which lay
in the words and his wife's avoidance of them. He still believed that,
angry and unpremeditated as his act was, he could not have done
otherwise in justice nor yet in mercy. And still, through this right
doing, what bitterness had come! His wife's, child's, guest's--his
own--sensibilities had been painfully shocked. In the depths of a
soldier's sorrow for a cause loved and lost, there had been the one
consolation that the unasked freedom so stupidly thrust upon these poor
slaves was in certain aspects an emancipation to their masters. Yet
here, before his child had learned to fondle his cheek, or his
home-coming was six hours old, his first night of peace in beloved
Rosemont had been blighted by this vile ingrate forcing upon him the
exercise of the only discipline, he fully believed, for which such a
race of natural slaves could have a wholesome regard. The mother sang
again, murmurously. The soldier grasped his suffering arm, and returned
to thought.
The war, his guest had said, had not taken the slaves away. It could
only redistribute them, under a new bondage of wages instead of the old
bondage of pure force. True. And the best and the wisest servants would
now fall to the wisest and kindest masters. Oh, for power to hasten
to-morrow's morning, that he might call to him again that menial band
down in the yard, speak to them kindly, even of Cornelius's fault, bid
them not blame the outcast resentfully, and assure them that never while
love remained stronger in them than pride, need they shake the light
dust of Rosemont from their poor shambling feet.
He rose, stole to the door of the inner room, pushed it noiselessly, and
went in. Barbara, in her crib, was hidden by her mother standing at her
side. The wife turned, glanced at her husband's wounded arm, and made a
soft gesture for him to keep out of sight. The child was leaning against
her mother, saying the last words of her own prayer.
"An' Dod bless ev'ybody, Uncle Leviticus, an' Aunt Jinny, an' Johanna,
an' Willis, an' Trudie, an' C'nelius"--a sigh--"an mom-a, an'--that's
all--an'----"
"And pop-a?"
No response. The mother prompted again. Still the child was silent. "And
pop-a, you know--the best last."
"An' Dod bless the best last," said Barbara, sadly. A pause.
"Don't you know all good little girls ask God to bless their pop-a's?"
"Do they?"
"Yes."
"Dod bless pop-a," she sighed, dreamily; "an' Dod bless me, too,
an'--an' keep me f'om bein' a dood little dirl.--Ma'am?--Yes, ma'am.
Amen."
She laid her head down, and in a moment was asleep. Husband and wife
passed out together. The wounded arm, its pain unconfessed, was cared
for, pious prayers were said, and the pair lay down to slumber.
Far in the night the husband awoke. He could think better now, in the
almost perfect stillness. There were faint signs of one or two servants
being astir, but in the old South that was always so. He pondered again
upon the present and the future of the unhappy race upon whom freedom
had come as a wild freshet. Thousands must sink, thousands starve, for
all were drunk with its cruel delusions. Yea, on this deluge the whole
Southern social world, with its two distinct divisions--the shining
upper--the dark nether--was reeling and careening, threatening, each
moment, to turn once and forever wrong side up, a hope-forsaken wreck.
To avert this, to hold society on its keel, must be the first and
constant duty of whoever saw, as he did, the fearful peril. So, then,
this that he had done--and prayed that he might never have to do
again--was, underneath all its outward hideousness, a more than right, a
generous, deed. For a man who, taking all the new risks, still taught
these poor, base, dangerous creatures to keep the only place they could
keep with safety to themselves or their superiors, was to them the only
truly merciful man.
He drifted into revery. Thoughts came so out of harmony with this line
of reasoning that he could only dismiss them as vagaries. Was sleep
returning? No, he laid wide awake, frowning with the pain of his wound.
Yet he must have drowsed at last, for when suddenly he saw his wife
standing, draped in some dark wrapping, hearkening at one of the open
windows, the moon was sinking.
He sat up and heard faintly, far afield, the voices of Leviticus,
Virginia, Willis, Trudie, and Johanna, singing one of the wild, absurd,
and yet passionately significant hymns of the Negro Christian worship.
Distance drowned the words, but an earlier familiarity supplied them to
the grossly syncopated measures of the tune which, soft and clear, stole
in at the open window:
"Rise in dat mawnin', an' rise in dat mawnin',
Rise in dat mawnin', an' fall upon yo' knees.
Bow low, an' a-bow low, an' a-bow low a little bit longah,
Bow low, an' a-bow low; sich a conquerin' king!"
The eyes of wife and husband met in a long gaze.
"They're coming this way," he faltered.
She slowly shook her head.
"My love----" But she motioned for silence and said, solemnly:
"They're leaving us."
"They're wrong!" he murmured in grieved indignation.
"Oh, who is right?" she sadly asked.
"They shall not treat us so!" exclaimed he. He would have sprung to his
feet, but she turned upon him suddenly, uplifting her hand, and with a
ring in her voice that made the walls of the chamber ring back, cried,
"No, no! Let them go! They were mine when they were property, and they
are mine now! Let them go!"
The singing ceased. The child in the next room had not stirred. The
dumfounded husband sat motionless under pretence of listening. His wife
made a despairing gesture. He motioned to hearken a moment more; but no
human sound sent a faintest ripple across the breathless air; the earth
was as silent as the stars. Still he waited--in vain--they were gone.
The soldier and his wife lay down once more without a word. There was no
more need of argument than of accusation. For in those few moments the
weight of his calamities had broken through into the under quicksands of
his character and revealed them to himself.
VIII.
SEVEN YEARS OF SUNSHINE
Poets and painters make darkness stand for oblivion. But for evil things
or sad there is no oblivion like sunshine.
The next day was hot, blue, and fragrant. John rose so late that he had
to sit up in front of his breakfast alone. He asked the maid near by if
she thought his father would be home soon. She "reckoned so."
"I wish he would be home in a hour," he mused, aloud. "I wish he would
be on the mountain road right now."
When he stepped down and started away she crouched before him.
"Whah you bound fuh, ole gen'leman, lookin' so sawt o' funny-sad?"
"I dunno."
"W'at you gwine do, boss?"
"I dunno."
"Well, cayn't you kiss me, Mist' I-dunno?"
He paid the toll and passed out to his play. With an old bayonet fixed
on a stick he fell to killing Yankees--colored troops. Pressing them
into the woods he charged, yelling, and came out upon the mountain road
that led far down to the pike. Here a new impulse took him and he moved
down this road to form a junction with his father. For some time the way
was comparatively level. By and by he came to heavier timber and deeper
and steeper descents. He went ever more and more loiteringly, for his
father did not appear. He thought of turning back, yet his longing
carried him forward. He was tired, but his mother did not like him to
walk long distances when he was tired, so it wouldn't be right to turn
back. He decided to wait for his father and ride home.
Meantime he would go to the next turn in the road and look. He looked in
vain. And so at the next--the next--the next. He went slowly, for his
feet were growing tender. Sometimes he almost caught a butterfly.
Sometimes he slew more Yankees. Always he talked to himself with a soft
bumbling like a bee's.
But at last he ceased even this and sat down at the edge of the stony
road ready to cry. His bosom had indeed begun to heave, when in an
instant all was changed. Legs forgot their weariness, the heart its
dismay, for just across the road, motionless beside a hollow log, what
should he see but a cotton-tail rabbit. As he stealthily reached for his
weapon the cotton-tail took two slow hops and went into the log. Charge
bayonets!--pat-pat-pat--slam! and the stick rattled in the hole, the
deadly iron at one end and the deadly boy at the other.
And yet nothing was impaled. Singular! He got his eyes to the hole and
glared in, but although it was full of daylight from a larger hole at
the other end, he could see no sign of life. It baffled comprehension.
But so did it defy contradiction. There was but one Resource: to play
the rabbit was still there and only to be got out by rattling the
bayonet every other moment and repeating, in a sepulchral voice,
"I--I--I'm gwine to have yo' meat fo' dinneh!"
He had been doing this for some time when all at once his blood froze as
another voice, fifteen times as big as his, said, in his very ear--
"I--I--I'm gwine to have yo' meat fo' dinneh."
He dropped half over, speechless, and beheld standing above him,
nineteen feet high as well as he could estimate hastily, a Yankee
captain mounted and in full uniform. John leaped up, and remembered he
was in gray.
"What are you doing here all alone, Shorty?"
"I dunno."
"Who are you? What's your name?"
"I dunno."
The Captain moved as if to draw his revolver, but brought forth instead
a large yellow apple. Then did John confess who he was and why there.
The Captain did as much on his part.
He had risen with the morning star to do an errand beyond Widewood, and
was now getting back to Suez. This very dawn he had made Judge March's
acquaintance beside his broken wagon, and had seen him ride toward Suez
to begin again the repair of his disasters. Would the small Confederate
like to ride behind him?
Very quickly John gave an arm and was struggling up behind the saddle.
The Captain touched the child's back.
"Owch!"
"Why, what's the matter? Did I hurt you?"
"No, sir."
The horse took his new burden unkindly, plunged and danced.
"Afraid?" asked the Captain. John's eyes sparkled merrily and he shook
his head.
"You're a pretty brave boy, aren't you?" said the stranger. But John
shook his head again.
"I'll bet you are, and a tol'able good boy, too, aren't you?"
"No, sir, I'm not a good boy, I'm bad. I'm a very bad boy, indeed."
The horseman laughed. "I don't mistrust but you're good enough."
"Oh, no. I'm not good. I'm wicked! I'm noisy! I make my ma's head ache
every day! I usen't to be so wicked when I was a little shaver. I used
to be a shaver, did you know that? But now I'm a boy. That's because I'm
eight. I'm a boy and I'm wicked. I'm awful wicked, and I'm getting
worse. I whistle. Did you think I could whistle? Well, I can.... There!
did you hear that? It's wicked to whistle in the house--to whistle
loud--in the house--it's sinful. Sometimes I whistle in the
house--sometimes." He grew still and fell to thinking of his mother, and
how her cheek would redden with something she called sorrow at his
shameless companioning with the wearer of a blue uniform. But he
continued to like his new friend; he was so companionably "low flung."
"Do you know Jeff-Jack?" he asked. But the Captain had not the honor.
"Well, he captures things. He's brave. He's dreadful brave."
"No! Aw! you just want to scare me!"
"So is Major Garnet. Did you ever see Major Garnet? Well, if you see him
you mustn't make him mad. I'd be afraid for you to make him mad."
"Why, how's that?"
"I dunno," said Johnnie, very abstractedly.
As they went various questions came up, and by and by John discoursed on
the natural badness of "black folks"--especially the yellow
variety--with imperfections of reasoning almost as droll as the soft
dragging of his vowels. Time passed so pleasantly that when they came
into the turnpike and saw his father coming across the battle-field with
two other horsemen, his good spirits hardly had room to rise any higher.
They rather fell. The Judge had again chanced upon the company of Major
Garnet and Jeff-Jack Ravenel, and it disturbed John perceptibly for
three such men to find him riding behind a Yankee.
It was a double surprise for him to see, first, with what courtesy they
treated the blue-coat, and then how soon they bade him good-day. The
Federal had smilingly shown a flask.
"You wouldn't fire on a flag of truce, would you?"
"I never drink," said Garnet.
"And I always take too much," responded Jeff-Jack.
* * * * *
I think we have spoken of John's slumbers being dreamless. A child can
afford to sleep without dreaming, he has plenty of dreams without
sleeping. No need to tell what days, weeks, months, of sunlit,
forest-shaded, bird-serenaded, wide-awake dreaming passed over this
one's wind-tossed locks between the ages of eight and fifteen.
Small wonder that he dreamed. Much of the stuff that fables and fairy
tales are made of was the actual furnishment of his visible
world--unbroken leagues of lofty timber that had never heard the ring of
an axe; sylvan labyrinths where the buck and doe were only half afraid;
copses alive with small game; rare openings where the squatter's wooden
ploughshare lay forgotten; dark chasms scintillant with the treasures of
the chemist, if not of the lapidary; outlooks that opened upon great
seas of billowing forest, whence blue mountains peered up, sank and rose
again like ocean monsters at play; glens where the she-bear suckled her
drowsing cubs to the plash of yeasty waterfalls that leapt and whimpered
to be in human service, but wherein the otter played all day unscared;
crags where the eagle nested; defiles that echoed the howl of wolves
unhunted, though the very stones cried out their open secret of
immeasurable wealth; narrow vales where the mountain cabin sent up its
blue thread of smoke, and in its lonely patch strong weeds and emaciated
corn and cotton pushed one another down among the big clods; and vast
cliffs from whose bushy brows the armed moonshiner watched the
bridle-path below.
These dreams of other children's story-books were John's realities. And
these were books to him, as well, while Chesterfield went unread, and
other things and conditions, not of nature and her seclusions, but
vibrant with human energies and strifes, were making, unheeded of him,
his world and his fate. A little boy's life does right to loiter. But if
we loiter with him here, we are likely to find our eyes held ever by the
one picture: John's gifted mother, in family group, book in her
lap--husband's hand on her right shoulder--John leaning against her left
side. Let us try leaving him for a time. And, indeed, we may do the same
as to Jeff-Jack Ravenel.
As he had told Barbara he would, he made his residence in Suez.
A mess-mate, a graceless, gallant fellow, who at the war's end had
fallen, dying, into his arms, had sent by him a last word of penitent
love to his mother, an aged widow. She lived in Suez, and when Ravenel
brought this message to her--from whom marriage had torn all her
daughters and death her only son--she accepted his offer, based on a
generous price, to take her son's room as her sole boarder and lodger.
Thus, without further effort, he became the stay of her home and the
heir of her simple affections.
IX.
LAUNCELOT HALLIDAY
General Halliday was a distant cousin of Mrs. Garnet. He had commanded
the brigade which included Garnet's battalion, and had won fame. Garnet,
who felt himself undervalued by Halliday, said this fame had been won by
show rather than by merit. And in truth, Halliday was not so much a man
of genuine successes as of an audacity that stopped just short of the
fantastical, and kept him perpetually interesting.
"Launcelot's failures," said Garnet, "make a finer show than most men's
successes. He'd rather shine without succeeding, than succeed without
shining."
The moment the war ended, Halliday hurried back to his plantation, the
largest in Blackland. This county's sole crop was cotton, and negroes
two-thirds of its population. His large family--much looked up to--had
called it home, though often away from it, seeking social stir at the
State capital and elsewhere. On his return from the war, the General
brought with him a Northerner, an officer in the very command to which
he had surrendered. Just then, you may remember, when Southerners saw
only ruin in their vast agricultural system, many Northerners thought
they saw a new birth. They felt the poetry of Dixie's long summers, the
plantation life--Uncle Tom's Cabin--and fancied that with Uncle Tom's
good-will and Northern money and methods, there was quick fortune for
them. Halliday echoed these bright predictions with brave buoyancy and
perfect sincerity, and sold the conqueror his entire estate. Then he
moved his family to New Orleans, and issued his card to his many
friends, announcing himself prepared to receive and sell any shipments
of cotton, and fill any orders for supplies, with which they might
entrust him. The Government's pardon, on which this fine rapidity was
hypothecated, came promptly--"through a pardon broker," said Garnet.
But the General's celerity was resented. He boarded at the St. Charles,
and, famous, sociable, and fond of politics, came at once into personal
contact with the highest Federal authorities in New Orleans. The happy
dead earnest with which he "accepted the situation" and "harmonized"
with these men sorely offended his old friends and drew the fire of the
newspapers. Even Judge March demurred.
"President Garnet," John heard the beloved voice in front of him say,
"gentlemen may cry Peace, Peace, but there can be too much peace, sir!"