about his throat. He gave a sigh of satisfaction; he knew that she’d
understand and be pleased.
“Oh, darling child!” said the old lady. “You have been so brave.”
Junior blushed a little, remembering that he had been frightened.
“Why, you have to,” he said simply. “You’re scared, you know; but you
mustn’t stop for that. _She’d_ feel pretty bad; and--there’s the
regiment.”
“The regiment?” The old man’s brows bunched, but he looked at the
little man with a great and growing pride; the pride, say, of an old
lion for a particularly promising cub.
“Ours,” explained the youngest officer and gentleman in it. “My
grandfather’s, who died at El Caney; my father’s and mine.”
“I see,” said the old man, thoughtfully. “I’d like, sir,” he added
respectfully, “to shake hands with you. For the regiment, you know.”
Junior got it the other way about. His mother’s own sunshiny smile
broke over his face and he put out a frank hand. But he couldn’t
understand why this old man should hold his hand so long and so tight,
nor why Aunt Lydia and the other old lady should turn aside their
heads, nor why tears should run down the old man’s cheeks. Also he
wished they’d tell him where he was and how he got there, and who they
were that seemed to claim him.
“My head,” he explained, “got sort of twirly and I can’t remember just
how I came here. Would you mind telling me, sir?”
“This,” said the old man, and his eyes seemed to bore right through
Junior, “is the Holcomb house. My name is Aaron Holcomb, and that lady
there is my wife.” And he drew her forward to stand beside him.
Astonishment and open disbelief struggled in Junior’s face. Why, this
was a _nice_ old man; and one might very, very easily love this old
lady. It simply couldn’t be these people who had driven “her” away!
“Aren’t there,” he wanted to know hopefully, “two Aaron Holcombs? Isn’t
there another one--not like you?”
The old man winced, for he couldn’t help reading in the child’s face
the meaning of that question. “No,” said he gravely, “there is just
one--myself.”
“Oh, no!” protested Junior. “Not you! You--you don’t look like
_that_!--either of you!”
So they stared at each other. And presently the child nodded, reaching
right down to the secretest bottom of that proud old heart. “I think,”
he said sweetly, “that you must have been awfully sorry and sad and
ashamed after you’d let her go. Because, you know, you couldn’t get her
back ever any more.”
Aaron Holcomb flung out his hands with a groaning cry. “I was!” he
whispered. “I am! I am!” But his old wife came and took his arm.
“Don’t you think,” she said to Junior, “that you’d like to stay with
us, little grandson? We want you so much; and maybe--after a while,
dear--you’d even grow to love us.”
Junior considered. He liked these two old people already; they weren’t
in the least ogreish, but on the contrary very, very pleasant to look
at. He wanted to stay in his mother’s old home; he rather thought she’d
like him to stay there. But if he left Miss Lydia and McAndrews, who
had been so kind to him, wouldn’t the regiment think he’d flunked?
Would the regiment approve?
Miss Lydia herself settled the matter out of hand. “I have a piece of
Christmas news for you, Junior,” she said, with a very tender smile.
“Your father’s coming home on leave of absence--soon. And until he
comes I think you’d better stay right here and get acquainted with your
grandparents. Then you can _both_ stay with me.”
“All right!” said Junior, rather sleepily.
“He’s going to stay, Aaron. We can have him!” said his grandmother, and
she bestowed upon Miss Lydia a look full of gratitude.
“And play with the Fairy. I love the Fairy,” said Junior, more
drowsily. His eyelids couldn’t stay open; he went to sleep.
With immense pride and tenderness his grandfather bent over him.
Delicately he moved the fair head on the pillow and touched the ruffled
hair. Then he laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder and kissed her as he
hadn’t kissed her since the Princess went away.
“Bone of our bone, Jenny, flesh of our flesh,” he said. “My
grandson--my little grandson!” He bent over and kissed Junior, and his
wife and Miss Lydia knew he was kissing Junior’s mother then too.
Even McAndrews, who had come to see his lad, hadn’t a word to say.
“Give me his father’s address, Miss Lydia,” the grandfather said
presently. “I’m going to cable my son to come home to us. And now you
women clear out. Jenny, you’re to fix--_her_ room for my grandson.
Miss Lydia, won’t you please help us to get his Christmas tree ready?
Sit down in the library and write out a list of the things you think
he might like--you help her, McAndrews, please. We’re to have the
big-best Christmas ever, Miss Lydia. Why, I want the whole town to come
here Christmas night and welcome my boy home.” He sat down and waved
his stick at them to leave him.
As they went out McAndrews grudgingly held forth his hand. “_I_ loved
him before _you_ ever clapped an eye upon him,” he said, surlily.
But Aaron Holcomb only shook his head. “That’s why I have to sit here
and get acquainted with him,” he said. “You see, he was born nine years
old to me. Besides, he might wake up and want something, and I’ve got
to pray, McAndrews, that that something’ll be me.”
LINDEN GOES HOME
LINDEN GOES HOME
Over the entire region, through which distracted beings wandered
like lost souls, there hung by day a column of smoke and by night a
pillar of fire. A calamity that one named Sherman--a vast, awful blue
thundercloud edged with crooked, bright gleams of bayonets--spread from
Atlanta to the sea.
Everybody was running; one’s destination did not seem to make much
difference, so long as it happened to be somewhere else. Then when one
reached somewhere else, folks were flying from there, too; so that
women and young children and old men and scared negro servants milled
around in a horrid circle of fear.
When her fleeing friends besought the little lady in black--not alone
for her own sake--to leave lone “Linden,” just off the Hardeeville
Road, she shook her head with the obstinacy of the meek. Wherefore they
went their ways and left her.
“I feel,” she remarked presently to old Cindy, “I feel as if I were
the only person left in the big, empty, lost world the day after the
Day of Judgment. Everything’s happened that could happen; everything’s
finished and done with.”
What she really meant was that _he_ had fallen. Understanding this,
Cindy reached over and soothingly patted her hand.
Only the master and mistress had never been afraid of Cindy; they had
always been kind to the gruesomely ugly old African. Cindy remembered;
and now that the other negroes had gone like chaff before the wind, and
the little desolate lady needed immediate help, Cindy marched unasked
up to the Big House and took capable charge.
So long as Cindy stayed in the Big House, no negro would willingly
cross its threshold. _Cindy was obi._ Dowered with evil power, in
the dark she dug baleful roots, and with these and the fearsome
“swamp-puppy,” cast spells and talked with h’ants. Her very appearance
inspired terror. She was nearly six feet tall, though age had somewhat
stooped her broad shoulders, and under her black turban her head was
quite bald. Her little red eyes were so deep-set that one felt rather
than saw their snake-bright glitter. From her blue gums (_blue-gummed
negroes are poison; if one should bite you, you would die_) projected
canine teeth of incredible length. When Cindy drew back her withered
lips, and her face, with its wrinkled forehead, and enormous nostrils,
twitched in silent laughter, one wished to run away. Only the gentle
eyes of the little mistress had ever looked with affection and trust
upon that grotesque mask.
When the disturbing rumor spread that they were coming toward Linden,
Cindy instantly decided to remove her mistress, willy-nilly, to some
place less lonely. There was in Columbia a favorite kinswoman, Mrs.
DeSaussure. They would go to her. Linden was left to its fate.
At Hardeeville an old man who had loved the master of Linden managed
to find a place in the overcrowded train for his widow, and big Cindy
crouched at her feet. At every station were dolorous crowds; and
long lines of vehicles, all piled with household effects, came and
went, moving endlessly, aimlessly, in a horrible confusion, as in a
nightmare. Always, in a cleared space upon the platforms, were narrow,
long pine boxes--waiting. Sometimes the old negroes who had come to
receive these boxes broke into lamentable cries and wailings. But the
white men and women took them away silently, being as silently watched
by the rows of sad faces in the train windows. The little lady in
black, looking upon them, gripped her hands together in her lap; she
also had received such a six-foot box from the front.
They reached Columbia at night; and here, too, was the nightmare of
people and things moving aimlessly, always, always moving, moving.
It was bitterly cold; there were no conveyances to be had, and the
little lady’s knees were trembling. She was shudderingly ill. An old
priest, noting her pitiful plight, came mercifully to Cindy’s aid. Upon
the threshold of the DeSaussure house, the moaning creature collapsed.
“I’m afraid,” said the priest to Mrs. DeSaussure, “that I can’t find
you a doctor. They’re pretty nearly all gone. But I’ll try. God help
us! God help us!” He wrung his hands, and disappeared, running.
No doctor came. But at dawn, in the bare, stripped drawing-room whose
hangings and carpets had long since been made into saddlebags, the
little boy who was the last of his race opened his huckleberry-blue
eyes.
“Poor--little--baby!” murmured his young mother faintly.
“Poor--poor--little--fatherless--baby! Never, never--to know--_him_!”
Two slow, cold tears crept down her white cheeks.
Aline DeSaussure bent over and kissed the child compassionately. This
frail old woman, whose diseased heart had rendered her hold upon
life purely tentative for many years, had yet, by the irony of fate,
survived her stalwart husband, her strong young sons. Over the baby’s
unconscious head, the two unhappy women looked at each other piteously.
Cindy looked at both, and muttered prayers not addressed to the white
man’s God. That God had come to Cindy along with slavery. Now the
opportunity had come to let them both go; the old pagan felt herself
free to return to her own gods, the old gods, the bush gods. It was a
great relief, as if one removed tormenting tight shoes and stretched at
ease one’s cramped and aching feet.
That day Columbia, stored with the treasures of half a State,
bursting with loot, was invested. Ominous hours dragged by, leadenly,
oppressively, with a sense of inevitable disaster overhanging and
imminent. In the middle of the night there arose of a sudden a glare;
and then upon all sides sounded the crackle of flames. Bells clanged;
dogs began to howl dismally. Shouts arose, and shrill and piercing
screams. One heard the frightened crying of children suddenly aroused
from sleep. As the flames spread, the light of burning buildings showed
unbelievable things, things grotesque and heroic and sometimes terrible.
In the Catholic Church, the orphans, hastily gathered, stood in a
huddled group, looking with frightened eyes at the pale, praying
sisters, and at the vestmented priest, who addressed with passionate
words and gestures certain grim-faced men in alien blue uniforms.
One of these men rapped out an order; the priest cried aloud; and then
the children, at a word from the sisters, began to move. They hurried
out into the frightful din and clamor of the streets, while behind
them church and convent began to burn. When the door fell in, one
glimpsed statues wrapped and writhing in flame, as the damned in the
Florentine’s hell. Columbia was a gigantic torch lighting up the black
night of war.
When the house on the corner was ablaze and thunderous knocks resounded
on the DeSaussure door, Cindy answered the summons.
“Who’s here?” There were bayonets beyond the voice, and Cindy looked
upon the group witheringly.
“White women’s hyuh, white men!” said she savagely. “Two uh dem--an’ a
new-come chile.”
“Get ’em out!” was the sharp order. “Get ’em out--or they’ll burn with
the house!”
Already the intruders were trampling through the rooms. They helped
themselves, rather whimsically, one thought, to whatever caught their
fancy; the owner looked on silently, with that disdainful and desperate
calmness with which intrepid souls face fate.
The baby and his mother were carried out, on a cot hastily piled with
such coverlets as could be snatched up, and set down in the nearest
clear space, a small square brilliantly lighted by the burning house
on the corner. The woman, who was extremely weak, had lapsed into
a merciful unconsciousness, but the baby squirmed and cried. Mrs.
DeSaussure, bareheaded, and with a worsted shawl about her thin
shoulders, sank down beside them. It was piercingly cold, and in the
grip of a bitter frost the torn and trampled streets were like iron,
over which swept a cruel February wind.
Toward dawn the woman on the cot opened her eyes.
“C-Cindy!”
“Yes, missis. Yes, chile.”
“I’m--I’m going.” Her stiff blue lips formed the words with difficulty,
but her eyes besought. “Promise--you’ll take the baby--back home--to
Linden. _Oh! God! God!_”
From a near-by street had come a hoarse and confused murmur of many
voices. Men in soiled uniforms tramped into sight. Capering negroes,
shouting, laughing, clapping, accompanied them. And of a sudden the
black people burst into an exultant and measured singing:
“B-ab-y-lon’s a-fallin’! B-ab-y-lon’s a-fallin’!
An’ de dar-kies gwine ter oc-cu-py de lan’!”
Bitten through by the teeth of the fire, the walls of the majestic old
house on the corner crashed down with a roar. Wild chant and wilder
figures swept by.
The little lady was shaken, head to foot, with a long, slow shudder.
A deep, deep sigh escaped from her bosom, and her head, crowned with
very heavy, bright hair, fell forward. Mrs. DeSaussure presently drew
the sheet up over her face. Under Cindy’s shawl, held close to her
flat black breast for greater warmth, the baby mewed with cat-like
plaintiveness.
The DeSaussure house had been adding its quota of illumination. As
they crouched upon the ground beside the cot, the two watchers could
see flames leap upward from its roof. When the roof fell in, Aline
DeSaussure moaned. It had sheltered generations; it had covered her
young wifehood, her lads’ childhood.
Presently, detaching itself from a chaotic background of smoke and
flame, there came a figure, clapping its hands, staring, screaming with
staccato laughter. Now she minced and bowed, smiling horribly, with
bitten lips. A torn velvet robe hung about her, soiled and disheveled.
She flung up her hands, and, catching the unbound black hair that
streamed about her, tore it, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
Vainly clutching at the flying, fantastic figure, which always lightly
eluded her, stumbled and panted a fat black mammy, calling with
endearing and coaxing tenderness upon her stark nursling.
Aline DeSaussure looked with wide and anguished eyes upon the terrible
and tragic figure, but a little while since the honored, the beloved,
the beautiful; and it seemed to her that Carolina herself, distraught,
ruined Carolina, went by in the wind of the mad-woman’s passing. She
uttered a lamentable cry; her hands flew to her heart, rent by a mortal
pang; and, as if to shut from her sight that poignant vision, her eyes
closed.
Cindy lifted her to the cot and drew the sheet over both women, who
were so slim that they did not crowd each other on its one pillow. The
black woman stood looking down upon them reflectively.
“Ain’t scared uh dem white folkses’ God no mo’. Not me!” she grumbled.
An hour or so later, at a cabin in the outside country, Cindy got
some milk for the well-nigh famished baby. Her evil aspect, and
the significant bag now openly worn about her neck, commandeered
respect--and necessities. But she was warned that not only season and
weather, but ruin, starvation, and soldiers, lay between herself and
Linden.
Cindy smiled awesomely.
“I done got powerful spell tuh lan’ dis chile home,” she confided. “He
natchelly _’bleeged_ tuh git home. Uh-huh! I done call muh own ol’
big black god clean f’um Afficky ’count uh dis hyuh same chile.” She
paused, and added, with dark impressiveness: “Wouldn’t like ter be de
pusson tarrygatin’ _him-all_!”
With the speck of humanity snuggled in her shawl, Cindy set out.
What was given willingly, she repaid with charms; what was not, she
took--when there was anything to take. If milk was procurable, Cindy
nosed it out with a truffle-hound’s flair. But far too often there was
no milk; then the child fed upon teas made from simples gathered by the
roadside, or for days at a time he lived upon corn meal boiled into
a very thin gruel. By all the fancied laws of hygiene he should have
succumbed. He grew.
At night, in some lonely thicket under the open sky, the witch woman
would squat upon her heels beside a small fire of crossed sticks and
with a palmful of earth and another of water would mutter spells over
his bald, innocent head. If there were any powers Cindy failed to call
to his aid, it was because she had never heard of them; and Cindy was a
witch doctor’s daughter.
Once, indeed, she had dared to call Names that filled even her
rock-ribbed heart with cold, awful fear. That, however, had happened
upon a most auspicious occasion, in the full of the moon, and when she
had captured one of the last few cocks left in Carolina--a black cock,
young and perfect. For these Names must never be uttered unless one
has a black cock’s blood to offer. They will come then to eat the smell
of the blood, and also because of certain prayers and words. Now if
they are to be petitioned to grant their favor and protection to, say,
a young child, that child must be laid mother naked upon Mother Earth
between Father Fire and Sister Water. And his skin must be pricked a
certain number of times, until drops of blood appear. Three times,
then, shall the Names be named, with the Word of each for a sign.
And then--if they are pleased--they will put upon that child their
spell--and Earth and Fire and Water shall never harm him--and all his
life people must love him and serve him. It is a very good spell for
any child to have put upon him.
When one is burdened with a young and lusty baby for whom food
must be foraged far and wide over a war-swept country-side, one’s
progress is necessarily slow, particularly when one is past fourscore,
and overdriven old legs and lungs show signs of wearing out. The
indomitable old woman, despite all obstacles, had made each week’s end
find her a little nearer to Linden. But one evening at sundown she felt
herself suddenly fail, as an old horse fails in harness.
It was long past dark when Cindy reached the nearest shelter, a cabin
set down at the edge of a swamp. In the incredibly old, wrinkled, and
palsied man who opened the door, the conjure woman recognized one of
her own calling, and sighed with relief. _They_ had not failed her yet;
she had found in her extremity the very help she stood most in need of.
Long, long into the night, while the baby slept peacefully upon a bed
of gunny-sacks, Cindy and the old man communed. Presently Sally, one
of his two granddaughters, was called in, and upon a tuft of the black
cock’s feathers, dipped in blood and tied with a seven-knotted string,
the scared girl was made to swear that she would take the baby home to
Linden when Cindy was gone. Cindy, in fact, had managed to stay only
long enough thus to settle her affairs to the best of her ability. So
the baby passed into the slack hands of strange negroes.
They were very kind to him; negroes are, as a rule, kind to children.
But in that parlous time, with a cabinful of hungry children and no men
to help them, the women had neither means nor time to send the child
forward, much as they would have liked to obey their grumbling old
grandfather’s repeated urgings.
In the meantime the child slept beside the youngest black baby in an
overcrowded cabin; and presently he was learning to walk, by the simple
process of getting up when he fell down and falling down when he got
up, with many an unnoticed bump and bawl between. He grew fat and
rosy on corn-meal mush and bacon grease eaten from a tin plate with a
mouth-stretching iron spoon. The many little negroes taught him early
to talk. He was not a year old when he would lisp his name--Linden.
Cindy had so insistently mentioned Linden that they named him thus; he
had no other name. On the whole, he fared, perhaps, as well as most
babies fared just then in war-worn Carolina.
Through the big teamster who just then caught her fancy, Sally at
last saw her chance to keep her troublesome promise. The teamster, in
the employ of the Union forces, had seen the unravaged and prosperous
North, and he wished Sally to go thither with him. Colored Canaan did
not lie in the South. Zeke knew the men who were coming home--in rags
and tags, battered, scattered, maimed and halt and in driblets--_but
who were coming home_. And he rather thought he would prefer to
be somewhere else for a while. Sally was quite willing to go; but
first she must fulfil the promise wrung from her by her baleful old
grandfather and the black witch with the red eyes and gorilla teeth.
If she did not do what they had made her swear to do--_and that big,
awful old woman came up out of the swamp some night--with all those
teeth_--
Zeke hastily agreed that Sally had better keep her word; it is very
unsafe to meddle with witches’ doings. When his job of hauling timber
for the Government was finished, and the last money collected, they two
would take the child back to Linden and then turn their faces northward.
Linden, however, no longer belonged to the baby; for, by one of those
summary military transfers common in conquered provinces, it had been
declared confiscated, and so passed into the strong hands of John
MacLean.
Full of a fierce and fiery faith--and full of Scotch-Irish prejudice
and obstinacy as well--John had seen in the South a field ripe for a
great spiritual harvest, and had laid aside the gun to arm himself
with the gospel. Having valiantly helped to free enslaved bodies, he
started in just as valiantly and as stubbornly to free enslaved souls.
In that country of wrecked plantations, of ruined rice-fields and
roofless houses, calm Linden, fronting the bright May River, pleased
him. Save that it bore sad evidences of marauders and that a great
deal of the fine furniture had been either broken or stolen outright,
the house was intact. Once in secure possession, John settled down to
what he meant to make his life-work, and called in the lighthearted,
sensuous colored people to drink deep of the cold well of orthodox
Calvinism. They were appreciative: they wished to please the white
man who offered them, for the mere taking, Thirty-nine unbreakable
Articles; but they found the well-water unpleasant to the palate
and--slyly made a sieve of the dipper.
He opened for the colored children a school, in the stately dining-room
from whose walls arrogant patricians looked out of splendid frames; the
room’s marble mantel bore their carved escutcheon; beneath which one
read: “_Ad Astra_.” John thought that such stars as these slave-holding
gentry had looked to were evil ones. He smiled to see their painted
semblances look down helplessly upon the sons and daughters of Ham
learning their A B abs in the room of their feastings; and his dour
humor was tickled at the contrast between the grinning little negroes
and the fine, gay, bare-bosomed ladies, with slim, pointed fingers that
had never toiled and slim necks one might think would break under the
weight of heads crammed with such damnable pride.
He was very hopeful. When he saw his dusky audience swaying like barley
in the breeze of his words of sound counsel, John MacLean felt himself
glimpsing the mountain peaks of coming Canaan, rising, rosy-pink,
in the dawn. He was as yet unaware of the neat holes bored in his
gospel-gourd.