have you. I don't mean that I shall ever be good enough for you--because
I shall not be. I shall always be a brute beside you--but if you will
wait I will win you. I swear it!"
She had not moved. She was as still as the dead oak that towered above
them. The sunset struck upon her bowed head and upon the quiet bosom,
where her hands were clasped.
"I will wait," she answered.
He came nearer and kissed the hands upon her breast. His face was
flushed and his lips were hot.
"Thank you," he said simply as he drew back.
In a moment he stooped to pick up the scattered goldenrod, heaping it
into her arms. "This is enough to fill the house," he protested. "You
can't want so much."
He had regained his rational tone, and she responded to it with a smile.
"I never know when I'm satisfied," she said. "It is my weakness. As a
child I always ate candy until it made me ill."
They crossed the field, the long plumes brushing against them and
powdering them with a feathery gold dust. At the fence she gave him the
bunch and lightly swung herself over the sunken rails. It did not occur
to him to assist her; she had always been as good as he at vaulting
bars. Now her long skirts retarded her, and she laughed as she came
quickly to the ground on the opposite side.
"One of the many disadvantages of my sex," she said. "The best prisons
men ever invented are women's skirts. Our wings are clipped while we
wear them."
"It is hard," he returned as he recalled her school-girl feats. "You
were such a mighty jumper."
"Those halcyon days are done," she sighed. "I can never stray beyond my
'sphere' again."
They had reached the end of the avenue, so he left her and went homeward
along the road. The sun had gone slowly down and the western horizon was
ripped open in a deep red track. The charred skeleton of the oak loomed
black and sinister against the afterglow, and at its feet the glory went
out of the autumn field. Straight ahead the sound of shots rang out
where a flock of bats circled above the road. On the darkening landscape
the lights began to glimmer in farmhouses far apart, and to Nicholas
they seemed watchful, friendly eyes that looked upon him. All Nature was
watchful--all the universe friendly. The glow which irradiated his
outlook with an abrupt transfiguration was to him the glow of universal
joy, though he knew it to be but the vanishing beam of youth and the end
thereof age.
It seemed to him that he was singled out--securely set apart by some
beneficent hand for some supreme good which, in his limited
observation, he had never seen put forth in the lots of others. His own
life lay so much nearer the Divine purpose than did the lives of his
neighbours--the purpose of Nature, whose end is the happiness that
conforms to sane and immutable laws. His kiss on Eugenia's lips was to
him God-given; the answer in her eyes had flamed a Scriptural
inspiration. In the tumultuous leaping of his thoughts it seemed to him
that the meaning of existence lay unrolled--a meaning obscured in all
religions, overlooked in all philosophies--a meaning that could be read
only by the lamp that was lit in the eyes that loved.
So in his ignorance and his ecstasy he went on his confident way, while
passion throbbed in his pulses and youth quickened in his brain.
From the far-off pines twilight came to meet him, the lights glimmered
clearer in distant windows, the afterglow drifted from the west, and the
shots ceased where the black bats circled above the road.
V
Eugenia arranged the goldenrod in the great blue vases and sat in the
deserted dining-room thinking of Nicholas. Where the damask curtains
were drawn back from the windows a gray line of twilight landscape was
visible, and a chill, transparent dusk filled the large room. Outside
she would see the box-walk, a stretch of lawn, broken by flower-beds,
and the avenue of cedars leading to the highway. From the porch floated
the smoke of the general's pipe.
Her brow was on her hand and she sat so motionless that the place seemed
deserted, save for an errant firefly that vainly palpitated in the
gloom. The glow that had flamed beneath Nicholas's kiss still lingered
in her face, and she was conscious of a faint, almost hysterical impulse
to weep. The fever in her veins had given place to a still tremor which
ran through her limbs. At first she felt rather than thought. She lapsed
into an emotional reverie as delicate as the fragrance of the October
roses on the table. There was a sensation of softness as when one lies
full length in sunshine or is caressed by firelight. She felt it pervade
her body even to the palms of her hands. Then her quick mind stirred,
and she recalled the pressure of his arms, the light in his eyes, the
quiver of his lips as they touched her hands. His strength had dominated
her and it still held her--the firm note in the voice that trembled,
the power in the hand that appealed, the almost savage vigour in the
arms that he folded on his breast. She had succumbed less to his
gentleness than to the knowledge that it was she alone who evoked that
gentleness out of a nature almost adamantine, wholly masculine. His
faults she knew to be the faults of one who had hewn his own road in
life--a rugged surface--a strain of rigidity beneath--at worst a
tendency to dogmatise--and knowing as she did her own control over them,
they attracted rather than repelled her.
And yet in this pulsating recognition of his manhood there was mingled
with an emotion half-maternal the memory of her own guardianship of his
stunted childhood. To a woman at once rashly spirited and profoundly
feminine the pathos of his boyish struggle appealed no less forcibly
than did the virility of his manhood. She might have loved him less had
her thought of him been untouched by pity.
She sat quietly in the twilight until Congo brought in the lamp and a
prospect of supper. Then she rose and went to join her father on the
porch.
"Why did you tell Mrs. Webb I would be a 'Daughter,' papa?" she gaily
demanded.
The general took his pipe from his mouth and stared up at her.
"It's a good cause, Eugie," he replied, "and she's a remarkable woman.
Her executive ability is astounding--absolutely astounding."
"I joined," said Eugenia. "I had to, after you said that. You know, I
called on her the day I took Sally in."
The general lowered his eyes and thoughtfully regarded the light that
was going gray in his pipe.
"Did she happen to say anything about--Dudley?" he inquired.
"Oh, yes. She said he sent me a message in a letter."
"Did she tell you what 'twas?"
"No. I didn't ask her."
He put the stem of his pipe between his teeth and hung on it desperately
for a moment; then he took it out again.
"He's a fine young fellow," he said at last. "I don't know a finer--and,
bless my soul! I'd see you married to him to-morrow."
But Eugenia laughed and beat his shoulder.
"You don't want to see me married to anybody," she said, "and you know
it."
At the end of the ensuing week Dudley came to Kingsborough, and upon the
first evening of his visit he walked out to Battle Hall. He was looking
smooth and well groomed, and the mass of his thick dark hair waving over
his white brow gave him an air of earnestness and ardour. Eugenia
wondered that she had never noticed before that he was like the portrait
of an old-time orator, and that his hands were finely rounded.
His voice, with its suggestion of suavity, fell soothingly on her
nerves. She had never liked him so much, and she had never shown it so
plainly. Once as she met his genial gaze she held her breath at the
marvel that he should grow to love her, and in vain. Was it that beside
his splendid shallows the more luminous depths of Nicholas's nature
still showed supreme? Or was it a question of fate--and of first and
last? Had Dudley come upon her in the red sunset, in the little shanty
beside the road, would she have gone out to him in the mere leaping of
youth and womanhood? Was it the moment, after all, and not the man? Or
was it something more unerring still--more profound--the prophetic call
of individual to individual, despite the specious pleading of the race?
But she put the thought aside and returned casually to Dudley.
His heartiness was a tonic, and her vanity responded to the unaffected
admiration in his eyes; but his chief claim to her regard lay in the
fact that it was the general, and not herself, whom he endeavoured to
propitiate.
"Well, my dear General!" he exclaimed cordially as he threw himself upon
the worn horsehair sofa in what was called the "sitting-room," "I find
your story about the fighting Texans capped by one Major Mason was
telling me last night about the North Carolinians--" He got no farther.
"I've fought side by side with North Carolina regiments, and I tell you,
sir, they're the best fighters God ever made!" cried the general. "Did
you ever hear that story about 'em when I was wounded?"
Dudley shook his head and leaned forward, his hands clasped between his
knees and an expression of flattering absorption on his face.
"I can't recall it now, sir," he delightfully lied.
The general cleared his throat, laid his pipe aside, and drew up his
chair.
"It was in my last battle," he began. "You know I got that ball in my
shoulder and was laid up when Lee surrendered--well, sir, I was propped
up there close by a company of those raw-boned mountaineers from North
Carolina, and they stood as still as the pine wood behind 'em, while
their colonel swore at 'em like mad.
"'Damn you for a troop of babies!' he yelled. 'Ain't you goin' into the
fight? Can't you lick a blamed Yankee?' And, bless your soul! those
scraggy fellows stood stock still and sung out:
"'We ain't mad!'
"Well, sir, they'd no sooner yelled that back than a bullet whizzed
along and took off one of their own men, and, on my oath, the bullet
hadn't ceased singing in my ears before that company charged the enemy
to a man--and whipped 'em, too, sir--whipped 'em clean off the field!"
He paused, clapped his knee, and roared.
"That's your North Carolinian," he said. "He's a God Almighty fighter,
but you've got to make him mad first."
Miss Chris brought her knitting to the lamp, and Eugenia, sitting with
her hands in her lap, followed the conversation with abstracted
interest.
It was not until Dudley rose to go that he came over to her and took her
hand.
"Good-night," he said, his ardent eyes upon her. "I'm to have that ride
to-morrow? You know I came for it."
The unreasoning blood beat in her face as she turned away, and she was
conscious that he had seen and misconstrued the senseless blush. It was
her misfortune to go red or pale without cause and to show an impassive
face above deep emotion.
The next morning she rode with Dudley, and the day after he came out
before returning to Richmond. She experienced a certain pleasure in the
contact with his bouyant optimism, but it was not without a sensation of
relief that she watched him depart after his last visit. It seemed to
leave her more to herself--and to Nicholas.
That afternoon she walked with him far across the fields, and they laid
together phantasmal foundations of their future lives. Perhaps the chief
thing to be said of their intercourse was that it was to each a mental
stimulant as well as an emotional delight. Eugenia's quick, untutored
mind, which had run to seed like an uncultivated garden, blossomed from
contact with his practical, unpolished intellect. He taught her logic
and a little law; she taught him poetry and passion. He argued his cases
to her and swept her back into the days of his old political
dreams--dreams from which he had awakened, but which still hovered as
memories in his waking hours. Sometimes he brought his books to Battle
Hall, and they read together beneath the general's unseeing eyes; but
more often they sat side by side in the pasture or the wood, the volume
lying open between them. He was the first man who had ever spurred her
into thought; she was the first woman he had ever loved.
As they walked across the fields this afternoon they drifted back to the
question of themselves and their own happiness. It was only a matter of
waiting, she said, of the patient passage of time; and they were so
sure of each other that all else was unimportant--to be disregarded.
"But am I sure of you?" he demanded.
It was not a personal distrust of Eugenia that he voiced; it was the
hardened state of disbelief in his own happiness which showed itself
when the first intoxication of passion was lived out.
"Why, of course you are," she readily rejoined. "Am I not sure of you?
You are as much mine as my eyes--or my hand."
"Oh, I am different!" he exclaimed. "A beggar doesn't prove faithless to
a princess--but what do you see in me, after all?"
She laughed. "I see a very moody lover."
They had reached a little deserted spring in the pasture called "Poplar
Spring," after the six great poplars which grew beside it. Eugenia
seated herself on a fallen log beside the tiny stream which trickled
over the smooth, round stones, bearing away, like miniature floats, the
yellow leaves that fell ceaselessly from the huge branches above.
"I don't believe you know how I love you," he said suddenly.
"Tell me," she insatiably demanded.
"If I could tell you I shouldn't love you as I do. There are some things
one can't talk about--but you are life itself--and you are all heaven
and all hell to me."
"I don't want to be hellish," she put in provokingly.
"But you are--when I think you may slip from me, after all."
The yellow leaves fluttered over them--over the fallen log and over the
bright green moss beside the little spring. As Eugenia turned towards
him, a single leaf fell from her hair to the ground.
"Oh! You are thinking of Dudley Webb!" she said, and laughed because
jealousy was her own darling sin.
"Yes, I am thinking--" he began, when she stopped him.
"Well, you needn't. You may just stop at once. I--love--you--Nick--Burr.
Say it after me."
He shook his head. Her hand lay on the log beside him, and his own
closed over it. As it did so, she contrasted its hardened palm with the
smooth surface of Dudley Webb's. The contrast touched her, and, with a
swift, warm gesture, she raised the clasped hands to her cheek.
"I told you once I liked your hand," she said. "Well--I love it."
He turned upon her a hungry glance.
"I would work it to the bone for you," he answered. "But--it is long to
wait."
"Yes, it is long to wait," she repeated, but her tone had not the
heaviness of his. Waiting in its wider sense means little to a
woman--and in a moment she cheerfully returned to a prophetic future.
A few days later Bernard came, and she saw Nicholas less often. Her
affection for her brother, belonging, as it did, to the dominant family
feeling which possessed her soul, was filled with an almost maternal
solicitude. He absorbed her with a spasmodic, half selfish, wholly
insistent appeal. She received his confidences, wrote his letters, and
tied his cravats. Upon his last visit home he had spent the greater
part of his time in Kingsborough; now he rode in seldom, and invariably
returned in a moody and depressed condition.
"You're worth the whole bunch of them," he had said to her of other
girls, "you dear old Eugie."
And she had warmed and laid a faithful hand on his arm. It was
characteristic of her that no call for affection went disregarded--that
the sensitive fibres of her nature quivered beneath any caressing hand.
"Do you really like me best?" she asked.
"Don't I?" He laughed his impulsive, boyish laugh--"I'll prove it by
letting you go in for the mail this afternoon. I detest Kingsborough!"
"Oh! No, no, I love it, but I suppose it is dull for you."
She ordered the carriage and went upstairs to put on her hat. When she
came down Bernard was not in sight, and she drove off, wondering why he
or any one else should detest Kingsborough.
She performed her mission at the post-office, and was mentally weighing
the probabilities of Nicholas having finished work for the day, when, in
passing along the main street, she saw him come to the door of his
office with a round, rosy girl, whom she recognised as Bessie Pollard.
She had intended to take him out with her, but as she caught sight of
his visitor she gave them both a condescending nod and ordered Sampson
to drive on. She felt vaguely offended and sharply irritated with
herself for permitting it. Her annoyance was not allayed by the fact
that Amos Burr stopped her in the road to inform her that his wife was
fattening a brood of turkeys which she would like to deliver into the
hands of Miss Chris. As he stood before her, hairy, ominous, uncouth,
she realised for the first time the full horror of the fact that he was
father to the man she loved. Hitherto she had but dimly grasped the
idea. Nicholas had been associated in her thoughts with the judge and
her earlier school days; and she had conceived of his poverty and his
people only in the heroic measures that related to his emancipation from
them. Now she felt that had she, in the beginning, seen him side by side
with his father, she could not have loved him. She flinched from Amos
Burr's shaggy exterior and drew back haughtily.
"I have nothing to do with the housekeeping," she said. "You may ask
Aunt Chris."
He spat a mouthful of tobacco juice into the dust and fingered the torn
brim of his hat.
"I wish you'd jest speak to Miss Chris about 'em," he returned, "an'
send me word by Nick." He gave an awkward lurch on his feet.
The colour flamed in Eugenia's face.
"Aunt Chris will send for the turkeys," she said hurriedly. "Drive on,
Sampson."
She sat splendidly erect, but the autumn landscape was blurred by a
sudden gush of tears.
An hour later she remembered that she had promised to let Nicholas join
her in the pasture, and she left the house with the grievance still at
her heart.
When she saw him it broke out abruptly.
"I am surprised that you keep up with such people," she said.
He looked at her blankly.
"If you mean Bessie Pollard," he rejoined, "she was in trouble and came
to me for advice. I couldn't help her, but I could at least be civil.
She was kind to me when I was in her father's store."
"I do not care to be reminded that you were ever in such a position."
He flinched, but answered quietly:
"I am afraid you will have to face it," he said. "If you become my wife,
you will, unfortunately, have to face a good deal that you might escape
by marrying in your own class--I am not in your class, you know," he
slowly added.
She was conscious of a cloudy irritation which was alien to her usually
beaming moods. The figure of Amos Burr loomed large before her, and she
hated herself for the discovery that she was tracing his sinister
likeness in his son. No, it was only the hair--that was all, but she
loathed the obvious colour.
Her lip trembled and she set her teeth into it.
"You might at least allow me to forget it," she retorted.
"Why should you wish to forget it? I think I shall be proud of it when I
have risen far enough above it to claim you. It is no small thing to be
a self-made man."
She resented the assurance of his tone.
"It is strange that you do not consider my view of it."
"Your view--what is it?"
"That I do not wish the man I love to--to speak to that Pollard girl,"
she gasped.
"Since you wish it, I will avoid her in future. She is nothing to me;
but I can't refuse to speak to her. You are unreasonable."
She was regarding the hovering shade of Amos Burr.
"If you think me unreasonable," she returned, "we may as well--"
He reached her side by a single step and flung his arm about her. Then
he looked into her face and laughed softly.
"May as well what--dearest?" he asked.
She shook an obstinate head.
"You don't love me," was her inevitable feminine challenge.
He laughed again. "Do I love you?" he demanded as he looked at her.
She did not answer, but the shade of Amos Burr melted afar.
Nicholas bent over her with abrupt intensity and kissed her lips until
his kisses hurt her.
"Do I love you--now?" he asked.
"Yes--yes--yes." She freed herself with a laugh that dispelled the
lingering cloud. "You may convince me next time without violence," she
affirmed radiantly.
As he watched her his large nostrils twitched whimsically. "You were
saying that we might as well--"
"Go home to supper," she finished triumphantly. "The sun has set."
When she left him a little later at the end of the avenue she flew
joyously up the narrow walk. She was softly humming to herself, and as
she stepped upon the porch the song ran lightly into words.
"I love Love, though he has wings,
And like light can flee--"
she sang, and paused within the shadow of the porch to glance through
the long window that led into the sitting-room. The heavy curtains
obstructed her gaze, and she had put up her hand to push them aside,
when her father's voice reached her, and at his words her outstretched
arm fell slowly to her side.
"It's that girl of Jerry Pollard's," he was saying. "She's gotten into
trouble, and that Burr boy's mixed up in it; the young rascal!"
Miss Chris's placid voice floated in.
"I can't believe it," she charitably murmured; and Bernard, who was on
the hearth rug, turned at the sound.
"It's all gossip, you know," he said.
Eugenia pushed aside the curtains and stepped into the room. Her hands
hung at her sides, and the animation had faded from her glance. Her face
looked white and drawn.
"It is not true," she said steadily. "Papa, it is not true."
"I--I'm afraid it is, daughter," gasped the general. There was an
abashed embarrassment in his attitude and his hands shook. He had hoped
to keep such facts beyond the utmost horizon of his daughter's life.
Eugenia crossed to the hearth rug and stood looking into Bernard's
face. She made an appealing gesture with her hands.
"Bernard, it is not true," she said.
He turned away from her and, nervously lifting the poker, divided the
smouldering log. A red flame shot up, illuminating the gathered faces
that stood out against the dusk. The glare lent a grotesque irony to the
flabby, awe-stricken features of the general, brightened the boyish
ill-humour in Bernard's eyes, and played peaceably over Miss Chris's
tranquil countenance.
"Bernard, it is not true," she said again.
The poker fell with a clatter to the hearth; and the noise irritated
her. Bernard put out a sudden, soothing hand.
"It is what they say in Kingsborough," he answered.
She turned from him to the window, pushed the curtains aside, and went
out again into the sunset.
VI
She ran swiftly along the walk, into the gloom of the avenue, and out
again to the open road. The sunset colours were flaming in the west, and
above them a solitary star was shining. The fields lay sombre and
deserted on either side, but straight ahead, in the lighter streak of
the road, she saw Nicholas's figure swinging onward. She might have
called to him, but she did not; she sped like a shadow in his path
until, hearing her footfalls in the dust, he looked back and halted.
"You!" he exclaimed.
She came up to him, her hand at her throat, her face turned towards the
sunset. For a moment her breath failed and she could not speak; then all
the words that she had meant to say--the appeal to him for truth, the
cry of her own belief in him--rang theatrical and ineffectual in her
brain.
When at last she spoke, it was to voice the mere tripping of her
tongue--to utter words which belied the beating of her thoughts.
"You must marry her," she said, and it seemed to her that it was a
stranger who spoke. She did not mean that--she had never meant it.
He looked at her blankly, and made a sudden movement forward, but she
waved him off.
"For God's sake, whom?" he demanded.
She wished that he had laughed at her--that he had laid bare the whole
hideous farce, but he did not; he regarded her gravely, with a grim
inquiry.
"Whom do you mean?" he repeated.
A light wind sprang up, blowing across the pasture and whirling the dead
leaves of distant trees into their faces. Overhead other stars came out,
and far away an owl hooted.
"Oh! you know, you know," she said, with a desperate anger at his
immobility. "When I saw you with her to-day, I did not--I did not--"
"Do you mean Bessie Pollard?" he asked. His voice was hard; it was
characteristic of him that, in the supreme test, his sense of humour
failed him. He met grave issues with a gravity that upheld them.
She bowed her head. At the same time she flung out a despairing hand for
hope, but he did not notice it. She was softening to him--if she had
ever steeled herself against him--and a single summons to her faith
would have vanquished the feeble resistance. But he did not make it--the
inflexible front which she had seen turned to others she now saw
presented to herself. He looked at her with an austere tightening of the
mouth and held off.
"And they have told you that I ruined her," he said, "and you believe
them."
"No--no," she cried; "not that!"
His eyes were on her, but there was no yielding in them. The arrogant
pride of a strong man, plainly born, was face to face with her appeal.
His features were set with the rigidity of stone.
"Who has told you this?" he demanded.
"Oh, it is not true--it is not true," she answered; "but
Bernard--Bernard believed it--and he is your friend."
Then his smouldering rage burst forth, and his face grew black. It was
as if an incarnate devil had leaped into his eyes. He took a step
forward.
"Then may God damn him," he said, "for he is the man!"
She fell from him as if he had struck her. Her spirit flashed out as his
had done. The anger of her race shot forth.
"Oh, stop! stop! How dare you!" she cried; "for he tried to shield
you--he tried to shield you--he would shield you if he could."
But he crossed to where she stood and caught her outstretched hands in a
grasp that hurt her. She winced, and his hold grew gentle; but his voice
was brutal in its passion.
"Be silent," he said, "and listen to me. They have lied to you, and you
have believed them--you I shall never forgive--you are nothing to
me--nothing. As for him--may God, in his mercy, damn him!"
He let her hands drop and went from her into the silence of the open
road.
When the thud of his footsteps was muffled by the distance Eugenia
turned and went back through the cedar avenue. She walked heavily, and
there was a bruised sensation in her limbs as if she had hurt herself
upon stones. A massive fatigue oppressed her, and she stumbled once or
twice over the rocks in the road. Her happiness was dead, this she told
herself; telling herself, also, that it had not perished by anger or by
disbelief. The slayer loomed intangible and yet inevitable--the shade
that had arisen from the gigantic gulf between separate classes which
they had sought, in ignorance, to abridge. The pride of Nicholas was not
individual, but typical--the pride of caste, and it was against this
that she had sinned--not in distrusting his honour, but in offending it.
It was in the clash of class, after all, that their theories had
crumbled. He might come back to her again--she might go forth to meet
him--but the bloom had gone from their dreams--in the reunion she saw
neither permanence nor abiding. The strongest of her instincts--the one
that made for the blood she bore--had quivered beneath the onslaught of
his accusation, but had not bent. Wherever and whenever the struggle
came she stood, as the Battles had always stood, for the clan. Be it
right or wrong, true or false, it was hers and she was on its side.
As she went beneath the great cedars, their long branches brushed her
face, like the remembering touch of familiar fingers, and she put up her
cheek to them as if they were sentient things. Long ago they had soothed
her as a troubled child, and now their caresses cooled her fever.
Underfoot she felt the ancient carpet they had spread throughout the
century--and it smoothed the way for her heavy feet. She was in the
state of subjective passiveness when the consciousness of external
objects alone seems awake. She felt a tenderness for the twisted box
bushes she brushed in passing, a vague pity for a sickly moth that flew
into her face; but for herself she was without pity or tenderness--she
had not brought her mind to bear upon her own hurt.
Indoors she found the family at supper. The general, hearing her step,
called her to her seat and gave her the brownest chicken breast in the
dish before him. Miss Chris offered her the contents of the cream jug,
and Congo plied her with Aunt Verbeny's lightest waffles; but the food
choked her and she could not eat. A lump rose in her throat, and she saw
the kindly, accustomed faces through a gathering mist. She regarded each
with a certain intentness, a peculiar feeling that there were hidden
traits in the commonplace features which she had never seen before--a
complexity in the benign candour of Miss Chris's countenance, in the
overwrought youthfulness of Bernard's, in the apoplectic credulity of
the general's. Familiar as they were, it seemed to her that there were
latent possibilities--obscure tendencies, which were revealed to her now
with microscopic exaggeration.
The general put his hand to her forehead and smoothed back the moist
hair.
"Ain't you well, daughter?" he asked anxiously. "Would you like a
toddy?"
"It's nothing," said Miss Chris cheerfully. "She's walked too far,
that's all. Eugie, you must go to bed early."
"I had her out all the morning in the sun," put in Bernard, with an
affectionate nod at Eugenia, "and she's such a trump she wouldn't give
out."
"You must learn to consider your sister," said his father testily.
"Oh! I liked it, papa," declared Eugenia. "I'm well and--I'm hungry."
Congo brought more waffles, and she ate one with grim determination. The
alert affection which surrounded her--which proved sensitive to a
change of colour or a tremor of voice, filled her with a swift sense of
security. She felt a sudden impulse to draw nearer in the shelter of the
race--to cling more closely to that unswerving instinct which had united
individual to individual and generation to generation.
As they rose from the table, she slipped her arm through her father's
and went with him into the hall.
"I'm tired," she said, stopping him on his way to the sitting-room, "so
I'll go to bed."
The general held her from him and looked into her face.
"Anybody been troubling you, Eugie?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"You dear old goose--no!"
He patted her shoulder reassuringly.
"If anybody troubles you, you just let me hear of it," he said. "They'll
find out Tom Battle wasn't at Appomattox. You've got an old father and
he's got an old sword--"
"And he's hungry for a fight," she gaily finished. Then she rubbed her
cheek against his brown linen sleeve, which was redolent of tobacco. The
firm physical contact inspired her with the courage of life; it seemed
to make for her a bulwark against the world and its incoming
tribulations.
She threw back her head and looked up into the puffed and scarlet face
where the coarse veins were congested, her eyes seeing only the love
which transfigured it. She was his pet and his pride, and she would
always be the final reward of his long life.
As she mounted the stairs, he blew his nose and called cheerfully after
her:
"Just remember, if anybody begins plaguing you, that I'm ready for
him--the rascal."
Once in her room she threw open the window and sat looking out into the
night, the chill autumn wind in her face. Far across the fields a pale
moon was rising, bearing a cloudy circle that betokened rain. It flung
long, ghostly shadows east and west, which flitted, lean and noiseless
and black, before the wind. Overhead the stars shone dimly, piercing a
fine mist. Eugenia leaned forward, her chin on her clasped hands. Beyond
the gray blur of the pasture she could see, like benighted beacons, the
lights in Amos Burr's windows, and she found herself vaguely wondering
if Nicholas were at his books--those books that never failed him. He had
that consolation at least--his books were more to him than she had been.
She was not conscious of anger; she felt only an indifferent
weariness--a nervous shrinking from the brutality of his rage. His face
as she had seen it rose suddenly before her, and she put her hand to her
eyes as if to shut out the sight. She saw the clear streak of the
highway, the gray pasture, the solitary star overhanging the horizon,
and she felt the dead leaves blown against her cheek from denuded trees
far distant. And lighted by a glare of memory she saw his face--she saw
the convulsed features, the furrow that cleft the forehead like a seam,
the heavy brows bent above the half-closed eyes, the spasmodic working
of the drawn mouth. She saw the man in whom, for its brief instant, evil
was triumphant--in whom that self-poise, which had been to her as the
secret of his strength, was tumultuously overthrown.
A great fatigue weighed upon her, as if she had emerged, defeated, from
a physical contest. Her hands trembled, and something throbbed in her
temple like an imprisoned bird.
As she sat in the silence, the door opened softly and Miss Chris came
in, bearing a lamp in her hand.
"Eugie," she said, peering into the darkness, "are you there?"
Eugenia lowered the window and came over to the hearth rug, where she
stood blinking from the sudden glare of the lamp. There were some
half-extinguished embers amid the ashes in the fireplace, and she threw
on fresh wood, watching while it caught and blazed up lightly over the
old brass andirons.
Miss Chris set the lamp on the table and came over to the fire. She
carried her key basket in her hand, and the keys jingled as she moved.
Her smooth, florid face had a fine moisture over it that showed like dew
on a well-sunned peach.
"You aren't worrying about Nick Burr, Eugie," she said with the amiable
bluntness which belonged to her. "I wouldn't let it worry me if I were
you."
Eugenia turned with a flash of pride.
"No, I am not worrying about him," she answered.
Miss Chris lifted a vase from the mantel-piece, dusted the spot where it
had stood, and replaced it carefully.
"Of course, I know you've seen a good deal of him of late," she went
on; "but, as I told Tom, I knew it was nothing more than your being
playmates together. He's a good boy, and I don't believe that scandal
about him any more than I would about Bernard; but he's Amos Burr's son,
after all, though he has raised himself a long way above him, and, as
poor Aunt Griselda used to say, 'When all's said and done, a Battle's a
Battle.'"
Eugenia was looking into the fire.
"Yes," she repeated slowly, "a Battle's a Battle, after all."
"That's right, dear. I knew you'd say so. I always declared that you
were more of a Battle than all the rest of us put together--if you do
look the image of a Tucker. Tom was telling me only last week that he'd
leave you as free as air and trust the name in your hands sooner than he
would in his own--and he has a great deal of family pride, you know,
though he was so wild in his youth. But I remember my father once
saying: 'A Battle may go a long way down the wrong road, but he'll
always pull up in time to turn.'"
Her beautiful eyes shone in the firelight, and her placid mouth formed a
round hole above her dimpled chin, giving her large face an expression
almost infantile. She took up the key basket, which she had placed on
the mantel-piece, cast a glance at the pile of logs to see if it had
been replenished, felt the cover on the bed, after inquiring if it
sufficed, and, with a cheerful "good-night," passed out, closing the
door behind her.
Eugenia did not turn as the door closed. She stood motionless upon the
hearth rug, looking down into the fire. Something in the huge old
fireplace, with its bent andirons supporting the blazing logs, in the
increasing bed of embers upon the bricks, in the sharp odour of the knot
of resinous pine she had thrown on with the hickory, brought before her
the winter evenings in Delphy's little cabin, when they sat upon
three-legged stools and roasted early winesaps. She saw the negro faces
in the glow of the hearth, and she saw Nicholas and herself sitting side
by side in the shadow. His childish face, with its look of ancient care,
came back to her with the knotted boyish hands that had carried and
fetched at her bidding. The whole wistful little figure was imaged in
the flames, melting rapidly into the boy, eager to act, ardent to
achieve, who had bidden her good-bye on that November afternoon, and,
dissolving again, to reappear as the strong man who had come upon her in
Uncle Ish's little shanty, bearing the old negro's bag upon his
shoulder.
She had loved him for his strength, his vigour, his gentleness--and she
still loved him.
Of the men that she had known, who was there so ready to assist, so
forgetful of services which he had rendered? There was none so powerful
and yet so kind--so generous or so gentle. An impulse stirred her to
cross the fields to his door and fling herself into the breach that
divided them; but again the phantom in the flames grew dim and then sent
out the face that she had seen that afternoon--convulsed and quivering,
with its flitting sinister likeness to Amos Burr. A voice that seemed to
be the voice of old dead Aunt Griselda--of her whole dead race that had
decayed and been forgotten, and come to life again in her--spoke
suddenly from the silence:
"When all's said and done, a Battle's a Battle."
The resinous pine blazed up, the pungent odour filled the large room,
and from the lightwood sticks tiny streams of resin oozed out and
dripped into the embers, turning the red to gray.
Mingling with the crackling of the flames there was a noise as of the
soughing of the wind in the pine forests.
The hearth grew suddenly blurred before her eyes; and a passion of grief
rose to her throat and clutched her with the grip of claws. For an
instant longer she stood motionless; then, turning from the fire, she
threw herself upon the floor to weep until the daybreak.
VII
When Nicholas left Eugenia it was to stride blindly towards his father's
gate. The rage which had stunned him into silence before the girl now
leaped and crackled like flame in his blood. His throat was parched and
he saw red like a man who kills.
Passing his home, he kept on to Kingsborough, and once within the shadow
of the wood, he broke into a run, flying from himself and from the goad
of his wrath. As he ran, he felt with a kind of alien horror that to
meet Bernard Battle face to face in this hour would be to do
murder--murder too mild for the man who had lied away his friend's
honour for the sake of the whiteness of his own skin. It was the
injustice that he resented with a holy rage--the hideous fact that a
clean man should be spotted to save an unclean one the splashing he
merited.
And Eugenia also--he hated Eugenia that he had kept her image
untarnished in his thoughts; that he had allowed the desire for no other
woman to shadow it. He had held himself as a temple for the worship of
her; he had permitted no breath of defilement to blow upon the
altar--and this was his reward. This--that the woman he loved had hurled
the first stone at the mere lifting of a Pharisaical finger--that she
had loved him and had turned from him when the first word was
uttered--as she would not have turned from the brother of her blood had
he been damned in Holy Writ. It was for this that he hated her.
The light of the sunset shining through the wood fell dull gold on his
pathway. A strong wind was blowing among the trees, and the dried leaves
were torn from the boughs and hurled roughly to the earth, when they
sped onward to rest against the drifts by the roadside. The sound of the
wind was deep and hoarse like the baying of distant hounds, and beneath
it, in plaintive minor, ran the sighing of the leaves before his
footsteps. Through the wood came the vague smells of autumn--a
reminiscent waft of decay, the reek of mould on rotting logs, the
effluvium of overblown flowers, the healthful smack of the pines. By
dawn frost would grip the vegetation and the wind would lull; but now it
blew, strong and clear, scattering before it withered growths and subtle
scents of death.
Out of the wood, Nicholas came on the highway again, and turned to where
the afterglow burnished the windows of Kingsborough. He followed the
road instinctively--as he had followed it daily from his childhood up,
beating out the impression of his own footsteps in the dust,
obliterating his old, even tracks by the reckless tramp of his delirium.
When he reached the college grounds he paused from the same dazed
impulse and looked back upon the west through the quiet archway of the
long brick building. The place was desolate with the desolation of
autumn. Through the funereal arch he saw the sunset barred by a network
of naked branches, while about him the darkening lawn was veiled with
the melancholy drift of the leaves. The only sound of life came from a
brood of turkeys settling to roost in a shivering aspen.
He turned and walked rapidly up the main street, where a cloud of dust
hung suspended. Past the court-house, across the green, past the little
whitewashed gaol, where in a happier season roses bloomed--out into the
open country where the battlefields were grim with headless corn
rows--he walked until he could walk no further, and then wheeled about
to retrace heavily his way. His rage was spent; his pulses faltered from
fatigue, and the red flashes faded from before his eyes.
When he reached home supper was over, and Nannie sat sewing in the
little room adjoining the kitchen.
"You're late for supper," she said idly as he entered. "Sairy Jane's
gone to bed with a headache and ma's in a temper. I'll get you something
as soon as I've done this seam."
"I've had supper," he answered shortly, adding from force of habit,
"where's ma?"
Nannie motioned towards the kitchen and drew a little nearer the lamp,
while Nicholas left the room in search of his stepmother.
Marthy Burr, a pile of newly dug potatoes on the floor beside her, was
carefully sorting them before storing them for winter use. The sound
ones she laid in a basket at her right hand, those that were of
imperfect growth or showed signs of decay she threw into a hamper that
was kept in the kitchen closet.
"You ought to make Jubal do this," said Nicholas as he entered.
"I wouldn't trust the thickest skinned potato in the field in his
hands," returned Marthy sharply. "He an' yo' pa made out to store 'em
last year, an' when I went to look in the first barrel, the last one of
'em had rotted."
"Let them rot," said Nicholas harshly. "I be damned if I'd care. You
don't eat them, anyway."
"I reckon if I was a man I might consarn myself 'bout the things that
tickle my own palate--an' 'taters ain't one of 'em," was his
stepmother's retort. "But, being a woman, it seems I've got to spend my
life slavin' for other folks' stomachs. But you're yo' Uncle Nick Sales
all over again; 'Don't you get up befo' day to set that dough, Marthy,'
he'd say, but when the bread came on flat as a pancake, he'd look sourer
than all the rest."
"What was my Uncle Nick Sales like?" asked Nicholas indifferently. He
knew the name, but he had never heard the man's story.
"All book larnin' an' mighty little sense--just like you," replied his
stepmother with repressed pride in her voice. "Could read the Bible in
an outlandish tongue an' was too big a fool to come in out of the rain.
He used to sit up all night at his books--an' fall asleep the next day
at the plough. He was the wisest fool I ever see."
"Poor fool!" said Nicholas softly. It was the epitaph over the unmarked
grave of that other member of his race who had blazed the thorny path
before him. A strange, pathetic figure rose suddenly in his vision--a
man with a great brow and a twisted back, with brawny, knotted hands--an
unlearned student driving the plough, an ignorant philosopher dragging
the mire.
"Poor fool!" he said again. "What did his learning do for him?"
"It killed him," returned his stepmother shortly.
She stood before him wiping her gnarled hands on her soiled apron. His
gaze fell upon her, and he wondered angrily whence sprung her
indomitable energy--the energy that could expend itself upon potatoes.
Her face was sharpened until it seemed to become all feature--there were
hollows in the narrow temples, and where the pale, thin hair was drawn
tightly over the head he could trace the prominent bones of the skull.
As he looked at her his own petty suffering was overshadowed by the
visible tragedy of her life--the sordid tragedy where unconsciousness
was pathos. He reached out quickly and took a corner of her apron in his
hand. It was the strongest demonstration of affection he had ever made
to her.
"I'll sort them, ma," he said lightly. "There's not a speck in the lot
of them too fine for my eyes." And he knelt down beside the earthy heap.
But when he went up to his room an hour later and lighted his kerosene
lamp, it was not of his stepmother that he was thinking--nor was it of
Eugenia. His stiffened muscles contracted in physical pain, and his
brain was deadened by the sense of unutterable defeat. The delirium of
his anger had passed away; the fever of his skin had chilled beneath the
cold sweat that broke over him--in the reaction from the madness that
had gripped him he was conscious of a sanity almost sublime. The
habitual balance of his nature had swung back into place.
He got out his books and arranged them as usual beside the lamp. Then he
took up the volume he had been reading and held it unopened in his
hands. He stared straight before him at the whitewashed wall of the
little room, at the rough pine bedstead, at the crude washstand, at the
coloured calendar above.
On the unearthly whiteness of the wall he beheld the pictured vision of
that other student of his race--the kinsman who had lived toiling and
had died learning. He came to him a tragic figure in mire-clotted
garments--a youth with aspiring eyes and muck-stained feet. He wondered
what had been his history--that unknown labourer who had sought
knowledge--that philosopher of the plough who had died in ignorance.
"Poor fools!" he said bitterly, "poor fools!" for in his vision that
other student walked not alone.
The next morning he went into Kingsborough at his usual hour, and,
passing his own small office, kept on to where Tom Bassett's name was
hung.
It was county court day, and the sheriff and the clerk of the court were
sitting peaceably in armchairs on the little porch of the court-house.
As Nicholas passed with a greeting, they turned from a languid
discussion of the points of a brindle cow in the street to follow
mentally his powerful figure.
"I reckon he's got more muscle than any man in town," remarked the
sheriff in a reflective drawl. "Unless Phil Bates, the butcher, could
knock him out. Like to see 'em at each other, wouldn't you?" he added
with a laugh.
The clerk carefully tilted his chair back against the wall and surveyed
his outstretched feet. "Like to live to see him stumping this State for
Congress," he replied. "There goes the brainiest man these parts have
produced since before the war--the people want their own men, and it's
time they had 'em."
Nicholas passed on to Tom's office, and, finding it empty, turned back
to the judge's house, where he found father and son breakfasting
opposite each other at a table bright with silver and chrysanthemums.
They hospitably implored him to join them, but he shook his head,
motioning away the plate which old Cæsar would have laid before him.
"I wanted to ask Tom if he had heard this--this lie about me," he said
quickly.
Tom looked up, flushing warmly.
"Why, who's been such a blamed fool as to tell you?" he demanded.
"You have heard it?"
"It isn't worth hearing. I called Jerry Pollard up at once, and he swore
he was all wrong--the girl herself exonerates you. Nobody believed it."
Nicholas crushed the brim of his hat in a sudden grip.
"Some believe it," he returned slowly. He sat down at the table, smiling
gratefully at the judge's protestations.
"They aren't all like you, sir," he declared. "I wish they were. This
world would be a little nearer heaven--a little less like hell."
There was a trail of lingering bitterness in his voice, and in a moment
he added quickly: "Do you know, I'd like to get away for a time. I've
changed my mind about caring to live here. If they'd send me up to the
legislature next year, I'd make a new beginning."
The judge shook his head.
"I doubt the wisdom of it, my boy," he said. But Tom caught at the
suggestion.
"Send you," he repeated. "Of course; they'll send you from here to
Jericho, if you say so. Why, there's no end to your popularity among
men. Where the ladies are concerned, I modestly admit that I have the
advantage of you; but they can't vote, God bless them!"
"You're welcome to all the good they may bring you, old boy," was
Nicholas's unchivalrous retort.
"Oh, you're jealous, Nick!" twitted Tom gaily. "They don't take kindly
to your carrot locks. Now, I've inherited a way with them, eh, dad?"
The judge complacently buttered his buckwheats. There was a twinkle in
his eyes and a quiver at the corner of his classic mouth.
"It was the only inheritance I wasn't able to squander in my wild oats
days," he returned. "May you cherish it, my boy, as carefully as your
father has done. It would be a dull world without the women."
"And a peaceable one," added Nicholas viciously.
"We owe them much," said the judge, pouring maple syrup from the old
silver jug. "If Helen of Troy set the world at war, she made men
heroes."
"You can't get the pater to acknowledge that the fair things are ever
wrong," put in Tom protestingly. "He would have proved Eve's innocence
to the Almighty. If a woman murdered ten men before his eyes he'd lay
the charge on the devil and acquit her."
The judge shook his head with a laugh.
"I might merely argue that the queen can do no wrong," he suggested.
When Tom had finished his breakfast, Nicholas walked with him to his
office, and, seeing Bessie Pollard, red-eyed and drooping in her
father's door, he lingered an instant and held out his hand. There was
defiant sympathy in his act--disdain of the judgment of
Kingsborough--and of General Battle, who was passing--and pity for a
bruised common thing that looked at him with beautiful, mindless eyes.
"You aren't looking bright to-day," he said kindly, "but things will
pull through, never fear--they always do, if you give them time."
Then he responded coolly to the general's cool nod, and, rejoining Tom,
they went on arm in arm. In his large-minded manhood it had not occurred
to him to connect the girl with the wrong done upon him--he knew her to
be more weak than wicked, and, in her soft, pretty sadness, she reminded
him of a half-drowned kitten.
During the next few months he frequently passed Eugenia in the road.
Sometimes he did not look at her, and again he met her wistful gaze and
spoke without a smile. Once he checked an eager movement towards her
because he had met Bernard just ahead--and he hated him; once he had
seen the carriage in the distance and had waited in a passionate rush
of remorse and love to hear her laughter as she talked with Dudley Webb.
They had faced each other at last with resolute eyes and unswerving
wills. On his side was the pride of an innocent man accused, the
bitterness of a proud man on an inferior plane; on hers, the
recollection of that wild evening in the road, and the belated
recognition of the debt she owed her race.
In the winter she went up to Richmond and he slowly forced himself to
renounce her. He began to see his old dream as it was--an emotional
chimera; a mental madness. As the year grew on he watched his long hope
wither root and branch, until, with the resurrection of the spring, it
lay still because there was no life left that might put forth. And when
his hope was dead he told himself that his unhappiness died with it,
that he might throw himself single-hearted into the work of his life.
VIII
The year passed and was done with--leaves budded, expanded, fell again.
Eugenia watched their growth, fulfilment, and decay as she had watched
them other seasons, though with eyes a thought widened by experience, a
shade darkened by tears. At first she had suffered wildly, then
passively, at last resignedly. The colour rebloomed in her cheek, the
gaiety rang back to her voice, for she was young, and youth is ever
buoyant.
There was work for her to do on the place, and she did it cheerfully.
She studied farming with her father and overhauled the methods of the
overseer, to the man's annoyance and the general's delight. "She tells
me Varly isn't scientific," roared the general with rapturous enjoyment.
"A scientific overseer! She'll be asking for an honest politician next."
"I'm sure Varly is a very respectable man," protested Miss Chris in her
usual position of defence. "The servants were always devoted to him
before the war--that says a good deal."
"There's not a better man in the county," admitted the general, "or a
worse farmer. Here I've let him go down hill at his own gait for more
than thirty years, to be pulled up in the end by a chit of a girl. I
wouldn't, if I were you, Eugie. He's old and he's slow."
"Oh! I'll promise not to hurt him," returned Eugenia. "I save him a lot
of hard work, and he likes it."
She drew on her loose dogskin gloves and went out to overlook the
shucking of the corn.
With the exercise in the open air she had gained in suppleness and
brilliancy. It was the outdoor work that saved her spirit and her
beauty--that gave her endurance for the indoor monotony and magnified
the splendid optimism of her saddest hour. She was a woman born for
happiness; when the Fates failed to accord it she defied them and found
her own.
In the autumn news came that Nicholas was elected to the General
Assembly. The judge brought it, riding out on a bright afternoon to chat
with the general before the blazing logs.
"The lad has a future," said the judge with a touch of pride. "Brains
don't grow on blackberry vines;" then he laughed softly. "Cæsar voted
for him," he added.
The general slapped his knee.
"Cæsar is a gentleman," he exclaimed. "He was the first darkey in
Kingsborough to vote the Democratic ticket. I walked up to the polls
with him and the boys cheered him. You weren't there, George."
The judge shook his head.
"They called it undue influence," he said; "but, on my honour, Tom, I
never spoke a political word to Cæsar in my life. Of course he'd heard
me talk with Tom at dinner. He'd heard me say that the man of his race
who would dare to vote with white men would be head and shoulders above
his people, a man of mind, a man that any gentleman in the county would
be proud to shake by the hand--but seek to influence Cæsar! Never, sir!"
"Now, there's that Ishmael of mine," said the general aggrievedly. "He
no sooner got his vote than he cast it just to spite me. I told the fool
he didn't know any more about voting than the old mule Sairy did, and he
said he didn't have to know 'nothin' cep'n his name.' He forgot that
when they challenged him at the polls, but he voted all the same--voted
in my face, sir."
They lighted their pipes and sang the praises of that idyllic period
which they called "before the war," while Eugenia crept away into the
shadows.
She was glad that Nicholas would go; glad, glad, glad--so glad that she
wept a little in the cold of a dark corner.
A week later Dudley came down, and she met him with a friendliness that
dismayed and disarmed him. Could a woman be so frankly cordial with a
man she loved? Could she face a passion that inspired her with such
serene self-poise? He questioned these things, but he did not hesitate.
He was of a Virginian line of lovers, and he charged in courtship as
courageously as his father had charged in battle. He was magnificent in
his youthful ardour, and so fitted for success that it seemed already to
cast a prophetic halo about his head.
"You are superb," Eugenia had said, half insolently, looking up at him
as he stood in the firelight. "How odd that I never noticed it before."
"You are looking at yourself in my eyes," he returned gallantly.
She shook her head.
"There are so many women who like handsome men, it's a pity you can't
fall in love with one," she said coldly.
"Am I to infer that you prefer ugly men?" he questioned.
"I--oh! I am too good-looking to care," she replied.
She sprang up suddenly and stood beside him. "We do look well together,"
she said with grave audacity.
He laughed. "I am flattered. It may weigh with you in your future plans.
Come, Eugie, let me love you!"
But her mood changed and she dragged him with her out into the autumn
fields.
In the last days of November a long rain came--a ruinous autumnal rain
that beat the white roads into livid streams of mud and sent the sad
dead leaves in shapeless tatters to the earth. The glory of the fall had
brought back the glory of her love; its death revived the agony of the
long decay.
At night the rain throbbed upon the tin roof above her. Sometimes she
would turn upon her pillow, stuffing the blankets about her ears; but,
muffled by the bedclothes, she heard always the incessant melancholy
sound. She heard it beating on the naked roof, rushing tumultuously to
the overflowing pipes, dripping upon the wet stones of the gutter below,
sweeping from the earth dead leaves, dead blossoms, dead desires.
In the day she watched it from the windows. The flower beds, desolated,
formed muddy fountains, the gravel walk was a shining rivulet, the
sycamore held three yellow leaves that clung vainly to a sheltered
bough, the aspen faced her, naked--only the impenetrable gloom of the
cedars was secure--sombre and inviolate.
On the third day she went out into the rain; splashing miles through the
heavy roads and returning with a glow in her cheeks and the savour of
the dampness in her mouth.
Taking off her wet garments she carried them to the kitchen to be dried.
With the needed exercise, her cheerful animation had returned.
In the brick kitchen a gloomy group of negroes surrounded the stove.
"Dar's gwine ter be a flood an' de ea'th hit's gwine ter pass away,"
lamented Aunt Verbeny, lifting the ladle from a huge pot, the contents
of which she was energetically stirring. "Hit's gwine ter pass away wid
de men en de cattle en de crops, en de black folks dey's gwine ter pass
des' de same es dey wuz white."
"I'se monst'ous glad I'se got religion," remarked a strange little negro
woman who had come over to sell a string of hares her husband had shot.
"De Lawd He begun ter git mighty pressin' las' mont', so I let 'im have
His way. Blessed be de name er de Lawd! Is you a church member, Sis
Delphy?"
"Yes, Lawd, a full-breasted member," responded Delphy, clamping the
declivity of her bosom.
"I ain' got much use fur dis yer gittin' en ungittin' er salvation," put
in Uncle Ish from the table where he was eating a late dinner of Aunt
Verbeny's providing. "Dar's too much monkeyin' mixed up wid it fur me.
Hit's too much de work er yo' j'ints ter make me b'lieve hit's gwine ter
salivate yo' soul. When my wife, Mandy, wuz 'live, I tuck 'n cyar'ed her
long up ter one er dese yer revivals, en' ole Sis Saphiry Baker come
'long gittin' happy, en fo' de Lawd she rid 'er clean roun' de chu'ch.
Naw, suh, de religion I wanter lay holt on is de religion uv rest."
"I ain' never sarved my Lawd wid laziness," put in Aunt Verbeny
reprovingly. "When He come arter me I ain' never let de ease er my limbs
stan' in de way. Ef you can't do a little shoutin' on de ea'th, you're
gwineter have er po' sho' ter keep de Lawd f'om overlookin' you at
Kingdom Come."
The strange little woman faced them proudly. "My husband, Silas, got
religion in de night time," she said, "an' he bruck clean thoo de slats.
De bed ain't helt stiddy sence."
Eugenia emerged from the dusk of the doorway, where she had lingered,
and Delphy rose to take the dripping clothes.
"Des' look at her!" exclaimed Aunt Verbeny at the girl's entrance.
"Ain't she a sight ter mek a blin' man see?" Then she added to the
strange little woman, "Dar ain' no lack er beaux roun' yer, needer."
Uncle Ish grunted.
"I ain' seen 'em swum es dey swum roun' Miss Meely," he muttered, while
Aunt Verbeny shook her fist at him behind the stranger's back. "De a'r
wuz right thick wid 'em."
"I reckon dis chile'll be mah'r'd soon es she sets her min' on it,"
returned Delphy indignantly. "She ain' gwineter have ter do much
cuttin' er de eyelashes, needer. De beaux come natch'ul."
"Dar's Marse Dudley, now," said Aunt Verbeny. "I ain' so ole but my
palate hit kin taste a gent'mun a mile off. Marse Dudley ain' furgit de
times I'se done roas' him roas'in' years when he warn' mo'n er chile.
Hit's 'how's yo' health, Aunt Verbeny?' des' de same es 'twuz den."
Eugenia laughed and flung the heap of garments into Delphy's arms. "The
rain's over," she said; "but, Uncle Ish, you'd better get Congo to fix
you up for the night. It is too wet for your rheumatism," and she ran
singing upstairs to where the general was dozing in the sitting-room.
"Wake up, dad! it's going to clear!"
The general started heavily from his sleep. There was a dazed look in
his eyes.
"Clear?" he asked doubtfully, "has it been raining?"
Eugenia shook him into consciousness.
"Raining for three whole days, and I believe you've slept through it.
Now the clouds are breaking."
"What is it the Bible says about 'the winter of our discontent'?--that's
what it is."
"Not the Bible, dear--Shakespeare."
"It's the same thing," retorted the general testily. His speech came
thickly as if he held a pebble in his mouth, and the swollen veins in
his face were livid.
Eugenia bent over him in sudden uneasiness. "Aren't you well, papa?" she
asked. "Is anything the matter?"
The general laughed and pinched her cheek.
"Never better in my life," he declared, "but I'll have to be getting
new glasses. These things aren't worth a cent. Find them, Eugie."
Eugenia picked them up, wiped them on his silk handkerchief, and put
them on his nose.
"You've slept too long," she said. "Come and take a walk in the hall."
She dragged him from his chair, and he yielded under protest.
"You forget that two hundred pounds can't skip about like fifty," he
complained.
But he followed her to the long hall, and they paced slowly up and down
in the afternoon shadows. At the end of ten minutes the general declared
that he felt so well he would go back to his chair.
"I'll get the 'Southern Planter' and read to you," said Eugenia. "Don't
go to sleep."
She ran lightly upstairs and, coming down in a moment, called him. He
did not answer and she called again.
The sitting-room was in dusk, and, as she entered, the firelight showed
the huge body of the general lying upon the hearth rug. A sound of heavy
snoring filled the room.
She flung herself beside him, lifting the great head upon her lap; but
before she had cried out Miss Chris was at her elbow.
"Hush, Eugie," she said quickly, though the girl had not spoken. "Send
Sampson for Dr. Bright, and tell Delphy to bring pillows. Give him to
me."
Her voice was firm, and there was no tremor in her large, helpful hands.
When Eugenia returned, the general was still lying upon the hearth rug,
his head supported by pillows. Miss Chris had opened one of the western
windows, and a cool, damp air filled the room. The rain had begun again,
descending with a soft, purring sound. Above it she heard the laboured
breathing from the hearth rug, and in the firelight she saw the regular
inflation of the swollen cheeks. The distended pupils stared back at
her, void of light.
As she stood motionless, her hands clenched before her, she followed the
soft, weighty tread of Miss Chris, passing to and fro with improvised
applications. The light fall of the rain irritated her; she longed for
the relentless downpour of the night.
At the end of an hour the roll of wheels broke the stillness, and she
went out to meet the doctor, passing, with a shiver, the unconscious
mass on the floor.
They carried him to his bed in the chamber next the parlour, and through
the night and day he lay an inert bulk beneath the bedclothes. Miss
Chris and Eugenia and the servants passed in and out of his room. One of
the dogs came and sat upon the threshold until Eugenia put her arms
about his neck and drew him away. She had not wept; she was white and
drawn and silent, as if the shock had dulled her to insensibility.
During the afternoon of the next day she persuaded Miss Chris to rest,
and, softly closing the door, sat down in a chair beside her father's
bed. It was the high white bed that had known the marriage, birth, and
death of a century of Battles. In it her father was born; beside it,
kneeling at prayer, her mother had died. The stately tester frame had
seen generations come and go, and had remained unchanged. Now its stiff
white curtains made a ghastly drapery above the purple face.
Eugenia sat motionless, her thoughts vaguely circling about the still
figure before her. It was not her father--this she felt profoundly--it
was some strange shape that had taken his place, or she was held by some
farcical nightmare from which she should awake presently with a start.
The half-used glasses on the little table beside her; the candle burned
down in the socket, and overlooked; the tightly corked phials of useless
drugs; the strong odour of mustard from the saucer in which a plaster
had been mixed--these things struck upon her faltering consciousness
with a shock of horrible reality. The odour of the mustard was more real
than the breathing of the body on the bed.
As she sat there, she thought of her mother--the pale, still woman who
had lain beautiful and dead where her father was dying now. She came to
her as from a faded miniature, wistful, holy, at rest--blessed and above
reproach. Her heart went out to her as to one standing near, hidden by
the long white curtains--nearer than Aunt Chris asleep upstairs, nearer
than Bernard, who was coming to her, nearer than the great form on the
bed. Closer than all other things was that spiritual presence. Then she
thought of her old negro mammy, who had died when she was but a
baby--her mother's nurse and hers. She recalled the beloved black face
beneath the snowy handkerchief, the restful bosom in blue homespun, the
tireless arms that had rocked her into slumber. Then of Jim, the dog,
true friend and faithful playmate. All the lives that she had loved and
had been bereft of gathered closer, closer in the gray shadows.
Her gaze passed to the window, seeking in the sad landscape the little
graveyard where they were lying. The rain came between her and the
clouded hill--descending softly and insistently between her eyes and the
end of her search. Against the panes the dripping branches of the
shivering mimosa tree beat themselves and moaned. A chill seized her
and, rising, she went to the hearth, noiselessly piling wood upon the
charred and waning logs, which crumbled and sent up a thin flame. She
hurried to the bed and sat down again, her eyes on the blanket that rose
and fell with the difficult breath. As she looked at the large, familiar
face, tracing its puffed outline and gross colouring, it resolved itself
into her earliest remembrance--throughout her childhood he had been her
slave and she his tyrant. What wish of hers had he ever ignored? With
what demand had he ever failed to comply? At the end of the long life
what had remained to him except herself--the single compensation--the
one reward? The pity of it smote her as with a lash. He had lived with
such fine bravery, and he had had so little--so little, and yet more
than myriads of the men that live and die. That live and die! About her
and beyond her she seemed to hear the rushing of great multitudes--the
passing of the countless souls through the gates of death.
With a cry she threw herself upon her knees, beseeching the dull ears.
* * * * *
Six hours later he died, and when the rain ceased and the sun came out
they buried him beside his wife in the little graveyard. For days after
the funeral Eugenia wandered like a shadow through the still rooms.
Bernard had come and gone, carrying with him his short, sharp grief.
Miss Chris had put aside her own sorrow and gone back to the management
of the house; only the girl, worn, idle, tragic, haunted the reminders
of her loss. Coming upon the general's old slouch hat on the rack, she
had grasped it in sudden passionate longing; at the sight of his
half-filled pipe she had rushed from the room and from the house. The
faint scent of tobacco about the furniture was a continual torture to
her. In the great chamber next the parlour she would sit for hours,
staring at the cold white bed, shivering before the fireless hearth. The
place chilled her like a vault; but she would linger wretchedly until
led away by Miss Chris, when she would sob upon that broad, unselfish
bosom.
December passed; the unsunned earth turned itself for a winter rest.
January came, swift and changeful. With February a snowstorm swept from
the north, driving southward. At first they felt it in the air; then the
swollen clouds chased overhead; at last the white flakes arrived,
falling, falling, falling. Through the night the storm made a glistening
mantle for the darkness; through the day it hid sombre sky and sombre
earth in a spotless veil. It covered the far country to the distant
forests; it weighted the ancient cedars until their green branches bent
to earth; it wrapped the gravelled walk in a winding sheet; it filled
the hollows of the box bushes until they hardened into hills of ice. The
snow was followed by cold winds. The ground froze in the night. Long
icicles formed on the naked trees, the window panes bore a lacework of
frost.
One afternoon, when the landscape was white and hard, Eugenia went out
into the deserted sheep pasture where the dead oak stood. A winter
sunset was burning like a bonfire in the west, and as far as the red
horizon swept an unbroken waste of snow. The rail fences shone silver in
their coat of frost, and from the blackened tree above her pendants of
ice were shot with light. Across the field a flock of gaunt crows flew,
casting purple shadows.
Eugenia leaned against the oak and stared vacantly at the landscape--at
the sunset, and at the waste of snow, across which flitted the demoniac
shadows of the crows. Her eyes saw only the desolation and the death;
they were sealed to the grandeur.
A sense of her own loneliness swept over her with the loneliness of
nature. Her own isolation--the isolation of a strong soul in
pain--walled her apart as with a wall of ice. That assurance of human
companionship on which she had based her future seemed suddenly
annihilated. She was alone and life was before her.
Then, as she turned her gaze, a man's figure broke upon the field of
snow, coming towards her. It was Dudley Webb, and in the resolute swing
of his carriage, in the resistless ardour of his eyes, he seemed to
reach her from east and west, from north and south, surrounding her with
a warmth of summer.
As he looked at her he held out his arms.
"Eugie--poor girl! dear girl!"
In the desolation of her life he stood to her as the hearth of home to
a wanderer in the frozen North.
For an instant she held back, and then, with a sob, she yielded.
"I must be loved," she said. "I must be loved or I shall die."
Around them the winter landscape reddened as the sunset broke, and above
their heads the crows flew, cawing, across the snow.