He awoke the next morning with a glow in his heart which should not be
new to youth, but was new to him. He remembered feeling something rather
like it years before when he had been a little boy and had wakened on the
morning of his birthday and found his mother kissing him and his bed
strewn with gifts.
He went downstairs and, strolling on to the porch, saw Sheba in the
garden. As he went to join her, he found himself in the midst of familiar
paths and growths.
"Why," he exclaimed, stopping before her, "it is the old garden!"
"Yes," Sheba answered; "Uncle Tom made it like this because he loved the
other one. You and I have played in the same garden. Good-morning,"
laughing.
"Good-morning," he said. "It is a good-morning. I--somehow I have been
thinking that when I woke I felt as I used to do when I was a child and
woke on my birthday."
That morning she showed him her domain. To the imaginative boy she led
with her, she seemed like a strange young princess, to whom all the land
belonged. She loved it so and knew so well all it yielded. She showed him
the cool woods where she always found the first spring flowers, the
chestnut and walnut trees where she and Tom gathered their winter supply
of nuts, the places where the wild grapes grew thickest, and those where
the ground was purple-carpeted with violets.
They wandered on together until they reached a hollow in the road, on one
side of which a pine wood sloped up a hillside, looking dark and cool.
"I come here very often," she said, quite simply. "My mother is here."
Then he saw that a little distance above the road a deserted log cabin
stood, and not far from it two or three pine trees had been cut down so
that the sun could shine on a mound over and about which flowers grew. It
was like a little garden in the midst of the silent wildness.
He followed her to the pretty spot, and she knelt down by it and removed
a leaf or a dead flower here and there. The little mound was a snowy mass
of white blossoms standing thick together, and for a yard or so about the
earth was starred with the same flowers.
"You see," she said, "Uncle Tom and I plant new flowers for every month.
Everything is always white. Sometimes it is all lilies of the valley or
white hyacinths, and then it is white roses, and in the autumn white
chrysanthemums. Uncle Tom thought of it when I was a little child, and we
have done it together ever since. We think she knows."
She stopped, and, still kneeling, looked at him as if suddenly
remembering something.
"You have not heard," she said; "she died when I was born, and we do not
even know her name."
"Not her name!" Rupert said; but the truth was that he had heard more of
the story than she had.
"My father was so stunned with grief, that Uncle Tom said he seemed to
think of nothing but that he could not bear to stay. He went away the
very night they laid her here. I suppose," she said slowly, and looking
at the mass of white narcissus instead of at him, "I suppose when people
love each other, and one dies, the other cannot--cannot----"
Rupert saw that she was unconsciously trying to explain something to
herself, and he interposed between her and her thoughts with a hurried
effort.
"Yes, yes," he said; "it must be so. When they love each other and one is
taken, how _can_ the other bear it?"
Then she lifted her eyes from the flowers to his again, and they looked
very large and bright.
"You see," she said, in an unsteady little voice, "I had only been alive
a few hours when he went away."
Suddenly the brightness in her eyes welled up and fell in two large
crystal drops, though a smile quivered on her lips.
"Don't tell Uncle Tom," she said; "I never let him know that it--it hurts
my feelings when I think I had only been alive such a few hours--and
there was nobody to care. I must have been so little. If--if there had
been no Uncle Tom----"
He knelt down by her side and took her hand in his.
"But there was," he said; "there was!"
"Yes," she answered, her sweet face trembling with emotion; "and, oh! I
love him so! I love him so!"
She put her free hand on the earth among the white flowers on the mound.
"And I love her, too," she said; "somehow I know she would not have
forgotten me."
"No, no, she would not!" Rupert cried; and they knelt together, hand in
hand, looking into each other's eyes as tenderly as children.
"I have been lonelier than you," he said; "I have had nobody."
"Your mother died, too, when you were very young?"
"Yes, Sheba," hesitating a moment. "I will tell you something."
"Yes?"
"Uncle Tom loved her. He left his home partly because he could not stay
and see her marry a man who--did not deserve her."
"Did she marry someone like that?" she asked.
His forehead flushed.
"She married my father," he said, "and he was a drunken maniac and broke
her heart. I saw it break. When I first remember her, she was a lovely
young girl with eyes like a gazelle's--and she cried all their beauty
away, and grew tired and old and haggard before I was twelve. He is dead,
but I hate him!"
"Oh!" she said; "you have been lonely!"
"I have been something worse than that!" he answered, and the gloom came
back to his face. "I have been afraid."
"Afraid!" said Sheba. "Of what?"
"That I might end like him. How do I know? It is in my blood."
"Oh, no!" she cried.
"We have nearly all been like that," he said. "He was the maddest of them
all, but he was only like many of the others. We grow tall, we De
Willoughbys, we have black eyes, we drink and we make ourselves insane
with morphine. It's a ghastly thing to think of," he shuddered. "When I
am lonely, I think of it night and day."
"You must not," she said. "I--I will help you to forget it."
"I have often wondered if there was anyone who could," he answered. "I
think perhaps you might."
When they returned to the Cross-roads there were several customers
loitering on the post-office porch, awaiting their arrival, and
endeavouring to wear an air of concealing no object whatever. The
uneventful lives they led year after year made men and women alike avid
for anything of the nature of news or incident. In some mysterious way
the air itself seemed to communicate to them anything of interest which
might be impending. Big Tom had not felt inclined to be diffuse on the
subject of the arrival of his nephew, but each customer who brought in a
pail of butter or eggs, a roll of jeans or a pair of chickens, seemed to
become enlightened at once as to the position of affairs.
"Ye see," Tom heard Doty confiding to a friend as they sat together
outside a window of the store; "ye see, it's this way--the D'Willerbys
was born 'ristycrats. I dunno as ye'd think it to look at Tom. Thar's a
heap _to_ Tom, but he ain't _my_ idee of a 'ristycrat. My idee is thet
mebbe he let out from D'lisleville kase he warn't 'ristycratic enough fur
'em. Thar wus a heap of property in the family, 'pears like. An' now the
hull lot of 'em's dead 'cept this yere boy that come last night. Stamps
hes seen him in D'lisleville, an' he says he's a-stavin' lookin' young
feller, an' thet thar's somethin' about a claim on the Guv'ment thet ef
Tom an' him don't foller up, they're blamed fools. Now Tom, he ain't no
blamed fool. Fur _not_ bein' a blamed fool, I'll back Tom agin any man in
Hamlin."
So, when the two young figures were seen sauntering along the road
towards the store, there were lookers-on enough to regard them with
interest.
"Now _he's_ my idee of a 'ristycrat," remarked Mr. Doty, with the manner
of a connoisseur. "Kinder tall an' slim, an' high-sperrity lookin';
Sheby's a gal, but she's got it too--thet thar sorter racehorse look.
Now, hain't she?"
"I want you to see the store and the people in it," Sheba was saying.
"It's my home, you know. Uncle Tom took me there the day after I was
born. I used to play on the floor behind the counter and near the stove,
and all those men are my friends."
Rupert had never before liked anything so much as he liked the simple
lovingness of this life of hers. As she knew the mountains, the flowers,
and the trees, she knew and seemed known by the very cows and horses and
people she saw.
"That's John Hutton's old gray horse," she had said as she caught sight
of one rider in the distance. "That is Billy Neil's yoke of oxen," at
another time. "Good-morning, Mrs. Stebbins," she called out, with the
prettiest possible cheer, to a woman in an orange cotton skirt as she
passed on the road. "It seems to me sometimes," she said to Rupert, "as
if I belonged to a family that was scattered over miles and lived in
scores of houses. They all used to tell Uncle Tom what would disagree
with me when I was cutting my teeth."
They mounted the steps of the porch, laughing the light, easy laugh of
youth, and the loiterers regarded them with undisguised interest and
admiration. In her pink cotton frock, and blooming like a rose in the
shade of her frilled pink sunbonnet, Sheba was fair to see. Rupert
presented an aspect which was admirably contrasting. His cool pallor and
dense darkness of eyes and hair seemed a delightful background to her
young tints of bloom.
"Thet thar white linen suit o' his'n," Mr. Doty said, "might hev been put
on a-purpose to kinder set off her looks as well as his'n."
It was to Mr. Doty Sheba went first.
"Jake," she said, "this is my cousin Mr. Rupert De Willoughby from
Delisleville."
"Mighty glad to be made 'quainted, sir," said Jake. "Tom's mightily sot
up at yer comin'."
They all crowded about him and went through the same ceremony. It could
scarcely be called a ceremony, it was such a simple and actually
affectionate performance. It was so plain that his young good looks and
friendly grace of manner reached their hearts at once, and that they were
glad that he had come.
"They _are_ glad you have come," Sheba said afterwards. "You are from the
world over there, you know," waving her hand towards the blue of the
mountains. "We are all glad when we see anything from the outside."
"Would you like to go there?" Rupert asked.
"Yes," she answered, with a little nod of her head. "If Uncle Tom will
go--and you."
They spent almost an hour in the store holding a sort of _levee_. Every
newcomer bade the young fellow welcome and seemed to accept him as a sort
of boon.
"He's a mighty good-lookin' young feller," they all said, and the women
added: "Them black eyes o' his'n an' the way his hair kinks is mighty
purty."
"Their feelings will be hurt if you don't stay a little," said Sheba.
"They want to look at you. You don't mind it, do you?"
"No," he answered, laughing; "it delights me. No one ever wanted to look
at me before. But I should hardly think they would want to look at me
when they might look at you instead."
"They have looked at me for eighteen years," she answered. "They looked
at me when I had the measles, and saw me turn purple when I had the
whooping-cough."
As they were going away, they passed a little man who had just arrived
and was hitching to the horse-rail a raw-boned "clay-bank" mare. He
looked up as they neared him and smiled peacefully.
"Howdy?" he said to Rupert. "Ye hain't seen me afore, but I seen you when
I was to Delisleville. It wuz me as told yer nigger ye'd be a fool if ye
didn't get Tom ter help yer to look up thet thar claim. Ye showed horse
sense by comin'. Wish ye luck."
"Uncle Tom," said Sheba, as they sat at their dinner and Mornin walked
backwards and forwards from the kitchen stove to the dining-room with
chicken fried in cream, hot biscuits, and baked yams, "we saw Mr. Stamps
and he wished us luck."
"He has a claim himself, hasn't he?" said Rupert. "He told Matt it was
for a yoke of oxen."
Tom broke into a melodious roar of laughter.
"Well," he said, "if we can do as well by ours as Stamps will do by his,
we shall be in luck. That yoke of oxen has grown from a small beginning.
If it thrives as it goes on, the Government's in for a big thing."
"It has grown from a calf," said Sheba, "and it wasn't six weeks old."
"A Government mule kicked it and broke its leg," said Tom. "Stamps made
veal of it, and in two months it was 'Thet heifer o' mine'--in six months
it was a young steer----"
"Now it's a yoke of oxen," said Rupert; "and they were the pride of the
county."
"Lord! Lord!" said Tom, "the United States has got something to
engineer."