Devil. One man was paddling at the stern; another was stretched on a
couch, with his head on a pillow placed at the bow, where he could see
the blossoming network above through his closed eyes. As Carl had said,
Scipio had left a trail all the way--a broken branch, a bent reed, or a
shred of cloth tied to the lily-leaves. All through the still day they
glided on, the canoe moving without a sound on the bosom of the dark
stream. They passed under the gray and solemn cypresses, rising without
branches to an enormous height, their far foliage hidden by the moss,
which hung down thickly in long flakes, diffusing the sunshine and
making it silvery like mist; in the silver swung the air-plants, great
cream-colored disks, and wands of scarlet, crowded with little buds,
blossoms that looked like butterflies, and blossoms that looked like
humming-birds, and little dragon-heads with grinning faces. Then they
came to the region of the palms; these shot up, slender and graceful,
and leaned over the stream, the great aureum-ferns growing on their
trunks high in the air. Beneath was a firmer soil than in the domain of
the cypresses, and here grew a mat of little flowers, each less than a
quarter of an inch wide, close together, pink, blue, scarlet, yellow,
purple, but never white, producing a hue singularly rich, owing to the
absence of that colorless color which man ever mingles with his floral
combinations, and strangely makes sacred alike to the bridal and to
death. Great vines ran up the palms, knotted themselves, and came down
again, hand over hand, wreathed in little fresh leaves of exquisite
green. Birds with plumage of blush-rose pink flew slowly by; also some
with scarlet wings, and the jeweled paroquets. The great Savannah cranes
stood on the shore, and did not stir as the boat moved by. And, as the
spring was now in its prime, the alligators showed their horny heads
above water, and climbed awkwardly out on the bank; or else, swimming by
the side of the canoe, accompanied it long distances, no doubt moved by
dull curiosity concerning its means of locomotion, and its ideas as to
choice morsels of food. The air was absolutely still; no breeze reached
these blossoming aisles; each leaf hung motionless. The atmosphere was
hot, and heavy with perfumes. It was the heart of the swamp, a riot of
intoxicating, steaming, swarming, fragrant, beautiful, tropical life,
without man to make or mar it. All the world was once so, before man was
made.
Did Deal appreciate this beauty? He looked at it, because he could not
get over the feeling that Carl was looking at it too; but he did not
admire it. The old New England spirit was rising within him again at
last, after the crushing palsy of the polar ice, and the icy looks of a
certain blue-eyed woman.
He came out of the swamp an hour before sunset, and, landing, lifted his
brother in his arms, and started northward toward San Miguel. The little
city was near; but the weight of a dead body grown cold is strange and
mighty, and it was late evening before he entered the gate, carrying his
motionless burden. He crossed the little plaza, and went into the
ancient cathedral, laying it down on the chancel-step before the high
altar. It was the only place he could think of; and he was not repelled.
A hanging lamp of silver burned dimly; in a few moments kind hands came
to help him. And thus Carl, who never went to church in life, went there
in death, and, with tapers burning at his head and feet, rested all
night under the picture of the Madonna, with nuns keeping watch and
murmuring their gentle prayers beside him.
The next morning he was buried in the dry little burial-ground on the
knoll overlooking the blue Southern ocean.
When all was over, Deal, feeling strangely lonely, remembered his
promise, and turned toward the post-office. He expected nothing; it was
only one of the poor lad's fancies; still, he would keep his word. There
was nothing for him.
He went out. Then an impulse made him turn back and ask if there was a
letter for Carl. "For Carl Brenner," he said, and thought how strange it
was that there was now no Carl. There was a letter; he put it into his
pocket and left the town, going homeward by the King's Road on foot; the
South Devil should see _him_ no more. He slept part of the night by the
roadside, and reached home the next morning; everything was as he had
left it. He made a fire and boiled some coffee; then he set the little
house in order, loaded his gun, and went out mechanically after game.
The routine of daily life had begun again.
"It's a pleasant old place," he said to himself, as he went through one
of the orange-aisles and saw the wild oranges dotting the ground with
their golden color. "It's a pleasant old place," he repeated, as he
went out into the hot, still sunshine beyond. He filled his game-bag,
and sat down to rest a while before returning. Then for the first time
he remembered the letter, and drew it forth. This was the letter Carl
meant; Carl asked him to get it after he was dead; he must have
intended, then, that he, Mark, should read it. He opened it, and looked
at the small, slanting handwriting without recognizing it. Then from the
inside a photograph fell out, and he took it up; it was Leeza. On the
margin was written, "For Mark."
She had written; but, womanlike, not, as Carl expected, to Mark.
Instead, she had written to Carl, and commissioned _him_ to tell
Mark--what? Oh, a long story, such as girls tell, but with the point
that, after all, she "liked" (liked?) Mark best. Carl's letter had been
blunt, worded with unflattering frankness. Leeza was tired of her own
coquetries, lonely, and poor; she wrote her foolish little apologizing,
confessing letter with tears in her blue eyes--those blue eyes that
sober, reticent Mark Deal could not forget.
Carl had gone to San Miguel, then, to mail a letter--a letter which had
brought this answer! Mark, with his face in his hands, thanked God that
he had not spoken one harsh word to the boy for what had seemed
obstinate disobedience, but had tended him gently to the last.
Then he rose, stretched his arms, drew a long breath, and looked around.
Everything seemed altered. The sky was brassy, the air an oven. He
remembered the uplands where the oats grew, near Exton; and his white
sand-furrows seemed a ghastly mockery of fields. He went homeward and
drew water from his well to quench his burning thirst; it was tepid, and
he threw it away, recalling as he did so the spring under the cool,
brown rocks where he drank when a boy. A sudden repugnance came over him
when his eyes fell on the wild oranges lying on the ground, over-ripe
with rich, pulpy decay; he spurned them aside with his foot, and thought
of the firm apples in the old orchard, a fruit cool and reticent, a
little hard, too, not giving itself to the first comer. Then there came
over him the hue of Northern forests in spring, the late, reluctant
spring of Exton; and the changeless olive-green of the pine barrens grew
hideous in his eyes. But, most of all, there seized him a horror of the
swamp--a horror of its hot steaming air, and its intoxicating perfume,
which reached him faintly even where he stood; it seemed to him that if
he staid long within their reach his brain would be affected as Carl's
had been, and that he should wander within and die. For there would be
no one to rescue _him_.
So strong was this new feeling, like a giant full armed, that he started
that very night, carrying his gun and Carl's violin, and a knapsack of
clothes on his back, and leaving his other possessions behind. Their
value was not great, but they made a princely home for the mongrel, who
came over after he had departed, looked around stealthily, stole several
small articles, and hastened away; came back again after a day or two,
and stole a little more; and finally, finding the place deserted,
brought back all his spoil and established himself there permanently,
knowing full well that it would be long before Monteano's would find
another tenant from the North.
As Mark Deal passed across the King's Road Bridge over the Branch (now
soon to be sainted), he paused, and looked down into the north border of
South Devil. Then he laid aside his gun and the violin, went off that
way, and gathered a large bunch of swamp blossoms. Coming into San
Miguel, he passed through the town and out to the little burial-ground
beyond. Here he found the new-made grave, and laid the flowers upon it.
"He will like them because they come from _there_," was his thought.
Then, with a buoyant step, he started up the long, low, white peninsula,
set with its olive-woods in a sapphire sea; and his face was turned
northward.
IN THE COTTON COUNTRY.
The loveliest land that smiles beneath the sky,
The coast-land of our western Italy.
I view the waters quivering; quaff the breeze,
Whose briny raciness keeps an under taste
Of flavorous tropic sweets, perchance swept home
From Cuba's perfumed groves and garden spiceries.
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE.
Call on thy children of the hill,
Wake swamp and river, coast and rill,
Rouse all thy strength, and all thy skill,
Carolina!
Tell how the patriot's soul was tried,
And what his dauntless breast defied;
How Rutledge ruled and Laurens died,
Carolina!
HENRY TIMROD.
Do you know the cotton country--the country of broad levels open to the
sun, where the ungainly, ragged bushes stand in long rows, bearing the
clothing of a nation on their backs? Not on their backs either, for the
white wool is scattered over the branches and twigs, looking, not as if
it grew there, but as if it had been blown that way, and had caught and
clung at random. When I first came to the cotton country, I used to
stand with my chin on the top-rail of the fences, trying to rid my eyes
of that first impression. I saw the fields only when the cotton was
white, when there were no green leaves left, and the fleecy down did not
seem to me a vegetable at all. Starved cows passed through the
half-plucked rows untempted, and I said to myself: "Of course. Cows do
not eat cotton any more than they eat wool; but what bush is there at
the North that they would not nibble if starving?" Accustomed to the
trim, soldierly ranks of the Western corn-fields, or the billowy grace
of the wheat, I could think of nothing save a parade of sturdy beggarmen
unwillingly drawn up in line, when I gazed upon the stubborn, uneven
branches, and generally lop-sided appearance of these plants--plants,
nevertheless, of wealth, usefulness, and historic importance in the
annals of our land. But after a while I grew accustomed to their
contrary ways, and I even began to like their defiant wildness, as a
contrast, perhaps, to the languorous sky above, the true sky of the
cotton country, with its soft heat, its hazy air, and its divine
twilight that lingers so long. I always walked abroad at sunset, and it
is in the sunset-light that I always see the fields now when far away.
No doubt there was plenty of busy, prosaic reality down there in the
mornings, but I never saw it; I only saw the beauty and the fancies that
come with the soft after-glow and the shadows of the night.
Down in the cotton country the sun shines steadily all day long, and the
earth is hot under your feet. There are few birds, but at nightfall the
crows begin to fly home in a long line, going down into the red west as
though they had important messages to deliver to some imprisoned
princess on the edge of the horizon. One day I followed the crows. I
said to myself: "The princess is a _ruse_; they probably light not far
from here, and I am going to find their place. The crows at home--that
would be something worth seeing." Turning from the path, I went
westward. "What!" said a country-woman, meeting Wordsworth on the road,
"are ye stepping westward, sir?" I, too, stepped westward.
Field after field I crossed; at last the fences ceased, and only old
half-filled ditches marked the boundary-lines. The land sloped downward
slightly, and after a while the ridge behind me seemed like a line of
heights, the old cotton-plants on its top standing out as distinctly as
single pine-trees on a mountain-summit outlined against the sky; so
comparative is height. The crows still flew westward as I came out upon
a second level lower down than the first, and caught a golden gleam
through the fringe of bushes in the middle of the plain. I had
unwittingly found the river at last, that broad, brown river that I knew
was down there somewhere, although I had not seen it with my bodily
eyes. I had full knowledge of what it was, though, farther south toward
the ocean; I knew the long trestles over the swamps and dark canebrakes
that stretched out for miles on each side of the actual stream--trestles
over which the trains passed cautiously every day, the Northern
passengers looking nervously down at the quaking, spongy surface below,
and prophesying accidents as certain some time--when they were not on
board. Up here in the cotton country, however, the river was more
docile; there were no tides to come up and destroy the banks, and with
the exception of freshets the habits of the stream were orderly. The
levels on each side might have been, should have been, rich with plenty.
Instead, they were uncultivated and desolate. Here and there a wild,
outlawed cotton-bush reared its head, and I could trace the old line of
the cart-road and cross-tracks; but the soil was spongy and
disintegrated, and for a long time evidently no care had been bestowed
upon it. I crossed over to the river, and found that the earth-bank
which had protected the field was broken down and washed away in many
places; the low trees and bushes on shore still held the straws and
driftwood that showed the last freshet's high-water mark.
The river made an irregular bend a short distance below, and I strolled
that way, walking now on the thick masses of lespedeza that carpeted the
old road-track, and now on the singularly porous soil of the level, a
soil which even my inexperienced eyes recognized as worthless, all its
good particles having been drained out of it and borne away on the
triumphant tide of the freshets. The crows still evaded me, crossing the
river in a straight line and flying on toward the west, and, in that
arbitrary way in which solitary pedestrians make compacts with
themselves, I said, "I will go to that tree at the exact turn of the
bend, and not one step farther." I went to that tree at the exact turn
of the bend, and then I went--farther; for I found there one solemn,
lonely old house. Now, if there had been two, I should not have gone on;
I should not have broken my compact. Two houses are sociable and
commonplace; but one all alone on a desolate waste like that inspired me
with--let us call it interest, and I went forward.
It was a lodge rather than a house; in its best day it could never have
been more than a very plain abode, and now, in its worst, it seemed to
have fallen into the hands of Giant Despair. "Forlorn" was written over
its lintels, and "without hope" along its low roof-edge. Raised high
above the ground, in the Southern fashion, on wooden supports, it seemed
even more unstable than usual to Northern eyes, because the
lattice-work, the valance, as it were, which generally conceals the
bare, stilt-like underpinning, was gone, and a thin calf and some
melancholy chickens were walking about underneath, as though the place
was an arbor. There was a little patch of garden, but no grass, no
flowers; everything was gray, the unpainted house, the sand of the
garden-beds, and the barren waste stretching away on all sides. At first
I thought the place was uninhabited, but as I drew nearer a thin smoke
from one of the chimneys told of life within, and I said to myself that
the life would be black-skinned life, of course. For I was quite
accustomed now to finding the families of the freedmen crowded into just
such old houses as this, hidden away in unexpected places; for the
freedmen hardly ever live up on the even ground in the broad sunshine as
though they had a right there, but down in the hollows or out into the
fringes of wood, where their low-roofed cabins, numerous though they may
be, are scarcely visible to the passer-by. There was no fence around
this house; it stood at large on the waste as though it belonged there.
Take away the fence from a house, and you take away its respectability;
it becomes at once an outlaw. I ascended the crazy, sunken steps that
led to the front door, and lifted the knocker that hung there as if in
mockery; who ever knocked there now save perhaps a river-god with his
wet fingers as he hurried by, mounted on the foaming freshet, to ravage
and lay waste again the poor, desolate fields? But no spirit came to the
door, neither came the swarm of funny little black faces I had expected;
instead, I saw before me a white woman, tall, thin, and gray-haired.
Silently she stood there, her great, dark eyes, still and sad, looking
at me as much as to say, "By what right are you here?"
"Excuse me, madam," was my involuntary beginning; then I somewhat
stupidly asked for a glass of water.
"I would not advise you to drink the water we have here; it is not
good," replied the woman. I knew it was not; the water is never good
down on the levels. But I was very stupid that day.
"I should like to rest a while," was my next attempt. It brought out a
wooden chair, but no cordiality. I tried everything I could think of in
the way of subjects for conversation, but elicited no replies beyond
monosyllables. I could not very well say, "Who are you, and how came you
here?" and yet that was exactly what I wanted to know. The woman's face
baffled me, and I do not like to be baffled. It was a face that was old
and at the same time young; it had deep lines, it was colorless, and the
heavy hair was gray; and still I felt that it was not old in years, but
that it was like the peaches we find sometimes on the ground, old,
wrinkled, and withered, yet showing here and there traces of that
evanescent bloom which comes before the ripeness. The eyes haunted me;
they haunt me now, the dry, still eyes of immovable, hopeless grief. I
thought, "Oh, if I could only help her!" but all I said was, "I fear I
am keeping you standing"; for that is the senseless way we human
creatures talk to each other.
Her answer was not encouraging.
"Yes," she replied, in her brief way, and said no more.
I felt myself obliged to go.
But the next afternoon I wandered that way again, and the next, and the
next. I used to wait impatiently for the hour when I could enter into
the presence of her great silence. How still she was! If she had wept,
if she had raved, if she had worked with nervous energy, or been
resolutely, doggedly idle, if she had seemed reckless, or callous, or
even pious; but no, she was none of these. Her old-young face was ever
the same, and she went about her few household tasks in a steady,
nerveless manner, as though she could go on doing them for countless
ages, and yet never with the least increase of energy. She swept the
room, for instance, every day, never thoroughly, but in a gentle,
incompetent sort of way peculiarly her own; yet she always swept it and
never neglected it, and she took as much time to do it as though the
task was to be performed with microscopic exactness.
She lived in her old house alone save for the presence of one child, a
boy of six or seven years--a quiet, grave-eyed little fellow, who played
all by himself hour after hour with two little wooden soldiers and an
empty spool. He seldom went out of the house; he did not seem to care
for the sunshine or the open air as other children care, but gravely
amused himself in-doors in his own quiet way. He did not make his wooden
soldiers talk or demolish each other triumphantly, according to the
manner of boys; but he marshaled them to and fro with slow
consideration, and the only sound was the click of their little muskets
as he moved them about. He seemed never to speak of his own accord; he
was strangely silent always. I used to wonder if the two ever talked
together playfully as mother and child should talk; and one day,
emboldened by a welcome, not warmer, for it was never warm, but not
quite so cold perhaps, I said:
"Your little son is very quiet, madam."
"He is not my son."
"Ah!" I replied, somewhat disconcerted. "He is a pretty child; what is
his name?"
"His name is John."
The child heard us in his barren corner, but did not look up or speak;
he made his two soldiers advance solemnly upon the spool in silence,
with a flank movement. I have called the corner barren, because it
seemed doubly so when the boy sat there. The poorest place generally
puts on something of a homelike air when a little child is in it; but
the two bare walls and angle of bare floor remained hopelessly empty and
desolate. The room was large, but there was nothing in it save the two
wooden chairs and a table; there was no womanly attempt at a rag-carpet,
curtains for the windows, or newspaper pictures for the walls--none of
those little contrivances for comfort with which women generally adorn
even the most miserable abiding-places, showing a kind of courage which
is often pathetic in its hopefulness. Here, however, there was nothing.
A back-room held a few dishes, some boxes and barrels, and showed on its
cavernous hearth the ashes of a recent fire. "I suppose they sleep in a
third bare room somewhere, with their two beds, no doubt, standing all
alone in the center of the chamber; for it would be too human, of
course, to put them up snugly against the wall, as anybody else would
do," I said to myself.
In time I succeeded in building up a sort of friendship with this
solitary woman of the waste, and in time she told me her story. Let me
tell it to you. I have written stories of imagination, but this is a
story of fact, and I want you to believe it. It is true, every word of
it, save the names given, and, when you read it, you whose eyes are now
upon these lines, stop and reflect that it is only one of many
life-stories like unto it. "War is cruelty," said our great general. It
is. It must be so. But shall we not, we women, like Sisters of Charity,
go over the field when the battle is done, bearing balm and wine and oil
for those who suffer?
"Down here in the cotton country we were rich once, madam; we were
richer than Northerners ever are, for we toiled not for our money,
neither took thought for it; it came and we spent it; that was all. My
father was Clayton Cotesworth, and our home was twenty miles from here,
at the Sand Hills. Our cotton-lands were down on these river-levels;
this was one of our fields, and this house was built for the overseer;
the negro-quarters that stood around it have been carried off piecemeal
by the freedmen." (Impossible to put on paper her accentuation of this
title.) "My father was an old man; he could not go to battle himself,
but he gave first his eldest son, my brother James. James went away from
earth at Fredericksburg. It was in the winter, and very cold. How often
have I thought of that passage, 'And pray ye that your flight be not in
the winter,' when picturing his sufferings before his spirit took
flight! Yes, it was very cold for our Southern boys; the river was full
of floating ice, and the raw wind swept over them as they tried to throw
up intrenchments on the heights. They had no spades, only pointed
sticks, and the ground was frozen hard. Their old uniforms, worn thin by
hard usage, hung in tatters, and many of them had no shoes; the skin of
their poor feet shone blue, or glistening white, like a dead man's skin,
through the coverings of rags they made for themselves as best they
could. They say it was a pitiful sight to see the poor fellows sitting
down in the mornings, trying to adjust these rag-wrappings so that they
would stay in place, and fastening them elaborately with their carefully
saved bits of string. He was an honored man who invented a new way. My
brother was one of the shoe-less; at the last, too, it seems that he had
no blanket, only a thin counterpane. When night came, hungry and tired
as he was, he could only wrap himself in that and lie down on the cold
ground to wait for morning. When we heard all this afterward, we said,
'Blessed be the bullet that put him out of his misery!' for poor James
was a delicate boy, and had been accustomed to loving, watchful care all
his life. Yet, oh, if I could only know that he was warm once, just
once, before he died! They told us he said nothing after he was shot
save 'How cold! How cold!' They put his poor, stiff body hastily down
under the sod, and then the brigade moved on; 'no man knoweth his
sepulchre unto this day.'