UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE
In the moment in which she sprang to her feet she saw that it was
not Hugon, and her heart grew calm again. In her torn gown, with her
brown hair loosed from its fastenings, and falling over her shoulders
in heavy waves whose crests caught the sunlight, she stood against
the tree beneath which she had lain, gazed with wide-open eyes at the
intruder, and guessed from his fine coat and the sparkling toy looping
his hat that he was a gentleman. She knew gentlemen when she saw them:
on a time one had cursed her for scurrying like a partridge across the
road before his horse, making the beast come nigh to unseating him;
another, coming upon her and the Widow Constance’s Barbara gathering
fagots in the November woods, had tossed to each a sixpence; a third,
on vestry business with the minister, had touched her beneath the chin,
and sworn that an she were not so brown she were fair; a fourth, lying
hidden upon the bank of the creek, had caught her boat head as she
pushed it into the reeds, and had tried to kiss her. They had certain
ways, had gentlemen, but she knew no great harm of them. There was
one, now--but he would be like a prince. When at eventide the sky was
piled with pale towering clouds, and she looked, as she often looked,
down the river, toward the bay and the sea beyond, she always saw this
prince that she had woven--warp of memory, woof of dreams--stand erect
in the pearly light. There was a gentleman indeed!
As to the possessor of the title now slowly and steadily making his way
toward her she was in a mere state of wonder. It was not possible that
he had lost his way; but if so, she was sorry that, in losing it, he
had found the slender zigzag of her path. A trustful child,--save where
Hugon was concerned,--she was not in the least afraid, and being of a
friendly mind looked at the approaching figure with shy kindliness, and
thought that he must have come from a distant part of the country. She
thought that had she ever seen him before she would have remembered it.
Upon the outskirts of the ring, clear of the close embrace of flowering
bush and spreading vine. Haward paused, and looked with smiling eyes at
this girl of the woods, this forest creature that, springing from the
earth, had set its back against the tree.
“Tarry awhile,” he said. “Slip not yet within the bark. Had I known, I
should have brought oblation of milk and honey.”
“This is the thicket between Fair View and the glebe lands,” said
Audrey, who knew not what bark of tree and milk and honey had to do
with the case. “Over yonder, sir, is the road to the great house. This
path ends here; you must go back to the edge of the wood, then turn to
the south”--
“I have not lost my way,” answered Haward, still smiling. “It is
pleasant here in the shade, after the warmth of the open. May I not sit
down upon the leaves and talk to you for a while? I came out to find
you, you know.”
As he spoke, and without waiting for the permission which he asked,
he crossed the rustling leaves, and threw himself down upon the earth
between two branching roots. Her skirt brushed his knee; with a
movement quick and shy she put more distance between them, then stood
and looked at him with wide, grave eyes. “Why do you say that you came
here to find me?” she asked. “I do not know you.”
Haward laughed, nursing his knee and looking about him. “Let that pass
for a moment. You have the prettiest woodland parlor, child! Tell me,
do they treat you well over there?” with a jerk of his thumb toward the
glebe house. “Madam the shrew and his reverence the bully, are they
kind to you? Though they let you go like a beggar maid,”--he glanced
kindly enough at her bare feet and torn gown,--“yet they starve you
not, nor beat you, nor deny you aught in reason?”
Audrey drew herself up. She had a proper pride, and she chose to
forget for this occasion a bruise upon her arm and the thrusting
upon her of Hugon’s company. “I do not know who you are, sir, that
ask me such questions,” she said sedately. “I have food and shelter
and--and--kindness. And I go barefoot only of week days”--
It was a brave beginning, but of a sudden she found it hard to go on.
She felt his eyes upon her and knew that he was unconvinced, and into
her own eyes came the large tears. They did not fall, but through
them she saw the forest swim in green and gold. “I have no father or
mother,” she said, “and no brother or sister. In all the world there is
no one that is kin to me.”
Her voice, that was low and full and apt to fall into minor cadences,
died away, and she stood with her face raised and slightly turned from
the gentleman who lay at her feet, stretched out upon the sere beech
leaves. He did not seem inclined to speech, and for a time the little
brook and the birds and the wind in the trees sang undisturbed.
“These woods are very beautiful,” said Haward at last, with his gaze
upon her, “but if the land were less level it were more to my taste.
Now, if this plain were a little valley couched among the hills, if to
the westward rose dark blue mountains like a rampart, if the runlet
yonder were broad and clear, if this beech were a sugar-tree”--
He broke off, content to see her eyes dilate, her bosom rise and fall,
her hand go trembling for support to the column of the beech.
“Oh, the mountains!” she cried. “When the mist lifted, when the cloud
rested, when the sky was red behind them! Oh, the clear stream, and the
sugar-tree, and the cabin! Who are you? How did you know about these
things? Were you--were you there?”
She turned upon him, with her soul in her eyes. As for him, lying at
length upon the ground, he locked his hands beneath his head and began
to sing, though scarce above his breath. He sang the song of Amiens:--
“Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me.”
When he had come to the end of the stanza he half rose, and turned
toward the mute and breathless figure leaning against the beech-tree.
For her the years had rolled back: one moment she stood upon the
doorstep of the cabin, and the air was filled with the trampling of
horses, with quick laughter, whistling, singing, and the call of a
trumpet; the next she ran, in night-time and in terror, between rows of
rustling corn, felt again the clasp of her pursuer, heard at her ear
the comfort of his voice. A film came between her eyes and the man at
whom she stared, and her heart grew cold.
“Audrey,” said Haward, “come here, child.”
The blood returned to her heart, her vision cleared, and her arm fell
from its clasp upon the tree. The bark opened not; the hamadryad had
lost the spell. When at his repeated command she crossed to him, she
went as the trusting, dumbly loving, dumbly grateful child whose life
he had saved, and whose comforter, protector, and guardian he had been.
When he took her hands in his she was glad to feel them there again,
and she had no blushes ready when he kissed her upon the forehead. It
was sweet to her who hungered for affection, who long ago had set his
image up, loving him purely as a sovereign spirit or as a dear and
great elder brother, to hear him call her again “little maid;” tell her
that she had not changed save in height; ask her if she remembered this
or that adventure, what time they had strayed in the woods together.
Remember! When at last, beneath his admirable management, the wonder
and the shyness melted away, and she found her tongue, memories came
in a torrent. The hilltop, the deep woods and the giant trees, the
house he had built for her out of stones and moss, the grapes they
had gathered, the fish they had caught, the thunderstorm when he had
snatched her out of the path of a stricken and falling pine, an alarm
of Indians, an alarm of wolves, finally the first faint sounds of the
returning expedition, the distant trumpet note, the nearer approach,
the bursting again into the valley of the Governor and his party, the
journey from that loved spot to Williamsburgh,--all sights and sounds,
thoughts and emotions, of that time, fast held through lonely years,
came at her call, and passed again in procession before them. Haward,
first amazed, then touched, reached at length the conclusion that the
years of her residence beneath the minister’s roof could not have been
happy; that she must always have put from her with shuddering and
horror the memory of the night which orphaned her; but that she had
passionately nursed, cherished, and loved all that she had of sweet and
dear, and that this all was the memory of her childhood in the valley,
and of that brief season when he had been her savior, protector,
friend, and playmate. He learned also--for she was too simple and
too glad either to withhold the information or to know that she had
given it--that in her girlish and innocent imaginings she had made of
him a fairy knight, clothing him in a panoply of power, mercy, and
tenderness, and setting him on high, so high that his very heel was
above the heads of the mortals within her ken.
Keen enough in his perceptions, he was able to recognize that here was
a pure and imaginative spirit, strongly yearning after ideal strength,
beauty, and goodness. Given such a spirit, it was not unnatural that,
turning from sordid or unhappy surroundings as a flower turns from
shadow to the full face of the sun, she should have taken a memory
of valiant deeds, kind words, and a protecting arm, and have created
out of these a man after her own heart, endowing him with all heroic
attributes; at one and the same time sending him out into the world,
a knight-errant without fear and without reproach, and keeping him by
her side--the side of a child--in her own private wonderland. He saw
that she had done this, and he was ashamed. He did not tell her that
that eleven-years-distant fortnight was to him but a half-remembered
incident of a crowded life, and that to all intents and purposes she
herself had been forgotten. For one thing, it would have hurt her;
for another, he saw no reason why he should tell her. Upon occasion
he could be as ruthless as a stone; if he were so now he knew it
not, but in deceiving her deceived himself. Man of a world that was
corrupt enough, he was of course quietly assured that he could bend
this woodland creature--half child, half dryad--to the form of his
bidding. To do so was in his power, but not his pleasure. He meant to
leave her as she was; to accept the adoration of the child, but to
attempt no awakening of the woman. The girl was of the mountains, and
their higher, colder, purer air; though he had brought her body thence,
he would not have her spirit leave the climbing earth, the dreamlike
summits, for the hot and dusty plain. The plain, God knew, had dwellers
enough.
She was a thing of wild and sylvan grace, and there was fulfillment
in a dark beauty all her own of the promise she had given as a child.
About her was a pathos, too,--the pathos of the flower taken from its
proper soil, and drooping in earth which nourished it not. Haward,
looking at her, watching the sensitive, mobile lips, reading in the
dark eyes, beneath the felicity of the present, a hint and prophecy
of woe, felt for her a pity so real and great that for the moment his
heart ached as for some sorrow of his own. She was only a young girl,
poor and helpless, born of poor and helpless parents dead long ago.
There was in her veins no gentle blood; she had none of the world’s
goods; her gown was torn, her feet went bare. She had youth, but not
its heritage of gladness: beauty, but none to see it; a nature that
reached toward light and height, and for its home the house which he
had lately left. He was a man older by many years than the girl beside
him, knowing good and evil; by instinct preferring the former, but at
times stooping, open-eyed, to that degree of the latter which a lax
and gay world held to be not incompatible with a convention somewhat
misnamed “the honor of a gentleman.” Now, beneath the beech-tree in the
forest which touched upon one side the glebe, upon the other his own
lands, he chose at this time the good; said to himself, and believed
the thing he said, that in word and in deed he would prove himself her
friend.
Putting out his hand he drew her down upon the leaves; and she sat
beside him, still and happy, ready to answer him when he asked her
this or that, readier yet to sit in blissful, dreamy silence. She was
as pure as the flower which she held in her hand, and most innocent
in her imaginings. This was a very perfect knight, a great gentleman,
good and pitiful, that had saved her from the Indians when she was a
little girl, and had been kind to her,--ah, so kind! In that dreadful
night when she had lost father and mother and brother and sister, when
in the darkness her childish heart was a stone for terror, he had come,
like God, from the mountains, and straightway she was safe. Now into
her woods, from over the sea, he had come again, and at once the load
upon her heart, the dull longing and misery, the fear of Hugon, were
lifted. The chaplet which she laid at his feet was not loosely woven of
gay-colored flowers, but was compact of austerer blooms of gratitude,
reverence, and that love which is only a longing to serve. The glamour
was at hand, the enchanted light which breaks not from the east or the
west or the north or the south was upon its way; but she knew it not,
and she was happy in her ignorance.
“I am tired of the city,” he said. “Now I shall stay in Virginia. A
longing for the river and the marshes and the house where I was born
came upon me”--
“I know,” she answered. “When I shut my eyes I see the cabin in the
valley, and when I dream it is of things which happen in a mountainous
country.”
“I am alone in the great house,” he continued, “and the floors echo
somewhat loudly. The garden, too; beside myself there is no one
to smell the roses or to walk in the moonlight. I had forgotten
the isolation of these great plantations. Each is a province and a
despotism. If the despot has neither kith nor kin, has not yet made
friends, and cares not to draw company from the quarters, he is lonely.
They say that there are ladies in Virginia whose charms well-nigh
outweigh their dowries of sweet-scented and Oronoko. I will wed such an
one, and have laughter in my garden, and other footsteps than my own in
my house.”
“There are beautiful ladies in these parts,” said Audrey. “There is the
one that gave me the guinea for my running yesterday. She was so very
fair. I wished with all my heart that I were like her.”
“She is my friend,” said Haward slowly, “and her mind is as fair as her
face. I will tell her your story.”
The gilded streak upon the earth beneath the beech had crept away,
but over the ferns and weeds and flowering bushes between the slight
trees without the ring the sunshine gloated. The blue of the sky was
wonderful, and in the silence Haward and Audrey heard the wind whisper
in the treetops. A dove moaned, and a hare ran past.
“It was I who brought you from the mountains and placed you here,” said
Haward at last. “I thought it for the best, and that when I sailed away
I left you to a safe and happy life. It seems that I was mistaken. But
now that I am at home again, child, I wish you to look upon me, who am
so much your elder, as your guardian and protector still. If there is
anything which you lack, if you are misused, are in need of help, why,
think that your troubles are the Indians again, little maid, and turn
to me once more for help!”
Having spoken honestly and well and very unwisely, he looked at his
watch and said that it was late. When he rose to his feet Audrey did
not move, and when he looked down upon her he saw that her eyes, that
had been wet, were overflowing. He put out his hand, and she took it
and touched it with her lips; then, because he said that he had not
meant to set her crying, she smiled, and with her own hand dashed away
the tears.
“When I ride this way I shall always stop at the minister’s house,”
said Haward, “when, if there is aught which you need or wish, you must
tell me of it. Think of me as your friend, child.”
He laid his hand lightly and caressingly upon her head. The ruffles
at his wrist, soft, fine, and perfumed, brushed her forehead and her
eyes. “The path through your labyrinth to its beechen heart was hard
to find,” he continued, “but I can easily retrace it. No, trouble not
yourself, child. Stay for a time where you are. I wish to speak to the
minister alone.”
His hand was lifted. Audrey felt rather than saw him go. Only a few
feet, and the dogwood stars, the purple mist of the Judas-tree, the
white fragrance of a wild cherry, came like a painted arras between
them. For a time she could hear the movement of the branches as he put
them aside; but presently this too ceased, and the place was left to
her and to all the life that called it home.
It was the same wood, surely, into which she had run two hours before,
and yet--and yet--When her tears were spent, and she stood up, leaning,
with her loosened hair and her gown that was the color of oak bark,
against the beech-tree, she looked about her and wondered. The wonder
did not last, for she found an explanation.
“It has been blessed,” said Audrey, with all reverence and simplicity,
“and that is why the light is so different.”