AUDREY OF THE GARDEN
The creek that ran between Fairview and the glebe lands was narrow and
deep; upon it, moored to a stake driven into a bit of marshy ground
below the orchard, lay a crazy boat belonging to the minister. To this
boat, of an early, sunny morning, came Audrey, and, standing erect,
pole in hand, pushed out from the reedy bank into the slow-moving
stream. It moved so slowly and was so clear that its depth seemed
the blue depth of the sky, with now and then a tranquil cloud to be
glided over. The banks were low and of the greenest grass, save where
they sank still lower and reeds abounded, or where some colored bush,
heavy with bloom, bent to meet its reflected image. It was so fair
that Audrey began to sing as she went down the stream; and without
knowing why she chose it, she sang a love song learned out of one of
Darden’s ungodly books, a plaintive and passionate lay addressed by
some cavalier to his mistress of an hour. She sang not loudly, but very
sweetly; carelessly, too, and as if to herself; now and then repeating
a line twice or maybe thrice; pleased with the sweet melancholy of the
notes, but not thinking overmuch of the meaning of the words. They
died upon her lips when Hugon rose from a lair of reeds and called to
her to stop. “Come to the shore, ma’m’selle!” he cried. “See, I have
brought you a ribbon from the town. Behold!” and he fluttered a crimson
streamer.
Audrey caught her breath; then gazed, reassured, at the five yards of
water between her and the bank. Had Hugon stood there in his hunting
dress, she would have felt them no security; but he was wearing his
coat and breeches of fine cloth, his ruffled shirt, and his great black
periwig. A wetting would not be to his mind.
As she answered not, but went on her way, silent now, and with her
slender figure bending with the motion of the pole, he frowned and
shrugged; then took up his pilgrimage, and with his light and swinging
stride kept alongside of the boat. The ribbon lay across his arm,
and he turned it in the sunshine. “If you come not and get it,” he
wheedled, “I will throw it in the water.”
The angry tears sprang to Audrey’s eyes. “Do so, and save me the
trouble,” she answered, and then was sorry that she had spoken.
The red came into the swarthy cheeks of the man upon the bank. “You
love me not,” he said. “Good! You have told me so before. But here I
am!”
“Then here is a coward!” said Audrey. “I do not wish you to walk there.
I do not wish you to speak to me. Go back!”
Hugon’s teeth began to show. “I go not,” he answered, with something
between a snarl and a smirk. “I love you, and I follow on your
path,--like a lover.”
“Like an Indian!” cried the girl.
The arrow pierced the heel. The face which he turned upon her was
the face of a savage, made grotesque and horrible, as war-paint and
feathers could not have made it, by the bushy black wig and the lace
cravat.
“Audrey!” he called. “Morning Light! Sunshine in the Dark! Dancing
Water! Audrey that will not be called ‘mademoiselle’ nor have the
wooing of the son of a French chief! Then shall she have the wooing of
the son of a Monacan woman. I am a hunter. I will woo as they woo in
the woods.”
Audrey bent to her pole, and made faster progress down the creek. Her
heart was hot and angry, and yet she was afraid. All dreadful things,
all things that oppressed with horror, all things that turned one white
and cold, so cold and still that one could not run away, were summed up
for her in the word “Indian.” To her the eyes of Hugon were basilisk
eyes,--they drew her and held her; and when she looked into them, she
saw flames rising and bodies of murdered kindred; then the mountains
loomed above her again, and it was night-time, and she was alone save
for the dead, and mad with fear and with the quiet.
The green banks went by, and the creek began to widen. “Where are you
going?” called the trader. “Wheresoever you go, at the end of your path
stand my village and my wigwam. You cannot stay all day in that boat.
If you come not back at the bidden hour, Darden’s squaw will beat you.
Come over, Morning Light, come over, and take me in your boat, and tie
your hair with my gift. I will not hurt you. I will tell you the French
love songs that my father sang to my mother. I will speak of land that
I have bought (oh, I have prospered, ma’m’selle!), and of a house that
I mean to build, and of a woman that I wish to put in the house,--a
Sunshine in the Dark to greet me when I come from my hunting in the
great forests beyond the falls, from my trading with the nation of the
Tuscaroras, with the villages of the Monacans. Come over to me, Morning
Light!”
The creek widened and widened, then doubled a grassy cape all in the
shadow of a towering sycamore. Beyond the point, crowning the low green
slope of the bank, and topped with a shaggy fell of honeysuckle and
ivy, began a red brick wall. Half way down its length it broke, and six
shallow steps led up to an iron gate, through whose bars one looked
into a garden. Gazing on down the creek past the farther stretch of the
wall, the eye came upon the shining reaches of the river.
Audrey turned the boat’s head toward the steps and the gate in the
wall. The man on the opposite shore let fall an oath.
“So you go to Fair View house!” he called across the stream. “There are
only negroes there, unless”--he came to a pause, and his face changed
again, and out of his eyes looked the spirit of some hot, ancestral
French lover, cynical, suspicious, and jealously watchful--“unless
their master is at home,” he ended, and laughed.
Audrey touched the wall, and over a great iron hook projecting
therefrom threw a looped rope, and fastened her boat.
“I stay here until you come forth!” swore Hugon from across the creek.
“And then I follow you back to where you must moor the boat. And then
I shall walk with you to the minister’s house. Until we meet again,
ma’m’selle!”
Audrey answered not, but sped up the steps to the gate. A sick fear
lest it should be locked possessed her; but it opened at her touch,
disclosing a long, sunny path, paved with brick, and shut between lines
of tall, thick, and smoothly clipped box. The gate clanged to behind
her; ten steps, and the boat, the creek, and the farther shore were
hidden from her sight. With this comparative bliss came a faintness and
a trembling that presently made her slip down upon the warm and sunny
floor, and lie there, with her face within her arm and the tears upon
her cheeks. The odor of the box wrapped her like a mantle; a lizard
glided past her; somewhere in open spaces birds were singing; finally a
greyhound came down the path, and put its nose into the hollow of her
hand.
She rose to her knees, and curled her arm around the dog’s neck; then,
with a long sigh, stood up, and asked of herself if this were the way
to the house. She had never seen the house at close range, had never
been in this walled garden. It was from Williamsburgh that the minister
had taken her to his home, eleven years before. Sometimes from the
river, in those years, she had seen, rising above the trees, the steep
roof and the upper windows; sometimes upon the creek she had gone past
the garden wall, and had smelled the flowers upon the other side.
In her lonely life, with the beauty of the earth about her to teach her
that there might be greater beauty that she yet might see with a daily
round of toil and sharp words to push her to that escape which lay in
a world of dreams, she had entered that world, and thrived therein. It
was a world that was as pure as a pearl, and more fantastic than an
Arabian tale. She knew that when she died she could take nothing out of
life with her to heaven. But with this other world it was different,
and all that she had or dreamed of that was fair she carried through
its portals. This house was there. Long closed, walled in, guarded
by tall trees, seen at far intervals and from a distance, as through
a glass darkly, it had become to her an enchanted spot, about which
played her quick fancy, but where her feet might never stray.
But now the spell which had held the place in slumber was snapped,
and her feet was set in its pleasant paths. She moved down the alley
between the lines of box, and the greyhound went with her. The branches
of a walnut-tree drooped heavily across the way; when she had passed
them she saw the house, square, dull red, bathed in sunshine. A moment,
and the walk led her between squat pillars of living green into the
garden out of the fairy tale.
Dim, fragrant, and old time; walled in; here sunshiny spaces, there
cool shadows of fruit-trees; broken by circles and squares of box;
green with the grass and the leaves, red and purple and gold and
white with the flowers; with birds singing, with the great silver
river murmuring by without the wall at the foot of the terrace, with
the voice of a man who sat beneath a cherry-tree reading aloud to
himself,--such was the garden that she came upon, a young girl, and
heavy at heart.
She was so near that she could hear the words of the reader, and she
knew the piece that he was reading; for you must remember that she was
not untaught, and that Darden had books.
“‘When from the censer clouds of fragrance roll,
And swelling organs lift the rising soul,
One thought of thee puts all the pomp to flight,
Priests, tapers, temples, swim before my sight’”--
The greyhound ran from Audrey to the man who was reading these verses
with taste and expression, and also with a smile half sad and half
cynical. He glanced from his page, saw the girl where she stood against
the dark pillar of the box, tossed aside the book, and went to her down
the grassy path between rows of nodding tulips. “Why, child!” he said.
“Did you come up like a flower? I am glad to see you in my garden,
little maid. Are there Indians without?”
At least, to Audrey, there were none within. She had been angered, sick
at heart and sore afraid, but she was no longer so. In this world that
she had entered it was good to be alive; she knew that she was safe,
and of a sudden she felt that the sunshine was very golden, the music
very sweet. To Haward, looking at her with a smile, she gave a folded
paper which she drew from the bosom of her gown. “The minister sent me
with it,” she explained, and curtsied shyly.
Haward took the paper, opened it, and fell to poring over the crabbed
characters with which it was adorned. “Ay? Gratulateth himself that
this fortunate parish hath at last for vestryman Mr. Marmaduke Haward;
knoweth that, seeing I am what I am, my influence will be paramount
with said vestry; commendeth himself to my favor; beggeth that I listen
not to charges made by a factious member anent a vastly magnified
occurrence at the French ordinary; prayeth that he may shortly present
himself at Fair View, and explain away certain calumnies with which his
enemies have poisoned the ears of the Commissary; hopeth that I am in
good health; and is my very obedient servant to command. Humph!”
He let the paper flutter to the ground, and turned to Audrey with a
kindly smile. “I am much afraid that this man of the church, whom I
gave thee for guardian, child, is but a rascal, after all, and a wolf
in sheep’s clothing. But let him go hang while I show you my garden.”
Going closer, he glanced at her keenly; then went nearer still, and
touched her cheek with his forefinger. “You have been crying,” he said.
“There _were_ Indians, then. How many and how strong, Audrey?”
The dark eyes that met his were the eyes of the child who, in the
darkness, through the corn, had run from him, her helper. “There was
one,” she whispered, and looked over her shoulder.
Haward drew her to the seat beneath the cherry-tree, and there, while
he sat beside her, elbow on knee and chin on hand, watching her, she
told him of Hugon. It was so natural to tell him. When she had made an
end of her halting, broken sentences, and he spoke to her gravely and
kindly, she hung upon his words, and thought him wise and wonderful
as a king. He told her that he would speak to Darden, and did not
despair of persuading that worthy to forbid the trader his house. Also
he told her that in this settled, pleasant, every-day Virginia, and
in the eighteenth century, a maid, however poor and humble, might not
be married against her will. If this half-breed had threats to utter,
there was always the law of the land. A few hours in the pillory or a
taste of the sheriff’s whip might not be amiss. Finally, if the trader
made his suit again, Audrey must let him know, and Monsieur Jean Hugon
should be taught that he had another than a helpless, friendless girl
to deal with.
Audrey listened and was comforted, but the shadow did not quite leave
her eyes. “He is waiting for me now,” she said fearfully to Haward,
who had not missed the shadow. “He followed me down the creek, and
is waiting over against the gate in the wall. When I go back he will
follow me again, and at last I will have to cross to his side. And then
he will go home with me, and make me listen to him. His eyes burn me,
and when his hand touches me I see--I see”--
Her frame shook, and she raised to his gaze a countenance suddenly
changed into Tragedy’s own. “I don’t know why,” she said, in a stricken
voice, “but of them all that I kissed good-by that night I now see
only Molly. I suppose she was about as old as I am when they killed
her. We were always together. I can’t remember her face very clearly;
only her eyes, and how red her lips were. And her hair: it came to
her knees, and mine is just as long. For a long, long time after you
went away, when I could not sleep because it was dark, or when I was
frightened or Mistress Deborah beat me, I saw them all; but now I see
only Molly,--Molly lying there _dead_.”
There was a silence in the garden, broken presently by Haward. “Ay,
Molly,” he said absently.
With his hand covering his lips and his eyes upon the ground, he fell
into a brown study. Audrey sat very still for fear that she might
disturb him, who was so kind to her. A passionate gratitude filled her
young heart; she would have traveled round the world upon her knees to
serve him. As for him, he was not thinking of the mountain girl, the
oread who, in the days when he was younger and his heart beat high,
had caught his light fancy, tempting him from his comrades back to the
cabin in the valley, to look again into her eyes and touch the brown
waves of her hair. She was ashes, and the memory of her stirred him not.
At last he looked up. “I myself will take you home, child. This fellow
shall not come near you. And cease to think of these gruesome things
that happened long ago. You are young and fair; you should be happy. I
will see to it that”--
He broke off, and again looked thoughtfully at the ground. The book
which he had tossed aside was lying upon the grass, open at the poem
which he had been reading. He stooped and raised the volume, and,
closing it, laid it upon the bench beside her. Presently he laughed.
“Come, child!” he said. “You have youth. I begin to think my own not
past recall. Come and let me show you my dial that I have just had put
up.”
There was no load at Audrey’s heart: the vision of Molly had passed;
the fear of Hugon was a dwindling cloud. She was safe in this old sunny
garden, with harm shut without. And as a flower opens to the sunshine,
so because she was happy she grew more fair. Audrey every day, Audrey
of the infrequent speech and the wide dark eyes, the startled air,
the shy, fugitive smiles,--that was not Audrey of the garden. Audrey
of the garden had shining eyes, a wild elusive grace, laughter as
silvery as that which had rung from her sister’s lips, years agone,
beneath the sugar-tree in the far-off blue mountains, quick gestures,
quaint fancies which she feared not to speak out, the charm of mingled
humility and spirit; enough, in short, to make Audrey of the garden a
name to conjure with.
They came to the sun-dial, and leaned thereon. Around its rim were
graved two lines from Herrick, and Audrey traced the letters with her
finger. “The philosophy is sound,” remarked Haward, “and the advice
worth the taking. Let us go see if there are any rosebuds to gather
from the bushes yonder. Damask buds should look well against your hair,
child.”
When they came to the rosebushes he broke for her a few scarce-opened
buds, and himself fastened them in the coils of her hair. Innocent and
glad as she was,--glad even that he thought her fair,--she trembled
beneath his touch, and knew not why she trembled. When the rosebuds
were in place they went to see the clove pinks, and when they had seen
the clove pinks they walked slowly up another alley of box, and across
a grass plot to a side door of the house; for he had said that he must
show her in what great, lonely rooms he lived.
Audrey measured the height and breadth of the house with her eyes. “It
is a large place for one to live in alone,” she said, and laughed.
“There’s a book at the Widow Constance’s; Barbara once showed it to
me. It is all about a pilgrim; and there’s a picture of a great square
house, quite like this, that was a giant’s castle,--Giant Despair. Good
giant, eat me not!”
Child, woman, spirit of the woodland, she passed before him into a dim,
cool room, all littered with books. “My library,” said Haward, with a
wave of his hand. “But the curtains and pictures are not hung, nor the
books in place. Hast any schooling, little maid? Canst read?”
Audrey flushed with pride that she could tell him that she was not
ignorant; not like Barbara, who could not read the giant’s name in the
pilgrim book.
“The crossroads schoolmaster taught me,” she explained. “He has a
scar in each hand, and is a very wicked man, but he knows more than
the Commissary himself. The minister, too, has a cupboard filled with
books, and he buys the new ones as the ships bring them in. When I have
time, and Mistress Deborah will not let me go to the woods, I read. And
I remember what I read. I could”--
A smile trembled upon her lips, and her eyes grew brighter. Fired
by the desire that he should praise her learning, and in her very
innocence bold as a Wortley or a Howe, she began to repeat the lines
which he had been reading beneath the cherry-tree:--
“‘When from the censer clouds of fragrance roll’”--
The rhythm of the words, the passion of the thought, the pleased
surprise that she thought she read in his face, the gesture of his
hand, all spurred her on from line to line, sentence to sentence. And
now she was not herself, but that other woman, and she was giving
voice to all her passion, all her woe. The room became a convent cell;
her ragged dress the penitent’s trailing black. That Audrey, lithe
of mind as of body; who in the woods seemed the spirit of the woods,
in the garden the spirit of the garden, on the water the spirit of
the water,--that this Audrey, in using the speech of the poet, should
embody and become the spirit of that speech was perhaps, considering
all things, not so strange. At any rate, and however her power came
about, at that moment, in Fair View house, a great actress was speaking.
“‘Fresh blooming Hope, gay daughter of the skies,
And Faith’”--
The speaker lost a word, hesitated, became confused. Finally silence;
then the Audrey of a while before, standing with heaving bosom, shy as
a fawn, fearful that she had not pleased him, after all. For if she had
done so, surely he would have told her as much. As it was, he had said
but one word, and that beneath his breath, “_Eloïsa!_”
It would seem that her fear was unfounded; for when he did speak, there
were, God wot, sugar-plums enough. And Audrey, who in her workaday
world was always blamed, could not know that the praise that was so
sweet was less wholesome than the blame.
Leaving the library they went into the hall, and from the hall looked
into great, echoing, half-furnished rooms. All about lay packing-cases,
many of them open, with rich stuffs streaming from them. Ornaments
were huddled on tables, mirrors and pictures leaned their faces to the
walls; everywhere was disorder.
“The negroes are careless, and to-day I held their hands,” said Haward.
“I must get some proper person to see to this gear.”
Up stairs and down they went through the house, that seemed very large
and very still, and finally they came out of the great front door, and
down the stone steps on to the terrace. Below them, sparkling in the
sunshine, lay the river, the opposite shore all in a haze of light. “I
must go home,” Audrey shyly reminded him, whereat he smiled assent, and
they went, not through the box alley to the gate in the wall, but down
the terrace, and out upon the hot brown boards of the landing. Haward,
stepping into a boat, handed her to a seat in the stern, and himself
took the oars. Leaving the landing, they came to the creek and entered
it. Presently they were gliding beneath the red brick wall with the
honeysuckle atop. On the opposite grassy shore, seated in a blaze of
noon sunshine, was Hugon.
They in the boat took no notice. Haward, rowing, spoke evenly on, his
theme himself and the gay and lonely life he had led these eleven
years; and Audrey, though at first sight of the waiting figure she had
paled and trembled, was too safe, too happy, to give to trouble any
part of this magic morning. She kept her eyes on Haward’s face, and
almost forgot the man who had risen from the grass and in silence was
following them.
Now, had the trader, in his hunting shirt and leggings, his moccasins
and fur cap, been walking in the great woods, this silence, even
with others in company, would have been natural enough to his Indian
blood; but Monsieur Jean Hugon, in peruke and laced coat, walking in a
civilized country, with words a-plenty and as hot as fire-water in his
heart, and none upon his tongue, was a figure strange and sinister. He
watched the two in the boat with an impassive face, and he walked like
an Indian on an enemy’s trail, so silently that he scarce seemed to
breathe, so lightly that his heavy boots failed to crush the flowers or
the tender grass.
Haward rowed on, telling Audrey stories of the town, of great men whose
names she knew, and beautiful ladies of whom she had never heard; and
she sat before him with her slim brown hands folded in her lap and
the rosebuds withering in her hair, while through the reeds and the
grass and the bushes of the bank over against them strode Hugon in his
Blenheim wig and his wine-colored coat. Well-nigh together the three
reached the stake driven in among the reeds, a hundred yards below the
minister’s house. Haward fastened the boat, and, motioning to Audrey
to stay for the moment where she was, stepped out upon the bank to
confront the trader, who, walking steadily and silently as ever, was
almost upon them.
But it was broad daylight, and Hugon, with his forest instincts,
preferred, when he wished to speak to the point, to speak in the dark.
He made no pause; only looked with his fierce black eyes at the quiet,
insouciant, fine gentleman standing with folded arms between him and
the boat; then passed on, going steadily up the creek toward the bend
where the water left the open smiling fields and took to the forest.
He never looked back, but went like a hunter with his prey before him.
Presently the shadows of the forest touched him, and Audrey and Haward
were left alone.
The latter laughed. “If his courage is of the quality of his
lace--What, cowering, child, and the tears in your eyes! You were
braver when you were not so tall, in those mountain days. Nay, no need
to wet your shoe.”
He lifted her in his arms, and set her feet upon firm grass. “How long
since I carried you across a stream and up a dark hillside!” he said.
“And yet to-day it seems but yesternight! Now, little maid, the Indian
has run away, and the path to the house is clear.”
* * * * *
In his smoke-filled, untidy best room Darden sat at table, his drink
beside him, his pipe between his fingers, and open before him a book
of jests, propped by a tome of divinity. His wife coming in from the
kitchen, he burrowed in the litter upon the table until he found an
open letter, which he flung toward her. “The Commissary threatens
again, damn him!” he said between smoke puffs. “It seems that t’other
night, when I was in my cups at the tavern, Le Neve and the fellow who
has Ware Creek parish--I forget his name--must needs come riding by.
I was dicing with Paris. Hugon held the stakes. I dare say we kept
not mum. And out of pure brotherly love and charity, my good, kind
gentlemen ride on to Williamsburgh on a tale-bearing errand! Is that
child never coming back, Deborah?”
“She’s coming now,” answered his wife, with her eyes upon the letter.
“I was watching from the upper window. He rowed her up the creek
himself.”
The door opened, and Audrey entered the room. Darden turned heavily in
his chair, and took the long pipe from between his teeth. “Well?” he
said. “You gave him my letter?”
Audrey nodded. Her eyes were dreamy; the red of the buds in her
hair had somehow stolen to her cheeks; she could scarce keep her
lips from smiling. “He bade me tell you to come to supper with him
on Monday,” she said. “And the Falcon that we saw come in last week
brought furnishing for the great house. Oh, Mistress Deborah, the most
beautiful things! The rooms are all to be made fine; and the negro
women do not the work aright, and he wants some one to oversee them.
He says that he has learned that in England Mistress Deborah was own
woman to my Lady Squander, and so should know about hangings and china
and the placing of furniture. And he asks that she come to Fair View
morning after morning until the house is in order. He wishes me to
come, too. Mistress Deborah will much oblige him, he says, and he will
not forget her kindness.”
Somewhat out of breath, but very happy, she looked with eager eyes
from one guardian to the other. Darden emptied and refilled his pipe,
scattering the ashes upon the book of jests. “Very good,” he said
briefly.
Into the thin visage of the ex-waiting-woman, who had been happier
at my Lady Squander’s than in a Virginia parsonage, there crept a
tightened smile. In her way, when she was not in a passion, she was
fond of Audrey; but, in temper or out of temper, she was fonder of the
fine things which for a few days she might handle at Fair View house.
And the gratitude of the master thereof might appear in coins, or in
an order on his store for silk and lace. When, in her younger days, at
Bath or in town, she had served fine mistresses, she had been given
many a guinea for carrying a note or contriving an interview, and in
changing her estate she had not changed her code of morals. “We must
oblige Mr. Haward, of course,” she said complacently. “I warrant you
that I can give things an air! There’s not a parlor in this parish that
does not set my teeth on edge! Now at my Lady Squander’s”--She embarked
upon reminiscences of past splendor, checked only by her husband’s
impatient demand for dinner.
Audrey, preparing to follow her into the kitchen, was stopped, as she
would have passed the table, by the minister’s heavy hand. “The roses
at Fair View bloom early,” he said, turning her about that he might
better see the red cluster in her hair. “Look you, Audrey! I wish you
no great harm, child. You mind me at times of one that I knew many
years ago, before ever I was chaplain to my Lord Squander or husband
to my Lady Squander’s waiting-woman. A hunter may use a decoy, and he
may also, on the whole, prefer to keep that decoy as good as when ’twas
made. Buy not thy roses too dearly, Audrey.”
To Audrey he spoke in riddles. She took from her hair the loosened
buds, and looked at them lying in her hand. “I did not buy them,” she
said. “They grew in the sun on the south side of the great house, and
Mr. Haward gave them to me.”