A QUESTION OF COLORS
Evelyn, seated at her toilette table, and in the hands of Mr. Timothy
Green, hairdresser in ordinary to Williamsburgh, looked with unseeing
eyes at her own fair reflection in the glass before her. Chloe, the
black handmaiden who stood at the door, latch in hand, had time to grow
tired of waiting before her mistress spoke. “You may tell Mr. Haward
that I am at home, Chloe. Bring him here.”
The hairdresser drew a comb through the rippling brown tresses and
commenced his most elaborate arrangement, working with pursed lips, and
head bent now to this side, now to that. He had been a hard-pressed
man since sunrise, and the lighting of the Palace candles that night
might find him yet employed by some belated dame. Evelyn was very pale,
and shadows were beneath her eyes. Moved by a sudden impulse, she took
from the table a rouge pot, and hastily and with trembling fingers
rubbed bloom into her cheeks; then the patch box,--one, two, three
Tory partisans. “Now I am less like a ghost,” she said, “Mr. Green, do
I not look well and merry, and as though my sleep had been sound and
dreamless?”
In his high, cracked voice, the hairdresser was sure that, pale or
glowing, grave or gay, Mistress Evelyn Byrd would be the toast at the
ball that night. The lady laughed, for she heard Haward’s step upon the
landing. He entered to the gay, tinkling sound, tent over the hand she
extended, then, laying aside hat and cane, took his seat beside the
table.
“‘Fair tresses man’s imperial race insnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair,’”
he quoted, with a smile. Then: “Will you take our hearts in blue
to-night, Evelyn? You know that I love you best in blue.”
She lifted her fan from the table, and waved it lightly to and fro.
“I go in rose color,” she said. “’Tis the gown I wore at Lady Rich’s
rout. I dare say you do not remember it? But my Lord of Peterborough
said”--She broke off, and smiled to her fan.
Her voice was sweet and slightly drawling. The languid turn of the
wrist, the easy grace of attitude, the beauty of bared neck and tinted
face, of lowered lids and slow, faint smile,--oh, she was genuine
fine lady, if she was not quite Evelyn! A breeze blowing through the
open windows stirred their gay hangings of flowered cotton; the black
girl sat in a corner and sewed; the supple fingers of the hairdresser
went in and out of the heavy hair; roses in a deep blue bowl made the
room smell like a garden. Haward sighed, so pleasant was it to sit
quietly in this cool chamber, after the glare and wavering of the world
without. “My Lord of Peterborough is magnificent at compliments,” he
said kindly, “but ’twould be a jeweled speech indeed that outdid your
deserving, Evelyn. Come, now, wear the blue! I will find you white
roses; you shall wear them for a breast knot, and in the minuet return
me one again.”
Evelyn waved her fan. “I dance the minuet with Mr. Lee.” Her tone was
still sweetly languid, her manner most indifferent. The thick and
glossy tress that, drawn forward, was to ripple over white neck and
bosom was too loosely curled. She regarded it in the mirror with an
anxious frown, then spoke of it to the hairdresser.
Haward, smiling, watched her with heavy-lidded eyes. “Mr. Lee is a
fortunate gentleman,” he said. “I may gain the rose, perhaps, in the
country dance?”
“That is better,” remarked the lady, surveying with satisfaction the
new-curled lock. “The country dance? For that Mr. Lightfoot hath my
promise.”
“It seems that I am a laggard,” said Haward.
The knocker sounded below. “I am at home, Chloe,” announced the
mistress; and the slave, laying aside her work, slipped from the room.
Haward played with the trifles upon the dressing table. “Wherein have I
offended, Evelyn?” he asked, at last.
The lady arched her brows, and the action made her for the moment very
like her handsome father. “Why, there is no offense!” she cried. “An
old acquaintance, a family friend! I step a minuet with Mr. Lee; I
stand up for a country dance with Mr. Lightfoot; I wear pink instead of
blue, and have lost my liking for white roses,--what is there in all
this that needs such a question? Ah, you have broken my silver chain!”
“I am clumsy to-day!” he exclaimed. “A thousand pardons!” He let the
broken toy slip from his fingers to the polished surface of the table,
and forgot that it was there. “Since Colonel Byrd (I am sorry to learn)
keeps his room with a fit of the gout, may I--an old acquaintance, a
family friend--conduct you to the Palace to-night?”
The fan waved on. “Thank you, but I go in our coach, and need no
escort.” The lady yawned, very delicately, behind her slender fingers;
then dropped the fan, and spoke with animation: “Ah, here is Mr. Lee!
In a good hour, sir! I saw the bracelet that you mended for Mistress
Winston. Canst do as much for my poor chain here? See! it and this
silver heart have parted company.”
Mr. Lee kissed her hand, and took snuff with Mr. Haward; then, after an
ardent speech crammed with references to Vulcan and Venus, chains that
were not slight, hearts that were of softer substance, sat down beside
this kind and dazzling vision, and applied his clever fingers to the
problem in hand. He was a personable young gentleman, who had studied
at Oxford, and who, proudly conscious that his tragedy of Artaxerxes,
then reposing in the escritoire at home, much outmerited Haward’s
talked-of comedy, felt no diffidence in the company of the elder fine
gentleman. He rattled on of this and that, and Evelyn listened kindly,
with only the curve of her cheek visible to the family friend. The
silver heart was restored to its chain; the lady smiled her thanks; the
enamored youth hitched his chair some inches nearer the fair whom he
had obliged, and, with his hand upon his heart, entered the realm of
high-flown speech. The gay curtains waved; the roses were sweet; black
Chloe sewed and sewed; the hairdresser’s hands wove in and out, as
though he were a wizard making passes.
Haward rose to take his leave. Evelyn yielded him her hand; it was
cold against his lips. She was nonchalant and smiling; he was easy,
unoffended, admirably the fine gentleman. For one moment their eyes
met. “I had been wiser,” thought the man, “I had been wiser to have
myself told her of that brown witch, that innocent sorceress! Why
something held my tongue I know not. Now she hath read my idyl, but all
darkened, all awry.” The woman thought: “Cruel and base! You knew that
my heart was yours to break, cast aside, and forget!”
Out of the house the sunlight beat and blinded. Houses of red brick,
houses of white wood; the long, wide, dusty Duke of Gloucester Street;
gnarled mulberry-trees broad-leafed against a September sky, deeply,
passionately blue; glimpses of wood and field,--all seemed remote
without distance, still without stillness, the semblance of a dream,
and yet keen and near to oppression. It was a town of stores, of
ordinaries and public places; from open door and window all along Duke
of Gloucester Street came laughter, round oaths, now and then a scrap
of drinking song. To Haward, giddy, ill at ease, sickening of a fever,
the sounds were now as a cry in his ear, now as the noise of a distant
sea. The minister of James City parish and the minister of Ware Creek
were walking before him, arm in arm, set full sail for dinner after a
stormy morning. “For lo! the wicked prospereth!” said one, and “Fair
View parish bound over to the devil again!” plained the other. “He’s
firm in the saddle; he’ll ride easy to the day he drinks himself to
death, thanks to this sudden complaisance of Governor and Commissary!”
“Thanks to”--cried the other sourly, and gave the thanks where they
were due.
Haward heard the words, but even in the act of quickening his pace to
lay a heavy hand upon the speaker’s shoulder a listlessness came upon
him, and he forbore. The memory of the slurring speech went from him;
his thoughts were thistledown blown hither and yon by every vagrant
air. Coming to Marot’s ordinary he called for wine; then went up the
stair to his room, and sitting down at the table presently fell asleep,
with his head upon his arms.
After a while the sounds from the public room below, where men were
carousing, disturbed his slumber. He stirred, and awoke refreshed. It
was afternoon, but he felt no hunger, only thirst, which he quenched
with the wine at hand. His windows gave upon the Capitol and a green
wood beyond; the waving trees enticed, while the room was dull and the
noises of the house distasteful. He said to himself that he would walk
abroad, would go out under the beckoning trees and be rid of the town.
He remembered that the Council was to meet that afternoon. Well, it
might sit without him! He was for the woods, where dwelt the cool winds
and the shadows deep and silent.
A few yards, and he was quit of Duke of Gloucester Street; behind him,
porticoed Capitol, gaol, and tiny vineclad debtor’s prison. In the
gaol yard the pirates sat upon a bench in the sunshine, and one smoked
a long pipe, and one brooded upon his irons. Gold rings were in their
ears, and their black hair fell from beneath colored handkerchiefs
twisted turbanwise around their brows. The gaoler watched them,
standing in his doorway, and his children, at play beneath a tree,
built with sticks a mimic scaffold, and hanged thereon a broken puppet.
There was a shady road leading through a wood to Queen’s Creek and the
Capitol Landing, and down this road went Haward. His step was light;
the dullness, the throbbing pulses, the oppression of the morning, had
given way to a restlessness and a strange exaltation of spirit. Fancy
was quickened, imagination heightened; to himself he seemed to see the
heart of all things. Across his mind flitted fragments of verse,--now
a broken line just hinting beauty, now the pure passion of a lovely
stanza. His thoughts went to and fro, mobile as the waves of the sea;
but firm as the reefs beneath them stood his knowledge that presently
he was going back to Fair View. To-morrow, when the Governor’s ball
was over, when he could decently get away, he would leave the town;
he would go to his house in the country. Late flowers bloomed in his
garden; the terrace was fair above the river; beneath the red brick
wall, on the narrow little creek shining like a silver highway, lay a
winged boat; and the highway ran past a glebe house; and in the glebe
house dwelt a dryad whose tree had closed against her. Audrey!--a fair
name. Audrey, Audrey!--the birds were singing it; out of the deep,
Arcadian shadows any moment it might come, clearly cried by satyr, Pan,
or shepherd. Hark! there was song--
It was but a negro on the road behind, singing to himself as he went
about his master’s business. The voice was the voice of the race,
mellow, deep, and plaintive; perhaps the song was of love in a burning
land. He passed the white man, and the arching trees hid him, but the
wake of music was long in fading. The road leading through a cool and
shady dell, Haward left it, and took possession of the mossy earth
beneath a holly-tree. Here, lying on the ground, he could see the road
through the intervening foliage; else the place had seemed the heart of
an ancient wood.
It was merry lying where were glimpses of blue sky, where the leaves
quivered and a squirrel chattered and a robin sang a madrigal. Youth
the divine, half way down the stair of misty yesterdays, turned upon
his heel and came back to him. He pillowed his head upon his arm, and
was content. It was well to be so filled with fancies, so iron of will,
so headstrong and gay; to be friends once more with a younger Haward,
with the Haward of a mountain pass, of mocking comrades and an irate
Excellency.
From the road came a rumble of oaths. Sailors, sweating and straining,
were rolling a very great cask of tobacco from a neighboring warehouse
down to the landing and some expectant sloop. Haward, lying at ease,
smiled at their weary task, their grunting and swearing; when they were
gone, smiled at the blankness of the road. All things pleased. There
was food for mirth in the call of a partridge, in the inquisitive gaze
of a squirrel, in the web of a spider gaoler to a gilded fly. There
was food for greater mirth in the appearance on the road of a solitary
figure in a wine-colored coat and bushy black peruke.
Haward sat up. “Ha, Monacan!” he cried, with a laugh, and threw a stick
to attract the man’s attention.
Hugon turned, stood astare, then left the road and came down into the
dell.
“What fortune, trader?” smiled Haward. “Did your traps hold in the
great forest? Were your people easy to fool, giving twelve deerskins
for an old match-coat? There is charm in a woodsman life. Come, tell me
of your journeys, dangers, and escapes.”
The half-breed looked down upon him with a twitching face. “What
hinders me from killing you now?” he demanded, with a backward look at
the road. “None may pass for many minutes.”
Haward lay back upon the moss, with his hands locked beneath his head.
“What indeed?” he answered calmly. “Come, here is a velvet log, fit
seat for an emperor--or a sachem; sit and tell me of your life in the
woods. For peace pipe let me offer my snuffbox.” In his mad humor
he sat up again, drew from his pocket, and presented with the most
approved flourish, his box of chased gold. “Monsieur, c’est le tabac
pour le nez d’un inonarque,” he said lazily.
Hugon sat down upon the log, helped himself to the mixture with a grand
air, and shook the yellow dust from his ruffles. The action, meant to
be airy, only achieved fierceness. From some hidden sheath he drew a
knife, and began to strip from the log a piece of bark. “Tell me, you,”
he said. “Have you been to France? What manner of land is it?”
“A gay country,” answered Haward; “a land where the men are all white,
and where at present, periwigs are worn much shorter than the one
monsieur affects.”
“He is a great brave, a French gentleman? Always he kills the man he
hates?”
“Not always,” said the other. “Sometimes the man he hates kills him.”
By now one end of the piece of bark in the trader’s hands was shredded
to tinder. He drew from his pocket his flint and steel, and struck a
spark into the frayed mass. It flared up, and he held first the tips
of his fingers, then the palm of his hand, then his bared forearm, in
the flame that licked and scorched the flesh. His face was perfectly
unmoved, his eyes unchanged in their expression of hatred. “Can he do
this?” he asked.
“Perhaps not,” said Haward lightly. “It is a very foolish thing to do.”
The flame died out, and the trader tossed aside the charred bit of
bark. “There was old Pierre at Monacan-Town who taught me to pray to
_le bon Dieu_. He told me how grand and fine is a French gentleman,
and that I was the son of many such. He called the English great pigs,
with brains as dull and muddy as the river after many rains. My mother
was the daughter of a chief. She had strings of pearl for her neck, and
copper for her arms, and a robe of white doeskin, very soft and fine.
When she was dead and my father was dead, I came from Monacan-Town to
your English school over yonder. I can read and write. I am a white man
and a Frenchman, not an Indian. When I go to the villages in the woods,
I am given a lodge apart, and the men and women gather to hear a white
man speak.... You have done me wrong with that girl, that Ma’m’selle
Audrey that I wish for wife. We are enemies: that is as it should be.
You shall not have her,--never, never! But you despise me; how is that?
That day upon the creek, that night in your cursed house, you laughed”--
The Haward of the mountain pass, regarding the twitching face opposite
him and the hand clenched upon the handle of a knife, laughed again. At
the sound the trader’s face ceased to twitch. Haward felt rather than
saw the stealthy tightening of the frame, the gathering of forces, the
closer grasp upon the knife, and flung out his arm. A hare scurried
past, making for the deeper woods. From the road came the tramp of a
horse and a man’s voice, singing,--
“‘To all you ladies now on land’”--
while an inquisitive dog turned aside from the road, and plunged into
the dell.
The rider, having checked his horse and quit his song in order to call
to his dog, looked through the thin veil of foliage and saw the two men
beneath the holly-tree. “Ha, Jean Hugon!” he cried. “Is that you? Where
is that packet of skins you were to deliver at my store? Come over
here, man!”
The trader moistened his dry lips with his tongue, and slipped the
knife back into its sheath. “Had we been a mile in the woods,” he said,
“you would have laughed no more.”
Haward watched him go. The argument with the rider was a lengthy one.
He upon horseback would not stand still in the road to finish it, but
put his beast into motion. The trader, explaining and gesticulating,
walked beside his stirrup; the voices grew fainter and fainter,--were
gone. Haward laughed to himself; then, with his eyes raised to the
depth on depth of blue, serene beyond the grating of thorn-pointed
leaves, sent his spirit to his red brick house and silent, sunny
garden, with the gate in the ivied wall, and the six steps down to the
boat and the lapping water.
The shadows lengthened, and a wind of the evening entered the wood.
Haward shook off the lethargy that had kept him lying there for the
better part of an afternoon, rose to his feet, and left the green dell
for the road, all shadow now, winding back to the toy metropolis, to
Marot’s ordinary, to the ball at the Palace that night.
The ball at the Palace!--he had forgotten it. Flare of lights, wail
of violins, a painted, silken crowd, laughter, whispers, magpie
chattering, wine, and the weariness of the dance, when his soul would
long to be with the night outside, with the rising wind and the shining
stars. He half determined not to go. What mattered the offense that
would be taken? Did he go he would repent, wearied and ennuyé, watching
Evelyn, all rose-colored, moving with another through the minuet;
tied himself perhaps to some pert miss, or cornered in a card-room by
boisterous gamesters, or, drinking with his peers, called on to toast
the lady of his dreams. Better the dull room at Marot’s ordinary,
or better still to order Mirza, and ride off at the planter’s pace,
through the starshine, to Fair View. On the river bank before the store
MacLean might be lying, dreaming of a mighty wind and a fierce death.
He would dismount, and sit beside that Highland gentleman, Jacobite
and strong man, and their moods would chime as they had chimed before.
Then on to the house and to the eastern window! Not to-night, but
to-morrow night, perhaps, would the darkness be pierced by the calm
pale star that marked another window. It was all a mistake, that month
at Westover,--days lost and wasted, the running of golden sands ill to
spare from Love’s brief glass....
His mood had changed when, with the gathering dusk, he entered his room
at Marot’s ordinary. He would go to the Palace that night; it would be
the act of a boy to fling away through the darkness, shirking a duty
his position demanded. He would go and be merry, watching Evelyn in the
gown that Peterborough had praised.
When Juba had lighted the candles, he sat and drank and drank again of
the red wine upon the table. It put maggots in his brain, fired and
flushed him to the spirit’s core. An idea came, at which he laughed.
He bade it go, but it would not. It stayed, and his fevered fancy
played around it as a moth around a candle. At first he knew it for
a notion, bizarre and absurd, which presently he would dismiss. All
day strange thoughts had come and gone, appearing, disappearing, like
will-o’-the-wisps for which a man upon a firm road has no care. Never
fear that he will follow them! He sees the marsh, that it has no
footing. So with this Jack-o’-lantern conception,--it would vanish as
it came.
It did not so. Instead, when he had drunken more wine, and had sat for
some time methodically measuring, over and over again, with thumb and
forefinger, the distance from candle to bottle, and from bottle to
glass, the idea began to lose its wildfire aspect. In no great time it
appeared an inspiration as reasonable as happy. When this point had
been reached, he stamped upon the floor to summon his servant from the
room below. “Lay out the white and gold, Juba,” he ordered, when the
negro appeared, “and come make me very fine. I am for the Palace,--I
and a brown lady that hath bewitched me! The white sword knot, sirrah;
and cock my hat with the diamond brooch”--
It was a night that was thronged with stars, and visited by a
whispering wind. Haward, walking rapidly along the almost deserted
Nicholson Street, lifted his burning forehead to the cool air and
the star-strewn fields of heaven. Coming to the gate by which he had
entered the afternoon before, he raised the latch and passed into the
garden. By now his fever was full upon him, and it was a man scarce
to be held responsible for his actions that presently knocked at the
door of the long room where, at the window opening upon Palace Street,
Audrey sat with Mistress Stagg and watched the people going to the ball.