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THE SHADOW
by
MARY WHITE OVINGTON
Author of "Half a Man"
New York
Harcourt, Brace and Howe
1920
Copyright, 1920, by
Harcourt, Brace and Howe, Inc.
The Quinn & Boden Company
Rahway. N. J.
TO
MY MOTHER
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
I THE PINES
II KATHLEEN
III DICK
IV THE LIVE OAKS
THE SHADOW
PROLOGUE
When George Ogilvie, distinguished Judge of Palmetto County, Florida,
read of the death in the papers--the quick death after the surgeon's
knife--he felt glad and inexpressibly relieved. To play the part of
avenger was sadly out of keeping with his gentle temperament. His wife
could have done it without a qualm but since this was not permitted her
she would in time have forced the role upon him. Fate, however, had
taken her revenge without using him as her instrument, and the man who
had brought disgrace into his home had slipped from the world honored by
his associates, without visible taint upon his career. Remembering this,
the Judge's sense of relief changed to a desire to play the familiar
role, to sit himself upon the throne of justice and pronounce sentence
upon this fresh-faced, laughing, persuasive criminal. Would he at the
Most High Tribunal be given his full penalty?
But this autumn night, as the wind howled about the old house shaking
the windows in their frames, as the rain tore the leaves from the
branches and beat them upon the sodden ground, he almost wished the lad
was alive again. He would then find some way to tie the loose, careless
life to the life that it had maimed, to the life it had brought into
existence. In this driving storm of circumstance that a week since had
hurled a human being out of the world and last night had brought a
second to take its place, he found himself helpless. His long career, a
career in which he had decided with quiet assurance the guilt or
innocence of men and women standing fearful before him, was of no
assistance. This was not another man's problem but his own. He poured
himself a drink from the old, ruby-glass decanter upon the sideboard,
and found his hand trembling so that the liquor was spilled upon the
cloth. His head swirled with the swirling leaves that the rain tore from
their sockets. All that he had believed and preached was taken from him
by his own world's tragic storm.
In the south room, however, it was peaceful and quiet. The wind spent
its strength in the north, and here one could listen to the creak of the
chair as the old nurse rocked slowly back and forth. Near her, on the
bed, upon her back, was a young girl. Her curling brown hair lay a braid
on either side of her delicate face. Her eyes were closed, but not in
sleep, for every now and then she would move her right arm as though to
draw something toward her. At length, opening her eyes, and looking to
the far corner of the room, she said: "Mammy, I want it."
The old colored woman left her seat and walked to where a cradle stood.
"Not right now, lil' lamb."
"Why not?"
"It done sleep now."
The girl turned upon her side and, crooking her arm, rested her head
within it. She listened, her brow slightly wrinkled, to the rain as it
beat upon the roof of the gallery.
Presently: "Why doesn't it cry, mammy?"
"Ain't I tole yer, chile, it done sleep. Ain't I tole yer?"
Downstairs the man of the house had stepped across the hall and joined a
little thin old gentleman who sat close to a blazing fire.
"Doctor!"
"Yes, George."
"Remember Lillias when you gave her to me, eighteen years ago?"
"What of it?"
"Nothing. How helpless she was. I reckon all baby things are helpless."
In lowered voice: "That baby upstairs now. It seems worse being a girl."
The doctor made no reply, but crouched by the fire.
"It's up to us what their lives shall be, eh? Queen or beggar maid."
The man of the house looked forlornly at his silent visitor. "Have a
drink?" he asked suddenly. "I'll get you one. Julia fixed it mighty well
getting the servants out of the way, but it don't make for hospitality."
Turning on him, the doctor raised his head and said, querulously: "Stop
talking, can't you, man, and think. What are you going to do?"
What was he going to do? He, Judge Ogilvie, did not know what he was
going to do. He looked helplessly into his friend's eyes.
Rising wearily the doctor went toward the door.
"You aren't going?" the man of the house cried in alarm.
"Yes, for a little. I've other work to do."
"See here, don't leave us like this! Supposing anything happens."
"Nothing should happen; only remember she is very weak. I should fear a
shock."
"But what are we going to do?"
"Talk with your wife." The doctor spoke with a note of command. "I'm not
the one to say what you should do." He pulled on his coat and, turning,
held out his hand to his friend. "I'll be back soon," he said more
gently. "I'll be with you through the night."
Then he opened the door upon the howling wind and rain and was gone.
Judge Ogilvie walked back into the living-room to see his wife standing
before the open fire.
She was a small woman, with a small, hard mouth. Usually it was firmly
set, but to-night it trembled with her trembling chin. The judge noted
that the old dress she wore, long discarded, was wet; that her hair lay
damp against her forehead. Her hands, too, were wet, as she held them
out to the flames.
"Where's the doctor?" she asked.
"Gone, for a little."
"And Lillias?"
"She has been quiet for some time. But you have been with her; you
should know."
"No," the woman answered, "I have been acting for Lillias while you two
have gaped and talked and risked her future with every hour. Something
has been done."
"Yes?" The man of the house found his heart beating fast, but he put his
question quietly, deliberately. "You have had many plans. Which have you
used?"
"I've hidden it; hidden her shame. It can never cross her path in this
world."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, I've not committed murder." She clenched her trembling hands
together. "Not that it mightn't be the best thing. But it's buried,
buried. You will never see it again."
"Buried?"
"Buried from the world into which it was born. Hidden in the sure way
that one in the South can hide. I did it myself," she went on in a
whisper. "I put some money in its dress and carried it in my arms that
no one might know. I went through the alleys over the slippery road. The
blacks' cabin was empty, and I hid it on the bed."
"God! A white child! And you did this thing!"
The man of the house for a moment faced his wife as judge.
"Yes," she answered, looking full into his stern face. "I left it there.
And I was right, I was right! You wanted to do something to hide the
disgrace. You said you did, you and the doctor both. But you talked and
talked, and sat here by the fire. Well, something is done now. We've
saved our daughter from disgrace. Let the baby begin an outcast. It's
better than becoming one at eighteen."
Then of a sudden her strength left her, and she fell, sobbing, into a
chair.
"You'll tell her, George?" she asked after a few moments. "She will know
it's for the best. But you are so quiet and gentle, and she must have no
shock."
"Yes," he answered slowly, "she must have no shock, but she will mind
very much. If she cries bitterly, may I bring it back?"
"No, no!" His wife faced him in arms again. And then, more quietly, "For
her sake, no."
"For her sake," he repeated to himself, and left the room.
As he walked up the stairs a great dog rose from where it lay in the
hallway and, following, rubbed his nose in his master's hand.
"Go back!" he commanded as he reached the door of the south room.
"Likely you'll be a comfort later, but go back now."
He went to the side of the bed and found his daughter lying, her eyes
wide open, looking out on the rain. He laid his hand gently upon her
head and she drew it down and kissed it. She had always known that he
would never fail her in his tender sympathy.
"The baby has slept a long time," she whispered. "Bring it to me,
please."
He stooped and kissed her.
"It's a little girl, and it looks like you. It does truly."
He stroked her forehead again, but did not speak.
She roused herself and turned her head toward the dark corner of the
room. "Bring it to me, mammy!" she called.
The old woman walked to the cradle and made as though to lift a child
from the blankets, but her arms were empty.
"Bring it to me!"
"Lillias!" her father was at her side where she sat erect staring at the
cradle. "Lillias, darling, your mother thought it best."
"Bring it to me!"
The old woman drew aside the blankets and showed an empty bed. "Chile,"
she moaned, "dis ain't my work."
There was a long silence; then the girl sank back in the sheets and
turned toward the window. "You might have let me kiss it good-by," she
said.
Her back was to them both and again she laid her head in the crook of
her arm. Her breath came softly, so very softly that what time it died
away neither of the watchers knew.
But when her father again touched her forehead it was quite cold, and he
felt as though another baby had been sent away to be hidden out in the
rain.
I
THE PINES
CHAPTER I
In the far south of the United States, where through the winter months
the sun holds in warmth the blue encircling sky, opening the buds of the
roses in December, where palmetto and white sand meet deep green swamp
and heavily scented magnolia, there flows a great river. From its narrow
source it deepens and widens until toward the end of its course it
becomes an estuary, and for many miles dwellers on one side can dimly
distinguish the contour of the opposite shore. The dwellers, as it
happens, are not many, and the little boat that makes its daily trip to
and from the busy city at the river's mouth is not overburdened with
freight or passengers. It zigzags from shore to shore, stopping at one
port for timber, at another to land an itinerant preacher, at a third to
receive a fragrant load of oranges or grapefruit destined for a market
in the north.
Merryvale is one of the oldest and most important of its stops. As long
as the state has had a history there has been a Merryvale living on the
river bank. In the days when the alligators climbed up the long wharf to
sun themselves, and the moccasins dropped from the overhanging trees
into the stream, the Merryvales owned thousands of acres at the water's
edge and other thousands back in the pine forests. Then there was a
Merryvale in Congress and another in the State Senate, while scores of
slaves tilled the land and tended the cherished orange groves. But with
the passing of time the alligators slipped from the wharf, the moccasins
retreated to where gunshots were less frequent, and vast stretches of
pines and of river-front passed into other hands.
Nevertheless, in the year 1910, when Lee Merryvale came back from
college, there was astonishingly little apparent change in the old
estate. To be sure, the timber had been depleted, acres of pines had
been shipped down the river to some sawmill; and, worse, noble trees had
been gashed in the trunks, their lifeblood drawn from them, drop by
drop, and then left to decay and fall. But the hyacinth still choked the
river near its bank where the gaunt cows waded in to chew the tough
leaves, and the great house at the front among the live-oaks and the
little cabins in the rear among the pines held descendants of old
masters and old slaves and viewed life in much the timeworn way.
You approached Merryvale, of course, from the water; only the ignorant
newcomer drove or motored the weary miles along the sandy road from the
railway station. The true approach from the city was up the wide river
for some three or four hours to the Merryvale landing. Here,
disembarking with a friendly good-by from the captain, you walked down
the long wharf, and, turning to the right, followed a narrow path in the
white sand until you came out upon the great house.
Unchanged since the first Merryvale built it many decades ago, it stands
a beautiful mansion of cool, high-ceilinged rooms and broad hallways.
Across the front, which faces east, are spacious verandas or galleries
that protect the rooms from the summer heat and afford pleasant places
to sun oneself on chill winter days. The kitchen and sheds, screened by
hardy bamboo, are in the rear; but at the front, before the house, as
far as the bank at the river's edge, is a broad open expanse that in the
North would be a lawn, but that here is sand dotted with tufts of grass
and strewn with fallen leaves. For the glory of the open space is the
live-oaks. These immense spreading trees stand well apart with huge
roots that twist along the ground to disappear in the sand, there to
send out other roots whose hungry mouths drink up the hidden moisture.
The leaves are small, a dark rich green; but neither the leaves nor the
great trunks attract your gaze; you are fascinated by the bunches of
white, fibrous moss that hang from each bough. On a still day they are
motionless, but the slightest breeze sends them softly waving, and in a
storm they swing back and forth, the wind tearing through their long,
thin strands, dragging off a bit here and a bit there, but in the end
leaving them still companions of the live-oak. Birds use the moss for
their nests, and probably no child in the Merryvale household has failed
at some time to fashion of the soft fibres a long white beard with which
to make the magic change from youth to venerated age. On either side of
the house, extending in both directions, are orange groves, and back of
the groves comes the second world, the world of the black folk.
As the world of the rulers has been among the live-oaks, so the world of
the workers has been among the pines. Back of the great house you come
to the clearing dotted with cabins that belong to the period before the
war, rough affairs of hewn logs, well-ventilated by their many cracks.
Whether of logs or the more modern clapboard, they are all set on
supports away from the earth, and under their flooring hens with their
chickens move about industriously scratching with their toes and
penetrating the inhospitable-looking sand with their strong beaks.
Occasionally a dog or a pig joins them and there is a general, but since
they are all good friends, quite senseless cackle of dissent. Numberless
weeds grow in the sand and flowers are about all the cabins; in the
spring, violets and red lilies, in the summer, cosmos and zinnias, and
the year through, red roses at the cabin doors.
Kindly monotony has been the keynote of Merryvale. To live on what you
have, parting when necessary with a piece of timberland among the pines
or a stretch of acres at the waterfront, this has been the history for
many years at the great house. And monotony has triumphed, too, among
the pines. After the war there were heart-throbbings and a sense of
portentous changes; but when freedom had come and gone; when the Negro
learned that he was still wholly dependent upon his old master, a
liberated laborer but without the tools that made possible a new life,
he turned to work again in his old surroundings at his familiar tasks.
Industrious and ambitious colored fathers and mothers at Merryvale had
been known to save enough to buy their homes; but their children, fed
too by ambition, left them for the North. Thus Aunt Lucindy had a son
who was head waiter in a hotel in Philadelphia, and Brother Jonathan's
daughter made a thousand dollars a year teaching school in Washington.
These depletions, so common in the country that pours her best stock
into the city, held the settlement back. Altogether, the old place was
full of pleasant, uneventful life touched with kindly decay.
And then Merryvale experienced a change. It came to black Merryvale
first. In 1905 the colored school lacked a teacher and the colored
Methodist church a preacher. These positions had been held by the same
person who, to the lasting benefit of the community, was called to a
wider field. Word came that the Church was sending a worthy and
well-known brother who had filled a pulpit in a distant city, but whose
failing health necessitated a change. With him was a daughter who would
teach school. Then of an autumn evening the Williams family arrived and
with them a multitude of envied possessions. Wealth entered the
four-roomed cabin that was scrubbed with furious intensity before the
white iron beds, the modern cooking-stove, the books--in all, a
multitude of bewildering furnishings were placed within its walls. A
period of whitewashing followed, of fencing in of chickens and garden,
of trimming and pruning. It was as though some modern machine with its
driving power, its whirring engine, had dropped into a medieval town.
Brother Williams was a feeble, kindly old man who preached but a short
six months before death came and the Methodist church was again without
a spiritual guide. After his death the preaching was by an itinerant,
but by that time the church had lost its preeminent place in the
community life. Salvation was taught indeed, but in a new guise and
under a new roof, and the leader and prophet of the new gospel was the
school teacher, Brother Williams' daughter Ellen.
Ellen Williams had been educated in one of the Negro colleges, founded
shortly after the Civil War by northern philanthropy, and conducted by
white women, and she had been filled with an unquenchable zeal to help
her race. She went into this poor, remote country school with the zeal
of the missionary to Africa; and if she was confronted by no wild beasts
or savage chieftains she met with disheartening indifference, with envy
and even with malice. But the true missionary burns with so pure a flame
that she destroys in her bright fire the obstructions that are placed in
her path. Moreover, she is made to rule and men and women obey, first
critically, then enthusiastically, her decrees. There were mutterings at
Ellen's demands. First the children must be washed beyond the strength
and dignity of those who have to tote their every pail of water; then an
unprecedented amount of needlework was needed to close up rents; and,
last, they must forever give money, money that might go for whisky, for
patent medicine, for the lodge or for the church, money needed to fill
out the meager four months' salary by the county to the seven months
demanded by the teacher as a minimum school year. Like all fanatics,
Ellen saw one supreme duty--the bringing of education to the children of
Merryvale. Other things, even preaching, might languish if this could be
accomplished.
Ellen had her triumph at the end of seven months, when all the pupils of
the school took part in the spring exhibition, from five-year-old
Samantha Johnson who recited an evening hymn, to twenty-year-old
Ebenezer, a half-witted youth and former laughing-stock, who displayed a
beautifully woven basket that had already been sold for two dollars to
some Rockefeller of the north, ("and the school is to have one dollar of
it for books," the teacher said emphatically). The Negro parent is
ambitious for his children, he looks forward with unfaltering hope to
the recognition of merit that shall come when his boy enters the world
and acquits himself like a man. And though the recognition be never
accorded, though to the average American the Negro who is not performing
humble tasks is a cross between an impudent upstart and a "nigger"
minstrel dude, the parent hopes on until death comes and his son, like
himself, turns for his hope to his offspring. Ellen had builded on this
firm foundation of parental ambition, and after the first year she
received the cooperation of the people among whom she had come to give
her life. A few evil spirits mocked, but they did not affect the success
of the Merryvale school. And indeed marvels can be accomplished in a
small community where, day and night, one may keep watch over one's
charges, and where the county superintendent is too indifferent or too
lazy to interfere with suggestion or criticism. So Ellen, a modern in
educational methods, with the zealot's untiring energy, taught her
children to keep clean and decent, to work steadily and to relate their
study to their daily life. As they learned to write they indited letters
to absent uncles and aunts, and (the teacher was judiciously blind to
this) begged stamps from old Mr. Merryvale. They did number work,
counting their chickens and multiplying their eggs with sober
intentness. When readers grew scarce they got the discarded newspapers
from the great house, and the older boys and girls began to watch the
happenings in the outer world. They dug in the school garden and planted
vegetables in gardens of their own. They even learned to cook and
introduced new dishes into the limited regimen of their homes.
It would not have been possible for Ellen to have carried her school to
the final triumph of the spring exhibition had she not been in touch
with the college, as it was somewhat grandiosely called, at which she
had received her education. Gifts of discarded blackboards, old but
still useful maps, song-books, tools, many essentials to her
undertaking, arrived at odd times on the river boat. Nor could she have
kept always well and strong, neatly dressed and abundantly fed, had it
not been for her mother's presence. Aunt Maggie, as Mrs. Williams was
called, while not as energetic as her daughter was a capable woman who
contributed her full part to the school's success. She earned more at
laundry-work than Ellen could at teaching; and the two, by selling eggs
and chickens and pork, by making jellies and candies for the hotel
people four miles away whose laundry more than anything else kept them
in funds, lived in decent comfort and put by for the future.
The second change that came to Merryvale dropped upon the great house.
Five years after the Williams' advent, Lee Merryvale, only son of an
only son, came back from college. He had made but two brief visits home
since he had left to take up his freshman work, offering the expense of
the trip as his excuse; and while his father missed him more with each
year of slackened strength, he confessed that Lee made small demands
upon his purse. He would write in affectionate and wondering solicitude
that no land need slip from the estate to be converted into bank-checks,
and would receive answer from his son that the college had given him a
scholarship and that he worked in the summer months. It was wisest not
to question but to wait until Lee returned to take up law, the
traditional Merryvale profession.
With long explanations, with pacing up and down what remained of the old
plantation, Lee Merryvale expounded to his father his ambition to become
a grower of vegetables and fruits. In his summer months, it seemed, he
had earned his way sweating on other men's farms, and he returned eager
to bring life and prosperity to the old place. Other people were making
money in his state, northerners of course, and why not he? He knew the
secret of northern success--the careful oversight of workers and the
willingness to pitch in and do things yourself. What if frost did come
every few years and destroy all you had? You made allowance for that in
your years of plenty. And so he argued, answering expressed doubts and
unexpressed questionings, until at length his father answered: "How
should I object when it will keep you by my side? You have your mother's
energy."
Lee had only a few recollections of his mother, but one was a bright
picture of a young girl with golden-red hair digging energetically at
the roots of a rose-bush. It was pleasant to think that, like him, she
had loved the taste of the earth and the fragrance of growing things.
His ambition was to down all the scoffers along the river and in the
city who thought his ambition a passing amusement, and predicted
abandonment and a season of gaiety during the coming winter.
Of the other members of the two households there were, at the great
house, Miss Patty, as every one called her, John Merryvale's sister who
came to him after his wife's death; and at the cabin in the pines, Tom,
the son of the household, a serious, reliable boy, deliberate to
slowness.
And lastly, there was Hertha. Ellen had insisted when they moved to
Merryvale that Hertha remain a second year at her college, and the girl
stayed away for that time; but the next season, the year Lee Merryvale
went North, she made her entrance, a girl of nineteen, into Merryvale
life. It was a modest entrance and she played her part shyly in the
background. Hertha bore no resemblance to her sister and brother. Among
the cabins in the pines you noticed her tightly curling hair and deep
brown eyes, but as she moved about the great house you saw her graceful
figure, her slender feet and hands, her small head on its long neck, her
delicate nose and mouth, her white skin. She was a good needlewoman, and
Miss Patty quickly seized upon her as her maid, and, for a pittance,
Hertha worked for her by day, while at night and on Sundays she joined
mother and brother and sister in the cabin. "You's a contented chile,"
her mother used to say, "an' 'member, dat's a gift." She had not been so
contented in the city where she spent her childhood, but this new world
by the river touched her spirit. She loved the quiet days, sewing and
waiting on Miss Patty whose indolence and advancing years made her
increasingly dependent. She loved on Sundays to take walks with Tom
through the woods to where the creek set in, black, mysterious, a long
line of cypresses guarding the stream. She was contented with her home,
and her mind sometimes wandered when Ellen talked in the evening of
plans for the future. Ellen was full of plans, she lived not for to-day
but for to-morrow, but Hertha lived in to-day. Life was not always
pleasant, the autumn tempests that lashed the great oaks and uprooted
the pines were terrifying, but there were more days of sunshine than of
storm. Lee Merryvale might sweat over his orange grove and swear at his
workers, Ellen might lead out the whole settlement in a mad orgy of
whitewashing, but no one expected anything disturbing from Hertha. Tom,
once, painstakingly reading through a collection of poems acquired by
Ellen in her school days as a prize, found the lines that suited the
lady of his home; for, to Tom, Hertha was not only sister but queen.
"And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence, and the calm
Of mute, insensate things."