COLONEL ROYALL and Diana drove into town in the morning; it was a long
drive from Eshcol, and the road led past Paradise Ridge. Diana, from
her side of the carriage, noticed the little cabin where Jean Bartlett
had died, and saw the shambling figure of Zeb leaning against the
door-post. Zeb was talking to a well-dressed man whose back was toward
her. A low-growing horse-chestnut partly hid his figure, but afterwards
she remembered a curious familiarity about it. At the time her heart
was bitter. She had heard nothing but Mrs. Eaton’s version of the
scandal of Paradise Ridge for a month, and once, when she drove past
the Cross-Roads, she had seen Sammy’s chubby figure sprawling under the
trees beside Caleb Trench’s office.
If he were the child’s father, he had certainly taken up the burden
squarely. Diana pushed all thought of it out of her mind by main
force, yet two hours later it would come back. She remembered, too,
that meeting on the trail, and her heart quaked. In some mysterious,
unfathomable way the man loomed up before her and mastered her will;
she could not cast him out, and she stormed against him and against
herself. Outwardly she was listening to Colonel Royall. At heart, too,
she was deeply concerned about her father; the colonel was failing, he
had been failing ever since spring set in. All her life Diana had felt
that, in spite of their devotion to each other, there was a door shut
between them, she had never had his full confidence. Yet, she could not
tell how she knew this, what delicate intuition revealed the fact of
his reticence. She had twice asked Dr. Cheyney what secret trouble her
father had, and the old man had looked guilty, even when he denied all
knowledge. Diana felt the presence of grief, and she had assumed that
it was especially poignant at the season when he kept the anniversary
of his wife’s death. Yet, lately, she wondered that he had never taken
her to her mother’s grave. Mrs. Royall had died when Diana was three
years old, and was buried in Virginia. More than this Diana had never
known, but she did know that her room at Broad Acres had been locked
the day of her death and that no one ever went there except her father
and the old negro woman who kept it spotless and “just as Miss Letty
left it.”
Neither Colonel Royall nor old Judy ever vouchsafed any explanation
of this room, its quaintly beautiful furniture and the apparently
unchanging spotlessness of the muslin curtains and the white valance
of the mahogany four-poster. Once, when she was a child, Diana had
crept in there and hidden under the bed, but hearing the key turn in
the lock when old Judy left the room, her small heart had quaked
with fear and she had remained crouching in a corner, still under the
bed, not daring to look out lest she should indeed see a beautiful
and ghostly lady seated at the polished toilet-table, or hear her
step upon the floor. She stayed there three hours, then terror and
loneliness prevailed and she fancied she did hear something; it was,
perhaps, the rustle of wings, for she had been told that angels had
wings, and if her mamma were dead she was, of course, an angel. The
rustle, therefore, of imaginary wings was more than Diana could bear,
and she lifted up her voice and wept. They had been searching the house
for her, and it was her father who drew her out from under the bed
and carried her, weeping, to the nursery. Then he spoke briefly but
terribly to the mammy in charge, and Diana never crept under the white
valance again.
She remembered that scene to-day as the carriage drove on under the
tall shade trees, and she remembered that Colonel Royall had never
looked so ill at this time of the year since the time when he was
stricken with fever in midsummer, when she was barely fifteen. Then he
had been out of his head for three days and she had heard him call some
one “Letty!” and then cry out: “God forgive me--there is the child!” He
had been eighteen months recovering, and she saw presages of illness
in his face; his eyes were resting sadly and absently, too, on the
familiar landscape. Diana winced, again conscious of the shut door. It
is hard to wait on at the threshold of the heart we love.
They were crossing the bridge when a long silence was broken. Below
them some negroes were chanting in a flatboat, and their voices were
beautiful.
“Away down South in de fields of cotton,
Cinnamon seed and sandy bottom,
Look away, look away,
Look away, look away!”
“Pa,” said Diana suddenly, “do you believe in the verdict?”
The colonel took off his hat and pushed back his thick white hair. “I
reckon I’ve got to, Di,” he replied reluctantly.
“Then you think Jacob is a bully and a fraud,” said Diana, with the
unsparing frankness of youth.
“Heaven forbid!” said the colonel gently.
“I thought you wanted me to marry him,” she pursued, victory in her eye.
The colonel reddened. “Diana,” he said, “I don’t want you to marry
anybody.”
She smiled. “Thank you,” she said; “after all, the verdict has done
some good in this State, Colonel Royall.”
They were at the court-house door now, and there was a crowd in the
square. The colonel got down and helped out Diana, and they walked into
the arched entrance of the basement together. “I didn’t want to leave
you out there to be stared at by that mob,” said the colonel; “people
seem to know us at a glance.”
Diana laughed softly. “Of course no one would remember you,” she said
maliciously; “they’re looking at my new hat.”
“I reckon they are,” said her father dryly; “we’ll have to find a place
to hide it in.”
As he spoke they passed the last doorkeeper, and walked down the
stone-paved corridor toward the elevator. It was absolutely still. On
the left hand was a small room with one large window looking out into
the court where a tree of heaven was growing. It had sprung from a seed
and no one had cut it down. The window was barred, but the cool air
of the court came in, for the sash was open. It was a room that they
called “the cage,” because prisoners waited there to be summoned to the
court-room to hear the verdict, but Colonel Royall did not know this.
There were a narrow lounge in it, two chairs and a table.
“Wait here,” he said to Diana, “I shan’t be ten minutes. I want to see
Judge Ladd, and I know where he is up-stairs. Court has adjourned for
luncheon, and you won’t be disturbed.”
Diana went in obediently and sat down in the chair by the window. She
could see nothing but the court enclosed on four sides by the old brick
building, and shaded in the centre by the slender tree of heaven. There
was no possible view of the street from this room. Opposite the door
was the blank wall of the hall; on the other side of that wall were
the rooms of the Registrar of Wills and the Probate Court. Outside the
door a spiral iron staircase ascended to the offices of the State’s
attorney; around the corner was the elevator and to this Colonel Royall
went.
Diana leaned back in her chair and surveyed the chill little room;
on the walls were written various reflections of waiting prisoners.
None were as eloquent as Sir Walter Raleigh’s message to the world,
but several meant the same thing in less heroic English. The colonel
had been gone ten minutes, and his daughter was watching the branches
of the tree as they stirred slightly, as if touched by some tremulous
breath, for no wind could reach them here.
It was then that she heard a quick step in the corridor and knew
it intuitively. She was not surprised when Caleb Trench stopped
involuntarily at the door. They had scarcely met in two months, but the
color rushed into her face; she seemed to see him again in the spring
woods, though now the hedgerows were showing goldenrod. Involuntarily,
too, she rose and they stood facing each other. She tried to speak
naturally, but nothing but a platitude came to her lips.
“I congratulate you,” she said foolishly, “on your victory.”
“Miss Royall, I am sorry that everything I do seems like a personal
attack upon your people,” he replied at once, and he had never appeared
to better advantage; “like the spiteful revenge of a foolish duellist,
a sensational politician. Will you do me the justice to believe that my
position is painful?”
Diana looked at him and hated herself because her breath came so short;
was she afraid of him? Perish the thought! “I always try to be just,”
she began with dignity, and then finished lamely, “of course we are a
prejudiced people at Eshcol.”
“You are like people everywhere,” he replied; “we all have our
prejudices. I wish mine were less. There is one thing I would like to
say to you, Miss Royall--” He stopped abruptly, and raised his head.
Their eyes met, and Diana knew that he was thinking of Jean Bartlett;
she turned crimson.
There was a long silence.
“I shall not say it,” he said, and his strong face saddened. What right
had he to thrust his confidence upon her? “You are waiting for your
father?” he added; “may I not escort you to another room? This--is
not suitable.” He wanted to add that he was amazed at the colonel
for leaving her there; he did not yet fully understand the old man’s
simplicity.
“I prefer to stay here,” Diana replied, a little coldly; “my father
knows I am here.”
It was Caleb’s turn to color. “I beg your pardon.” He stopped again,
and then turned and looked out of the window. “I fear I have lost even
your friendship now,” he said bitterly.
She did not reply at once; she was trying to discipline herself, and in
the pause both heard the great clock in the tower strike one.
“On the contrary, I thank you for offering to find me a pleasanter
place to wait in,” Diana said, with an effort at lightness. “It is a
little dreary, but I’m sure my father must be coming and--”
She stopped with a little cry of surprise, for there was suddenly the
sharp sound of a pistol shot, followed instantly by a second. The
reports came from the other side of the hall, and were followed by a
tumult in the street.
“What can it be?” she cried, in sudden terror for her father.
Caleb Trench swung around from the window with an awakening of every
sense that made him seem a tremendous vital force. He divined a
tragedy. Afterwards the girl remembered his face and was amazed at the
fact that she had obeyed him like a child.
“Wait here!” he exclaimed, “your father is safe. I will see what it is.
On no account leave this room now--promise me!”
She faltered. “I promise,” she said, and he was gone.
It seemed five minutes; it was in reality only ten seconds since the
shots were fired. Meanwhile, there was a tumult without, the shouting
of men and the rush of many feet. Diana stood still, trembling, her
hands clasped tightly together. Even afar off the voice of the mob is a
fearsome thing.