ALMOST IN SIGHT.
In St. Tammany Parish, on the northern border of Lake Ponchartrain,
about thirty miles from New Orleans, in a straight line across the
waters of the lake, stood in time of the war, and may stand yet, an old
house, of the Creole colonial fashion, all of cypress from sills to
shingles, standing on brick pillars ten feet from the ground, a wide
veranda in front, and a double flight of front steps running up to it
sidewise and meeting in a balustraded landing at its edge. Scarcely
anything short of a steamer's roof or a light-house window could have
offered a finer stand-point from which to sweep a glass round the
southern semi-circle of water and sky than did this stair-landing; and
here, a long ship's-glass in her hands, and the accustomed look of care
on her face, faintly frowning against the glare of noonday, stood Mary
Richling. She still had on the pine-straw hat, and the skirt--stirring
softly in a breeze that had to come around from the north side of the
house before it reached her--was the brown and olive homespun.
"No use," said an old, fat, and sun-tanned man from his willow chair on
the veranda behind her. There was a slight palsied oscillation in his
head. He leaned forward somewhat on a staff, and as he spoke his entire
shapeless and nearly helpless form quaked with the effort. But Mary, for
all his advice, raised the glass and swung it slowly from east to west.
The house was near the edge of a slightly rising ground, close to the
margin of a bayou that glided around toward the left from the woods at
its back, and ran, deep and silent, under the shadows of a few huge,
wide-spreading, moss-hung live-oaks that stood along its hither shore,
laving their roots in its waters, and throwing their vast green images
upon its glassy surface. As the dark stream slipped away from these it
flashed a little while in the bright open space of a marsh, and, just
entering the shade of a spectral cypress wood, turned as if to avoid it,
swung more than half about, and shone sky-blue, silver, and green as it
swept out into the unbroken sunshine of the prairie.
It was over this flowery savanna, broadening out on either hand, and
spreading far away until its bright green margin joined, with the
perfection of a mosaic, the distant blue of the lake, that Mary,
dallying a moment with hope, passed her long glass. She spoke with it
still raised and her gaze bent through it:--
"There's a big alligator crossing the bayou down in the bend."
"Yes," said the aged man, moving his flat, carpet-slippered feet a
laborious inch; "alligator. Alligator not goin' take you 'cross lake. No
use lookin'. 'Ow Peter goin' come when win' dead ahead? Can't do it."
Yet Mary lifted the glass a little higher, beyond the green, beyond the
crimpling wavelets of the nearer distance that seemed drawn by the
magical lens almost into her hand, out to the fine, straight line that
cut the cool blue below from the boundless blue above. Round swung the
glass, slowly, waveringly, in her unpractised hand, from the low cypress
forests of Manchac on the west, to the skies that glittered over the
unseen marshes of the Rigolets on the farthest east.
"You see sail yondeh?" came the slow inquiry from behind.
"No," said Mary, letting the instrument down, and resting it on the
balustrade.
"Humph! No! Dawn't I tell you is no use look?"
"He was to have got here three days ago," said Mary, shutting the glass
and gazing in anxious abstraction across the prairie.
The Spanish Creole grunted.
"When win' change, he goin' start. He dawn't start till win' change.
Win' keep ligue dat, he dawn't start 't all." He moved his orange-wood
staff an inch, to suit the previous movement of his feet, and Mary came
and laid the glass on its brackets in the veranda, near the open door of
a hall that ran through the dwelling to another veranda in the rear.
In the middle of the hall a small woman, as dry as the peppers that hung
in strings on the wall behind her, sat in a rush-bottomed rocking-chair
plaiting a palmetto hat, and with her elbow swinging a tattered manilla
hammock, in whose bulging middle lay Alice, taking her compulsory
noonday nap. Mary came, expressed her thanks in sprightly whispers,
lifted the child out, and carried her to a room. How had Mary got here?
The morning after that on which she had missed the cars at Canton she
had taken a south-bound train for Camp Moore, the camp of the forces
that had evacuated New Orleans, situated near the railway station of
Tangipahoa, some eighty miles north of the captured city. Thence, after
a day or two of unavoidable delay, and of careful effort to know the
wisest step, she had taken stage,--a crazy ambulance,--with some others,
two women, three children, and an old man, and for two days had
travelled through a beautiful country of red and yellow clays and
sands below and murmuring pines above,--vast colonnades of towering,
branchless brown columns holding high their green, translucent roof, and
opening up their wide, bright, sunshot vistas of gentle, grassy hills
that undulated far away under the balsamic forest, and melted at length
into luminous green unity and deer-haunted solitudes. Now she went down
into richer bottom-lands, where the cotton and corn were growing tall
and pretty to look upon, like suddenly grown girls, and the sun was
beginning to shine hot. Now she passed over rustic bridges, under posted
warnings to drive slow or pay a fine, or through sandy fords across
purling streams, hearing the monotone of some unseen mill-dam, or
scaring the tall gray crane from his fishing, or the otter from his
pranks. Again she went up into leagues of clear pine forest, with stems
as straight as lances; meeting now a farmer, and now a school-girl or
two, and once a squad of scouts, ill-mounted, worse clad, and yet more
sorrily armed; bivouacking with the jolly, tattered fellows, Mary and
one of the other women singing for them, and the "boys" singing for
Mary, and each applauding each about the pine-knot fire, and the women
and children by and by lying down to slumber, in soldier fashion, with
their feet to the brands, under the pines and the stars, while the
gray-coats stood guard in the wavering fire-light; but Mary lying broad
awake staring at the great constellation of the Scorpion, and thinking
now of him she sought, and now remorsefully of that other scout, that
poor boy whom the spy had shot far away yonder to the north and
eastward. Now she rose and journeyed again. Rare hours were those for
Alice. They came at length into a low, barren land, of dwarfed and
scrawny pines, with here and there a marshy flat; thence through a
narrow strip of hickories, oaks, cypresses, and dwarf palmetto, and so
on into beds of white sand and oyster-shells, and then into one of the
villages on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
Her many little adventures by the way, the sayings and doings and
seeings of Alice, and all those little adroitnesses by which Mary from
time to time succeeded in avoiding or turning aside the suspicions
that hovered about her, and the hundred times in which Alice was her
strongest and most perfect protection, we cannot pause to tell. But we
give a few lines to one matter.
Mary had not yet descended from the ambulance at her journey's end;
she and Alice only were in it; its tired mules were dragging it slowly
through the sandy street of the village, and the driver was praising
the milk, eggs, chickens, and genteel seclusion of Mrs. ----'s
"hotel," at that end of the village toward which he was driving, when a
man on horseback met them, and, in passing, raised his hat to Mary. The
act was only the usual courtesy of the highway; yet Mary was startled,
disconcerted, and had to ask the unobservant, loquacious driver to
repeat what he had said. Two days afterward Mary was walking at the
twilight hour, in a narrow, sandy road, that ran from the village out
into the country to the eastward. Alice walked beside her, plying her
with questions. At a turn of the path, without warning, she confronted
this horseman again. He reined up and lifted his hat. An elated look
brightened his face.
"It's all fixed," he said. But Mary looked distressed, even alarmed.
"You shouldn't have done this," she replied.
The man waved his hand downward repressively, but with a countenance
full of humor.
"Hold on. It's _still_ my deal. This is the last time, and then I'm
done. Make a spoon or spoil a horn, you know. When you commence to do a
thing, do it. Them's the words that's inscribed on my banner, as the
felleh says; only I, Sam, aint got much banner. And if I sort o' use
about this low country a little while for my health, as it were, and
nibble around sort o' _pro bono p[=u]blico_ takin' notes, why you aint
a-carin', is you? For wherefore shouldest thou?" He put on a yet more
ludicrous look, and spread his hand off at one side, working his
outstretched fingers.
"Yes," responded Mary, with severe gravity; "I must care. You did finish
at Holly Springs. I was to find the rest of the way as best I could.
That was the understanding. Go away!" She made a commanding gesture,
though she wore a pleading look. He looked grave; but his habitual
grimace stole through his gravity and invited her smile. But she
remained fixed. He gathered the rein and straightened up in the saddle.
"Yes," she insisted, answering his inquiring attitude; "go! I shall be
grateful to you as long as I live. It wasn't because I mistrusted you that
I refused your aid at Camp Moore or at----that other place on this side. I
don't mistrust you. But don't you see--you must see--it's your duty to
see--that this staying and--and--foll--following--is--is--wrong." She
stood, holding her skirt in one hand, and Alice's hand in the other, not
upright, but in a slightly shrinking attitude, and as she added once more,
"Go! I implore you--go!" her eyes filled.
"I will; I'll go," said the man, with a soft chuckle intended for
self-abasement. "I go, thou goest, he goes. 'I'll skedaddle,' as the
felleh says. And yit it do seem to me sorter like,--if my moral sense is
worthy of any consideration, which is doubtful, may be,--seems to me
like it's sort o' jumpin' the bounty for you to go and go back on an
arrangement that's been all fixed up nice and tight, and when it's on'y
jess to sort o' 'jump into the wagon' that's to call for you to-morrow,
sun-up, drove by a nigger boy, and ride a few mile' to a house on the
bayou, and wait there till a man comes with a nice little schooner, and
take you on bode and sail off, and 'good-by, Sally,' and me never in
sight from fust to last, 'and no questions axed.'"
"I don't reject the arrangement," replied Mary, with tearful
pleasantness. "If you'll do as I say, I'll do as you say; and that will
be final proof to you that I believe you're"--she fell back a step,
laughingly--"'the clean sand!'" She thought the man would have
perpetrated some small antic; but he did not. He did not even smile, but
lifted the rein a little till the horse stepped forward, and, putting
out his hand, said:--
"Good-by. You don't need no directions. Jess tell the lady where you'
boardin' that you've sort o' consented to spend a day or two with old
Adrien Sanchez, and get into the wagon when it comes for you." He let go
her hand. "Good-by, Alice." The child looked up in silence and pressed
herself against her mother. "Good-by," said he once more.
"Good-by," replied Mary.
His eyes lingered as she dropped her own.
"Come, Alice," she said, resisting the little one's effort to stoop and
pick a wild-pea blossom, and the mother and child started slowly back
the way they had come. The spy turned his horse, and moved still more
slowly in the opposite direction. But before he had gone many rods he
turned the animal's head again, rode as slowly back, and, beside the
spot where Mary had stood, got down, and from the small imprint of her
shoe in the damp sand took the pea-blossom, which, in turning to
depart, she had unawares trodden under foot. He looked at the small,
crushed thing for a moment, and then thrust it into his bosom; but in a
moment, as if by a counter impulse, drew it forth again, let it flutter
to the ground, following it with his eyes, shook his head with an amused
air, half of defiance and half of discomfiture, turned, drew himself
into the saddle, and with one hand laid upon another on the saddle-bow
and his eyes resting on them in meditation, passed finally out of sight.
* * *
Here, then, in this lone old Creole cottage, Mary was tarrying, prisoner
of hope, coming out all hours of the day, and scanning the wide view,
first, only her hand to shade her brow, and then with the old
ship's-glass, Alice often standing by and looking up at this
extraordinary toy with unspoken wonder. All that Mary could tell her of
things seeable through it could never persuade the child to risk her own
eye at either end of it. So Mary would look again and see, out in the
prairie, in the morning, the reed birds, the marsh hen, the blackbirds,
the sparrows, the starlings, with their red and yellow epaulets, rising
and fluttering and sinking again among the lilies and mallows, and the
white crane, paler than a ghost, wading in the grassy shallows. She saw
the ravening garfish leap from the bayou, and the mullet in shining
hundreds spatter away to left and right; and the fisherman and the
shrimp-catcher in their canoes come gliding up the glassy stream, riding
down the water-lilies, that rose again behind and shook the drops from
their crowns, like water-sprites. Here and there, farther out, she saw
the little cat-boats of the neighboring village crawling along the edge
of the lake, taking their timid morning cruises. And far away she saw
the titanic clouds; but on the horizon, no sail.
In the evening she would see mocking-birds coming out of the savanna and
flying into the live-oaks. A summer duck might dart from the cypresses,
speed across the wide green level, and become a swerving, vanishing
speck on the sky. The heron might come round the bayou's bend, and
suddenly take fright and fly back again. The rattling kingfisher might
come up the stream, and the blue crane sail silently through the purple
haze that hung between the swamp and the bayou. She would see the gulls,
gray and white, on the margin of the lake, the sun setting beyond its
western end, and the sky and water turning all beautiful tints; and
every now and then, low down along the cool, wrinkling waters, passed
across the round eye of the glass the broad, downward-curved wing of the
pelican. But when she ventured to lift the glass to the horizon, she
swept it from east to west in vain. No sail.
"Dawn't I tell you no use look? Peter dawn't comin' in day-time, nohow."
But on the fifth morning Mary had hardly made her appearance on the
veranda, and had not ventured near the spy-glass yet, when the old man
said:--
"She rain back in swamp las' night; can smell."
"How do you feel this morning?" asked Mary, facing around from her first
glance across the waters. He did not heed.
"See dat win'?" he asked, lifting one hand a little from the top of his
staff.
"Yes," responded Mary, eagerly; "why, it's--hasn't it--changed?"
"Yes, change' las' night 'fo' went to bed."
The old man's manner betrayed his contempt for one who could be
interested in such a change, and yet not know when it took place.
"Why, then," began Mary, and started as if to take down the glass.
"What you doin'?" demanded its owner. "Better let glass 'lone; fool' wid
him enough."
Mary flushed, and, with a smile of resentful apology, was about to
reply, when he continued:--
"What you want glass for? Dare Peter' schooner--right dare in bayou.
What want glass for? Can't see schooner hundred yard' off 'dout glass?"
And he turned away his poor wabbling head in disgust.
Mary looked an instant at two bare, rakish, yellow poles showing out
against the clump of cypresses, and the trim little white hull and
apple-green deck from which they sprang, then clasped her hands and ran
into the house.