{0002}
“It isn't usual for a young lady to have freckles, Aunt Lydia says,” she remarked, “and you must rub this right on and not wash it off till morning—and, after you've rubbed it well in, you must get down on your knees and ask God to mend your temper.”
Betty was lying in her little trundle bed, while Petunia, her small black maid, pulled off her stockings, but she got up obediently and laved her face in buttermilk. “I don't reckon there's any use about the other,” she said. “I believe the Lord's jest leavin' me in sin as a warnin' to you and Petunia,” and she got into her trundle bed and waited for the lights to go out, and for the watchful Virginia to fall asleep.
She was still waiting when the door softly opened and her mother came in, a lighted candle in her hand, the pale flame shining through her profile as through delicate porcelain, and illumining her worn and fragile figure. She moved with a slow step, as if her white limbs were a burden, and her head, with its smoothly parted bright brown hair, bent like a lily that has begun to fade.
She sat down upon the bedside and laid her hand on the child's forehead. “Poor little firebrand,” she said gently. “How the world will hurt you!” Then she knelt down and prayed beside her, and went out again with the white light streaming upon her bosom. An hour later Betty heard her soft, slow step on the gravelled drive and knew that she was starting on a ministering errand to the quarters. Of all the souls on the great plantation, the mistress alone had never rested from her labours.
The child tossed restlessly, beat her pillow, and fell back to wait more patiently. At last the yellow strip under the door grew dark, and from the other trundle bed there came a muffled breathing. With a sigh, Betty sat up and listened; then she drew the frog's skin from beneath her pillow and crept on bare feet to the door. It was black there, and black all down the wide, old staircase. The great hall below was like a cavern underground. Trembling when a board creaked under her, she cautiously felt her way with her hands on the balustrade. The front door was fastened with an iron chain that rattled as she touched it, so she stole into the dining room, unbarred one of the long windows, and slipped noiselessly out. It was almost like sliding into sunshine, the moon was so large and bright.
From the wide stone portico, the great white columns, looking grim and ghostly, went upward to the roof, and beyond the steps the gravelled drive shone hard as silver. As the child went between the lilac bushes, the moving shadows crawled under her bare feet like living things.
At the foot of the drive ran the big road, and when she came out upon it her trailing gown caught in a fallen branch, and she fell on her face. Picking herself up again, she sat on a loosened rock and looked about her.
The strong night wind blew on her flesh, and she shivered in the moonlight, which felt cold and brazen. Before her stretched the turnpike, darkened by shadows that bore no likeness to the objects from which they borrowed shape. Far as eye could see, they stirred ceaselessly back and forth like an encamped army of grotesques.
She got up from the rock and slipped the frog's skin into the earth beneath it. As she settled it in place, her pulses gave a startled leap, and she stood terror-stricken beside the stone. A thud of footsteps was coming along the road.
For an instant she trembled in silence; then her sturdy little heart took courage, and she held up her hand.
“If you'll wait a minute, Mr. Devil, I'm goin' in,” she cried.
From the shadows a voice laughed at her, and a boy came forward into the light—a half-starved boy, with a white, pinched face and a dusty bundle swinging from the stick upon his shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” he snapped out.
Betty gave back a defiant stare. She might have been a tiny ghost in the moonlight, with her trailing gown and her flaming curls.
“I live here,” she answered simply. “Where do you live?”
“Nowhere.” He looked her over with a laugh.
“Nowhere?”
“I did live somewhere, but I ran away a week ago.”
“Did they beat you? Old Rainy-day Jones beat one of his servants and he ran away.”
“There wasn't anybody,” said the boy. “My mother died, and my father went off—I hope he'll stay off. I hate him!”
He sent the words out so sharply that Betty's lids flinched.
“Why did you come by here?” she questioned. “Are you looking for the devil, too?”
The boy laughed again. “I am looking for my grandfather. He lives somewhere on this road, at a place named Chericoke. It has a lot of elms in the yard; I'll know it by that.”
Betty caught his arm and drew him nearer. “Why, that's where Champe lives!” she cried. “I don't like Champe much, do you?”
“I never saw him,” replied the boy; “but I don't like him—”
“He's mighty good,” said Betty, honestly; then, as she looked at the boy again, she caught her breath quickly. “You do look terribly hungry,” she added.
“I haven't had anything since—since yesterday.”
The little girl thoughtfully tapped her toes on the road. “There's a currant pie in the safe,” she said. “I saw Uncle Shadrach put it there. Are you fond of currant pie?—then you just wait!”
She ran up the carriage way to the dining-room window, and the boy sat down on the rock and buried his face in his hands. His feet were set stubbornly in the road, and the bundle lay beside them. He was dumb, yet disdainful, like a high-bred dog that has been beaten and turned adrift.
As the returning patter of Betty's feet sounded in the drive, he looked up and held out his hands. When she gave him the pie, he ate almost wolfishly, licking the crumbs from his fingers, and even picking up a bit of crust that had fallen to the ground.
“I'm sorry there isn't any more,” said the little girl. It had seemed a very large pie when she took it from the safe.
The boy rose, shook himself, and swung his bundle across his arm.
“Will you tell me the way?” he asked, and she gave him a few childish directions. “You go past the wheat field an' past the maple spring, an' at the dead tree by Aunt Ailsey's cabin you turn into the road with the chestnuts. Then you just keep on till you get there—an' if you don't ever get there, come back to breakfast.”
The boy had started off, but as she ended, he turned and lifted his hat.
“I am very much obliged to you,” he said, with a quaint little bow; and Betty bobbed a courtesy in her nightgown before she fled back into the house.
The boy trudged on bravely, his stick sounding the road. Sharp pains ran through his feet where his shoes had worn away, and his head was swimming like a top. The only pleasant fact of which he had consciousness was that the taste of the currants still lingered in his mouth.
When he reached the maple spring, he swung himself over the stone wall and knelt down for a drink, dipping the water in his hand. The spring was low and damp and fragrant with the breath of mint which grew in patches in the little stream. Overhead a wild grapevine was festooned, and he plucked a leaf and bent it into a cup from which he drank. Then he climbed the wall again and went on his way.
He was wondering if his mother had ever walked along this road on so brilliant a night. There was not a tree beside it of which she had not told him—not a shrub of sassafras or sumach that she had not carried in her thoughts. The clump of cedars, the wild cherry, flowering in the spring like snow, the blasted oak that stood where the branch roads met, the perfume of the grape blossoms on the wall—these were as familiar to him as the streets of the little crowded town in which he had lived. It was as if nature had stood still here for twelve long summers, or as if he were walking, ghostlike, amid the ever present memories of his mother's heart.
His mother! He drew his sleeve across his eyes and went on more slowly. She was beside him on the road, and he saw her clearly, as he had seen her every day until last year—a bright, dark woman, with slender, blue-veined hands and merry eyes that all her tears had not saddened. He saw her in a long, black dress, with upraised arm, putting back a crepe veil from her merry eyes, and smiling as his father struck her. She had always smiled when she was hurt—even when the blow was heavier than usual, and the blood gushed from her temple, she had fallen with a smile. And when, at last, he had seen her lying in her coffin with her baby under her clasped hands, that same smile had been fixed upon her face, which had the brightness and the chill repose of marble.
Of all that she had thrown away in her foolish marriage, she had retained one thing only—her pride. To the end she had faced her fate with all the insolence with which she faced her husband. And yet—“the Lightfoots were never proud, my son,” she used to say; “they have no false pride, but they know their place, and in England, between you and me, they were more important than the Washingtons. Not that the General wasn't a great man, dear, he was a very great soldier, of course—and in his youth, you know, he was an admirer of your Great-great-aunt Emmeline. But she—why, she was the beauty and belle of two continents—there's an ottoman at home covered with a piece of her wedding dress.”
And the house? Was the house still as she had left it on that Christmas Eve? “A simple gentleman's home, my child—not so imposing as Uplands, with its pillars reaching to the roof, but older, oh, much older, and built of brick that was brought all the way from England, and over the fireplace in the panelled parlour you will find the Lightfoot arms.
“It was in that parlour, dear, that grandmamma danced a minuet with General Lafayette; it looks out, you know, upon a white thorn planted by the General himself, and one of the windows has not been opened for fifty years, because the spray of English ivy your Great-aunt Emmeline set out with her own hands has grown across the sash. Now the window is quite dark with leaves, though you can still read the words Aunt Emmeline cut with her diamond ring in one of the tiny panes, when young Harry Fitzhugh came in upon her just as she had written a refusal to an English earl. She was sitting in the window seat with the letter in her hand, and, when your Great-uncle Harry—she afterwards married him, you know—fell on his knees and cried out that others might offer her fame and wealth, but that he had nothing except love, she turned, with a smile, and wrote upon the pane 'Love is best.' You can still see the words, very faint against the ivy that she planted on her wedding day—”
Oh, yes, he knew it all—Great-aunt Emmeline was but the abiding presence of the place. He knew the lawn with its grove of elms that overtopped the peaked roof, the hall, with its shining floor and detached staircase that crooked itself in the centre where the tall clock stood, and, best of all, the white panels of the parlour where hung the portrait of that same fascinating great-aunt, painted, in amber brocade, as Venus with the apple in her hand.
And his grandmother, herself, in her stiff black silk, with a square of lace turned back from her thin throat and a fluted cap above her corkscrew curls—her daguerreotype, taken in all her pride and her precision, was tied up in the bundle swinging on his arm.
He passed Aunt Ailsey's cabin, and turned into the road with the chestnuts. A mile farther he came suddenly upon the house, standing amid the grove of elms, dwarfed by the giant trees that arched above it. A dog's bark sounded snappily from a kennel, but he paid no heed. He went up the broad white walk, climbed the steps to the square front porch, and lifted the great brass knocker. When he let it fall, the sound echoed through the shuttered house.
The Major, who was sitting in his library with a volume of Mr. Addison open before him and a decanter of Burgundy at his right hand, heard the knock, and started to his feet. “Something's gone wrong at Uplands,” he said aloud; “there's an illness—or the brandy is out.” He closed the book, pushed aside the bedroom candle which he had been about to light, and went out into the hall. As he unbarred the door and flung it open, he began at once:—
“I hope there's no ill news,” he exclaimed.
The boy came into the hall, where he stood blinking from the glare of the lamplight. His head whirled, and he reached out to steady himself against the door. Then he carefully laid down his bundle and looked up with his mother's smile.
“You're my grandfather, and I'm very hungry,” he said.
The Major caught the child's shoulders and drew him, almost roughly, under the light. As he towered there above him, he gulped down something in his throat, and his wide nostrils twitched.
“So you're poor Jane's boy?” he said at last.
The boy nodded. He felt suddenly afraid of the spare old man with his long Roman nose and his fierce black eyebrows. A mist gathered before his eyes and the lamp shone like a great moon in a cloudy circle.
The Major looked at the bundle on the floor, and again he swallowed. Then he stooped and picked up the thing and turned away.
“Come in, sir, come in,” he said in a knotty voice. “You are at home.”
The boy followed him, and they passed the panelled parlour, from which he caught a glimpse of the painting of Great-aunt Emmeline, and went into the dining room, where his grandfather pulled out a chair and bade him to be seated. As the old man opened the huge mahogany sideboard and brought out a shoulder of cold lamb and a plate of bread and butter, he questioned him with a quaint courtesy about his life in town and the details of his journey. “Why, bless my soul, you've walked two hundred miles,” he cried, stopping on his way from the pantry, with the ham held out. “And no money! Why, bless my soul!”
“I had fifty cents,” said the boy, “that was left from my steamboat fare, you know.”
The Major put the ham on the table and attacked it grimly with the carving-knife.
“Fifty cents,” he whistled, and then, “you begged, I reckon?”
The boy flushed. “I asked for bread,” he replied, stung to the defensive. “They always gave me bread and sometimes meat, and they let me sleep in the barns where the straw was, and once a woman took me into her house and offered me money, but I would not take it. I—I think I'd like to send her a present, if you please, sir.”
“She shall have a dozen bottles of my best Madeira,” cried the Major. The word recalled him to himself, and he got up and raised the lid of the cellaret, lovingly running his hand over the rows of bottles.
“A pig would be better, I think,” said the boy, doubtfully, “or a cow, if you could afford it. She is a poor woman, you know.”
“Afford it!” chuckled the Major. “Why, I'll sell your grandmother's silver, but I'll afford it, sir.”
He took out a bottle, held it against the light, and filled a wine glass. “This is the finest port in Virginia,” he declared; “there is life in every drop of it. Drink it down,” and, when the boy had taken it, he filled his own glass and tossed it off, not lingering, as usual, for the priceless flavour. “Two hundred miles!” he gasped, as he looked at the child with moist eyes over which his red lids half closed. “Ah, you're a Lightfoot,” he said slowly. “I should know you were a Lightfoot if I passed you in the road.” He carved a slice of ham and held it out on the end of the knife. “It's long since you've tasted a ham like this—browned in bread crumbs,” he added temptingly, but the boy gravely shook his head.
“I've had quite enough, thank you, sir,” he answered with a quaint dignity, not unlike his grandfather's and as the Major rose, he stood up also, lifting his black head to look in the old man's face with his keen gray eyes.
The Major took up the bundle and moved toward the door. “You must see your grandmother,” he said as they went out, and he led the way up the crooked stair past the old clock in the bend. On the first landing he opened a door and stopped upon the threshold. “Molly, here is poor Jane's boy,” he said.
In the centre of a big four-post bed, curtained in white dimity, a little old lady was lying between lavender-scented sheets. On her breast stood a tall silver candlestick which supported a well-worn volume of “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” held open by a pair of silver snuffers. The old lady's face was sharp and wizened, and beneath her starched white nightcap rose the knots of her red flannel curlers. Her eyes, which were very small and black, held a flickering brightness like that in live embers.
“Whose boy, Mr. Lightfoot?” she asked sharply.
Holding the child by the hand, the Major went into the room.
“It's poor Jane's boy, Molly,” he repeated huskily.
The old lady raised her head upon her high pillows, and looked at him by the light of the candle on her breast. “Are you Jane's boy?” she questioned in suspicion, and at the child's “Yes, ma'am,” she said, “Come nearer. There, stand between the curtains. Yes, you are Jane's boy, I see.” She gave the decision flatly, as if his parentage were a matter of her pleasure. “And what is your name?” she added, as she snuffed the candle.
The boy looked from her stiff white nightcap to the “log-cabin” quilt on the bed, and then at her steel hoops which were hanging from a chair back. He had always thought of her as in her rich black silk, with the tight gray curls about her ears, and at this revelation of her inner mysteries, his fancy received a checkmate.
But he met her eyes again and answered simply, “Dandridge—they call me Dan—Dan Montjoy.”
“And he has walked two hundred miles, Molly,” gasped the Major.
“Then he must be tired,” was the old lady's rejoinder, and she added with spirit: “Mr. Lightfoot, will you show Dan to Jane's old room, and see that he has a blanket on his bed. He should have been asleep hours ago—good night, child, be sure and say your prayers,” and as they crossed the threshold, she laid aside her book and blew out her light.
The Major led the way to “Jane's old room” at the end of the hall, and fetched a candle from somewhere outside. “I think you'll find everything you need,” he said, stooping to feel the covering on the bed. “Your grandmother always keeps the rooms ready. God bless you, my son,” and he went out, softly closing the door after him.
The boy sat down on the steps of the tester bed, and looked anxiously round the three-cornered room, with its sloping windows filled with small, square panes of glass. By the candlelight, flickering on the plain, white walls and simple furniture, he tried to conjure back the figure of his mother,—handsome Jane Lightfoot. Over the mantel hung two crude drawings from her hand, and on the table at the bedside there were several books with her name written in pale ink on the fly leaves. The mirror to the high old bureau seemed still to hold the outlines of her figure, very shadowy against the greenish glass. He saw her in her full white skirts—she had worn nine petticoats, he knew, on grand occasions—fastening her coral necklace about her stately throat, the bands of her black hair drawn like a veil above her merry eyes. Had she lingered on that last Christmas Eve, he wondered, when her candlestick held its sprig of mistletoe and her room was dressed in holly? Did she look back at the cheerful walls and the stately furniture before she blew out her light and went downstairs to ride madly off, wrapped in his father's coat? And the old people drank their eggnog and watched the Virginia reel, and, when they found her gone, shut her out forever.
Now, as he sat on the bed-steps, it seemed to him that he had come home for the first time in his life. All this was his own by right,—the queer old house, his mother's room, and beyond the sloping windows, the meadows with their annual yield of grain. He felt the pride of it swelling within him; he waited breathlessly for the daybreak when he might go out and lord it over the fields and the cattle and the servants that were his also. And at last—his head big with his first day's vanity—he climbed between the dimity curtains and fell asleep.
When he awaked next morning, the sun was shining through the small square panes, and outside were the waving elm boughs and a clear sky. He was aroused by a knock on his door, and, as he jumped out of bed, Big Abel, the Major's driver and confidential servant, came in with the warm water. He was a strong, finely-formed negro, black as the ace of spades (so the Major put it), and of a singularly open countenance.
“Hi! ain't you up yit, young Marster?” he exclaimed. “Sis Rhody, she sez she done save you de bes' puffovers you ever tase, en ef'n you don' come 'long down, dey'll fall right flat.”
“Who is Sis Rhody?” inquired the boy, as he splashed the water on his face.
“Who she? Why, she de cook.”
“All right, tell her I'm coming,” and he dressed hurriedly and ran down into the hall where he found Champe Lightfoot, the Major's great-nephew, who lived at Chericoke.
“Hello!” called Champe at once, plunging his hands into his pockets and presenting an expression of eager interest. “When did you get here?”
“Last night,” Dan replied, and they stood staring at each other with two pairs of the Lightfoot gray eyes.
“How'd you come?”
“I walked some and I came part the way on a steamboat. Did you ever see a steamboat?”
“Oh, shucks! A steamboat ain't anything. I've seen George Washington's sword. Do you like to fish?”
“I never fished. I lived in a city.”
Zeke came in with a can of worms, and Champe gave them the greater share of his attention. “I tell you what, you'd better learn,” he said at last, returning the can to Zeke and taking up his fishing-rod. “There're a lot of perch down yonder in the river,” and he strode out, followed by the small negro.
Dan looked after him a moment, and then went into the dining room, where his grandmother was sitting at the head of her table, washing her pink teaset in a basin of soapsuds. She wore her stiff, black silk this morning with its dainty undersleeves of muslin, and her gray curls fell beneath her cap of delicate yellowed lace. “Come and kiss me, child,” she said as he entered. “Did you sleep well?”
“I didn't wake once,” answered the boy, kissing her wrinkled cheek.
“Then you must eat a good breakfast and go to your grandfather in the library. Your grandfather is a very learned man, Dan, he reads Latin every morning in the library.—Cupid, has Rhody a freshly broiled chicken for your young master?”
{0004}
She got up and rustled about the room, arranging the pink teaset behind the glass doors of the corner press. Then she slipped her key basket over her arm and fluttered in and out of the storeroom, stopping at intervals to scold the stream of servants that poured in at the dining-room door. “Ef'n you don' min', Ole Miss, Paisley, she done got de colick f'om a hull pa'cel er green apples,” and “Abram he's des a-shakin' wid a chill en he say he cyarn go ter de co'n field.”
“Wait a minute and be quiet,” the old lady responded briskly, for, as the boy soon learned, she prided herself upon her healing powers, and suffered no outsider to doctor her husband or her slaves. “Hush, Silas, don't say a word until I tell you. Cupid—you are the only one with any sense—measure Paisley a dose of Jamaica ginger from the bottle on the desk in the office, and send Abram a drink of the bitters in the brown jug—why, Car'line, what do you mean by coming into the house with a slit in your apron?”
“Fo' de Lawd, Ole Miss, hit's des done cotch on de fence. All de ducks Aun' Meeley been fattenin' up fur you done got loose en gone ter water.”
“Well, you go, too, every one of you!” and she dismissed them with waves of her withered, little hands. “Send them out, Cupid. No, Car'line, not a word. Don't 'Ole Miss' me, I tell you!” and the servants streamed out again as they had come.
When he had finished his breakfast the boy went back into the hall where Big Abel was taking down the Major's guns from the rack, and, as he caught sight of the strapping figure and kindly black face, he smiled for the first time since his home-coming. With a lordly manner, he went over and held out his hand.
“I likeyou, Big Abel,” he said gravely, and he followed him out into the yard.
For the next few weeks he did not let Big Abel out of his sight. He rode with him to the pasture, he sat with him on his doorstep of a fine evening, and he drove beside him on the box when the old coach went out. “Big Abel says a gentleman doesn't go barefooted,” he said to Champe when he found him without his shoes in the meadow, “and I'm a gentleman.”
“I'd like to know what Big Abel knows about it,” promptly retorted Champe, and Dan grew white with rage and proceeded to roll up his sleeves. “I'll whip any man who says Big Abel doesn't know a gentleman!” he cried, making a lunge at his cousin. In point of truth, it was Champe who did the whipping in such free fights; but bruises and a bleeding nose had never scared the savage out of Dan. He would spring up from his last tumble as from his first, and let fly at his opponent until Big Abel rushed, in tears, between them.
From the garrulous negro, the boy soon learned the history of his family—learned, indeed, much about his grandfather of which the Major himself was quite unconscious. He heard of that kindly, rollicking early life, half wild and wholly good-humoured, in which the eldest male Lightfoot had squandered his time and his fortune. Why, was not the old coach itself but an existing proof of Big Abel's stories? “'Twan' mo'n twenty years back dat Ole Miss had de fines' car'ige in de county,” he began one evening on the doorstep, and the boy drove away a brood of half-fledged chickens and settled himself to listen. “Hadn't you better light your pipe, Big Abel?” he inquired courteously.
Big Abel shuffled into the cabin and came back with his corncob pipe and a lighted taper. “We all ain' rid in de ole coach den,” he said with a sigh, as he sucked at the long stem, and threw the taper at the chickens. “De ole coach hit uz th'owed away in de out'ouse, en I 'uz des stiddyin' 'bout splittin' it up fer kindlin' wood—en de new car'ige hit cos' mos' a mint er money. Ole Miss she uz dat sot up dat she ain' let de hosses git no sleep—nor me nurr. Ef'n she spy out a speck er dus' on dem ar wheels, somebody gwine year f'om it, sho's you bo'n—en dat somebody wuz me. Yes, Lawd, Ole Miss she 'low dat dey ain' never been nuttin' like dat ar car'ige in Varginny sence befo' de flood.”
“But where is it, Big Abel?”
“You des wait, young Marster, you des wait twel I git dar. I'se gwine git dar w'en I come ter de day me an Ole Marster rid in ter git his gol' f'om Mars Tom Braxton. De car'ige hit sutney did look spick en span dat day, en I done shine up my hosses twel you could 'mos' see yo' face in dey sides. Well, we rid inter town en we got de gol' f'om Marse Braxton,—all tied up in a bag wid a string roun' de neck er it,—en we start out agin (en Ole Miss she settin' up at home en plannin' w'at she gwine buy), w'en we come ter de tave'n whar we all use ter git our supper, en meet Marse Plaintain Dudley right face to face. Lawd! Lawd! I'se done knowed Marse Plaintain Dudley afo' den, so I des tech up my hosses en wuz a-sailin' 'long by, w'en he shake his han' en holler out, 'Is yer wife done tied you ter 'er ap'on, Maje?' (He knowed Ole Miss don' w'ar no ap'on des es well es I knowed hit—dat's Marse Plaintain all over agin); but w'en he holler out dat, Ole Marster sez, 'Stop, Abel,' en I 'bleeged ter stop, you know, I wuz w'en Ole Marster tell me ter.
“'I ain' tied, Plaintain, I'm tired,' sez Ole Marster, 'I'm tired losin' money.' Den Marse Plaintain he laugh like a devil. 'Oh, come in, suh, come in en win, den,' he sez, en Ole Marster step out en walk right in wid Marse Plaintain behint 'im—en I set dar all night,—yes, suh, I set dar all night a-hol'n' de hosses' haids.
“Den w'en de sun up out come Ole Marster, white es a sheet, with his han's a-trem'lin', en de bag er gol' gone. I look at 'im fur a minute, en den I let right out, 'Ole Marster, whar de gol'?' en he stan' still en ketch his breff befo' he say, 'Hit's all gone, Abel, en de car'ige en de hosses dey's gone, too.” En w'en I bust out cryin' en ax 'im, 'My hosses gone, Ole Marster?' he kinder sob en beckon me fer ter git down f'om my box, en den we put out ter walk all de way home.
“W'en we git yer 'bout'n dinner time, dar wuz Ole Miss at de do' wid de sun in her eyes, en soon es she ketch sight er Ole Marster, she put up her han' en holler out, 'Marse Lightfoot, whar de car'ige?' But Ole Marster, he des hang down his haid, same es a dawg dat's done been whupped fur rabbit runnin', en he sob, 'Hit's gone, Molly en de bag er gol' en de hosses, dey's gone, too, I done loss 'em all cep'n Abel—en I'm a bad man, Molly.' Dat's w'at Ole Marster say, 'I'm a bad man, Molly,' en I stiddy 'bout my hosses en Ole Miss' car'ige en shet my mouf right tight.”
“And Grandma? Did she cry?” asked the boy, breathlessly.
“Who cry? Ole Miss? Huh! She des th'ow up her haid en low, 'Well, Marse Lightfoot, I'm glad you kep' Abel—en we'll use de ole coach agin',' sez she—en den she tu'n en strut right in ter dinner.”
“Was that all she ever said about it, Big Abel?”
“Dat's all I ever hyern, honey, en I b'lieve hit's all Ole Marster ever hyern eeder, case w'en I tuck his gun out er de rack de nex' day, he was settin' up des es prim in de parlour a-sippin' a julep wid Marse Peyton Ambler, en I hyern 'im kinder whisper, 'Molly, she's en angel, Peyton—' en he ain' never call Ole Miss en angel twel he loss 'er car'ige.”
The master of Uplands was standing upon his portico behind the Doric columns, looking complacently over the fat lands upon which his fathers had sown and harvested for generations. Beyond the lane of lilacs and the two silver poplars at the gate, his eyes wandered leisurely across the blue green strip of grass-land to the tawny wheat field, where the slaves were singing as they swung their cradles. The day was fine, and the outlying meadows seemed to reflect his gaze with a smile as beneficent as his own. He had cast his bread upon the soil, and it had returned to him threefold.
As he stood there, a small, yet imposing figure, in his white duck suit, holding his broad slouch hat in his hand, he presented something of the genial aspect of the country—as if the light that touched the pleasant hills and valleys was aglow in his clear brown eyes and comely features. Even the smooth white hand in which he held his hat and riding-whip had about it a certain plump kindliness which would best become a careless gesture of concession. And, after all, he looked but what he was—a bland and generous gentleman, whose heart was as open as his wine cellar.
A catbird was singing in one of the silver poplars, and he waited, with upraised head, for the song to end. Then he stooped beside a column and carefully examined a newly planted coral honeysuckle before he went into the wide hall, where his wife was seated at her work-table.
From the rear door, which stood open until frost, a glow of sunshine entered, brightening the white walls with their rows of antlers and gunracks, and rippling over the well-waxed floor upon which no drop of water had ever fallen. A faint sweetness was in the air from the honeysuckle arbour outside, which led into the box-bordered walks of the garden.
As the Governor hung up his hat, he begun at once with his daily news of the farm. “I hope they'll get that wheat field done to-day,” he said: “but it doesn't look much like it—they've been dawdling over it for the last three days. I am afraid Wilson isn't much of a manager, after all; if I take my eyes off him, he seems to lose his head.”
“I think everything is that way,” returned his wife, looking up from one of the elaborately tucked and hemstitched shirt fronts which served to gratify the Governor's single vanity. “I'm sure Aunt Pussy says she can't trust Judy for three days in the dairy without finding that the cream has stood too long for butter—and Judy has been churning for twenty years.” She cut off her thread and held the linen out for the Governor's inspection. “I really believe that is the prettiest one I've made. How do you like this new stitch?”
“Exquisite!” exclaimed her husband, as he took the shirt front in his hand. “Simply exquisite, my love. There isn't a woman in Virginia who can do such needlework; but it should go upon a younger and handsomer man, Julia.”
His wife blushed and looked up at him, the colour rising to her beautiful brow and giving a youthful radiance to her nunlike face. “It could certainly go upon a younger man, Mr. Ambler,” she rejoined, with a touch of the coquetry for which she had once been noted; “but I should like to know where I'd find a handsomer one.”
A pleased smile broadened the Governor's face, and he settled his waistcoat with an approving pat. “Ah, you're a partial witness, my dear,” he said; “but I've an error to confess, so I mustn't forego your favour—I—I bought several of Mr. Willis's servants, my love.”
“Why, Mr. Ambler!” remonstrated his wife, reproach softening her voice until it fell like a caress. “Why, Mr. Ambler, you bought six of Colonel Blake's last year, you know and one of the house servants has been nursing them ever since. The quarters are filled with infirm darkies.”
“But I couldn't help it, Julia, I really couldn't,” pleaded the Governor. “You'd have done it yourself, my dear. They were sold to a dealer going south, and one of them wants to marry that Mandy of yours.”
“Oh, if it's Mandy's lover,” broke in Mrs. Ambler, with rising interest, “of course you had to buy him, and you did right about the others—you always do right.” She put out her delicate blue-veined hand and touched his arm. “I shall see them to-day,” she added, “and Mandy may as well be making her wedding dress.”
“What an eye to things you have,” said the Governor, proudly. “You might have been President, had you been a man, my dear.”
His wife rose and took up her work-box with a laugh of protest. “I am quite content with the mission of my sex, sir,” she returned, half in jest, half in wifely humility. “I'm sure I'd much rather make shirt fronts for you than wear them myself.” Then she nodded to him and went, with her stately step, up the broad staircase, her white hand flitting over the mahogany balustrade.
As he looked after her, the Governor's face clouded, and he sighed beneath his breath. The cares she met with such serenity had been too heavy for her strength; they had driven the bloom from her cheeks and the lustre from her eyes; and, though she had not faltered at her task, she had drooped daily and grown older than her years. The master might live with a lavish disregard of the morrow, not the master's wife. For him were the open house, the shining table, the well-stocked wine cellar and the morning rides over the dewy fields; for her the cares of her home and children, and of the souls and bodies of the black people that had been given into her hands. In her gentle heart it seemed to her that she had a charge to keep before her God; and she went her way humbly, her thoughts filled with things so vital as the uses of her medicine chest and the unexpounded mysteries of salvation.
Now, as she reached the upper landing, she met Betty running to look for her.
“O, mamma, may I go to fish with Champe and the new boy and Big Abel? And Virginia wants to go, too, she says.”
“Wait a moment, child,” said Mrs. Ambler. “You have torn the trimming on your frock. Stand still and I'll mend it for you,” and she got out her needle and sewed up the rent, while Betty hopped impatiently from foot to foot.
“I think the new boy's a heap nicer than Champe, mamma,” she remarked as she waited.
“Do you, dear?”
“An' he says I'm nicer than Champe, too. He fought Champe 'cause he said I didn't have as much sense as he had—an' I have, haven't I, mamma?”
“Women do not need as much sense as men, my dear,” replied Mrs. Ambler, taking a dainty stitch.
“Well, anyway, Dan fought Champe about it,” said Betty, with pride. “He'll fight about 'most anything, he says, if he jest gets roused—an' that cert'n'y did rouse him. His nose bled a long time, too, and Champe whipped him, you know. But, when it was over, I asked him if I had as much sense as he had, and he said, 'Psha! you're just a girl.' Wasn't that funny, mamma?”
“There, there, Betty,” was Mrs. Ambler's rejoinder. “I'm afraid he's a wicked boy, and you mustn't get such foolish thoughts into your head. If the Lord had wanted you to be clever, He would have made you a man. Now, run away, and don't get your feet wet; and if you see Aunt Lydia in the garden, you may tell her that the bonnet has come for her to look at.”
Betty bounded away and gave the message to Aunt Lydia over the whitewashed fence of the garden. “They've sent a bonnet from New York for you to look at, Aunt Lydia,” she cried. “It came all wrapped up in tissue paper, with mamma's gray silk, and it's got flowers on it—a lot of them!” with which parting shot, she turned her back upon the startled old lady and dashed off to join the boys and Big Abel, who, with their fishing-poles, had gathered in the cattle pasture.
Miss Lydia, who was lovingly bending over a bed of thyme, raised her eyes and looked after the child, all in a gentle wonder. Then she went slowly up and down the box-bordered walks, the full skirt of her “old lady's gown” trailing stiffly over the white gravel, her delicate face rising against the blossomless shrubs of snowball and bridal-wreath, like a faintly tinted flower that had been blighted before it fully bloomed. Around her the garden was fragrant as a rose-jar with the lid left off, and the very paths beneath were red and white with fallen petals. Hardy cabbage roses, single pink and white dailies, yellow-centred damask, and the last splendours of the giant of battle, all dipped their colours to her as she passed, while the little rustic summer-house where the walks branched off was but a flowering bank of maiden's blush and microphylla.
Amid them all, Miss Lydia wandered in her full black gown, putting aside her filmy ruffles as she tied back a hanging spray or pruned a broken stalk, sometimes even lowering her thread lace cap as she weeded the tangle of sweet Williams and touch-me-not. Since her gentle girlhood she had tended bountiful gardens, and dreamed her virgin dreams in the purity of their box-trimmed walks. In a kind of worldly piety she had bound her prayer book in satin and offered to her Maker the incense of flowers. She regarded heaven with something of the respectful fervour with which she regarded the world—that great world she had never seen; for “the proper place for a spinster is her father's house,” she would say with her conventional primness, and send, despite herself, a mild imagination in pursuit of the follies from which she so earnestly prayed to be delivered—she, to whom New York was as the terror of a modern Babylon, and a Jezebel but a woman with paint upon her cheeks. “They tell me that other women have painted since,” she had once said, with a wistful curiosity. “Your grandmamma, my dear Julia, had even seen one with an artificial colour. She would not have mentioned it to me, of course,—an unmarried lady,—but I was in the next room when she spoke of it to old Mrs. Fitzhugh. She was a woman of the world, was your grandmamma, my dear, and the most finished dancer of her day.” The last was said with a timid pride, though to Miss Lydia herself the dance was the devil's own device, and the teaching of the catechism to small black slaves the chief end of existence. But the blood of the “most finished dancer of her day” still circulated beneath the old lady's gown and the religious life, and in her attenuated romances she forever held the sinner above the saint, unless, indeed, the sinner chanced to be of her own sex, when, probably, the book would never have reached her hands. For the purely masculine improprieties, her charity was as boundless as her innocence. She had even dipped into Shakespeare and brought away the memory of Mercutio; she had read Scott, and enshrined in her pious heart the bold Rob Roy. “Men are very wicked, I fear,” she would gently offer, “but they are very a—a—engaging, too.”
To-day, when Betty came with the message, she lingered a moment to convince herself that the bonnet was not in her thoughts, and then swept her trailing bombazine into the house. “I have come to tell you that you may as well send the bonnet back, Julia,” she began at once. “Flowers are much too fine for me, my dear. I need only a plain black poke.”
“Come up and try it on,” was Mrs. Ambler's cheerful response. “You have no idea how lovely it will look on you.”
Miss Lydia went up and took the bonnet out of its wrapping of tissue paper. “No, you must send it back, my love,” she said in a resigned voice. “It does not become me to dress as a married woman. It may as well go back, Julia.”
“But do look in the glass, Aunt Lydia—there, let me put it straight for you. Why, it suits you perfectly. It makes you look at least ten years younger.”
“A plain black poke, my dear,” insisted Aunt Lydia, as she carefully swathed the flowers in the tissue paper. “And, besides, I have my old one, which is quite good enough for me, my love. It was very sweet of you to think of it, but it may as well go back.” She pensively gazed at the mirror for a moment, and then went to her chamber and took out her Bible to read Saint Paul on Woman.
When she came down a few hours later, her face wore an angelic meekness. “I have been thinking of that poor Mrs. Brown who was here last week,” she said softly, “and I remember her telling me that she had no bonnet to wear to church. What a loss it must be to her not to attend divine service.”
Mrs. Ambler quickly looked up from her needlework. “Why, Aunt Lydia, it would be really a charity to give her your old one!” she exclaimed. “It does seem a shame that she should be kept away from church because of a bonnet. And, then, you might as well keep the new one, you know, since it is in the house; I hate the trouble of sending it back.”
“It would be a charity,” murmured Miss Lydia, and the bonnet was brought down and tried on again. They were still looking at it when Betty rushed in and threw herself upon her mother. “O, mamma, I can't help it!” she cried in tears, “an' I wish I hadn't done it! Oh, I wish I hadn't; but I set fire to the Major's woodpile, and he's whippin' Dan!”
“Betty!” exclaimed Mrs. Ambler. She took the child by her shoulders and drew her toward her. “Betty, did you set fire to the Major's woodpile?” she questioned sternly.
Betty was sobbing aloud, but she stopped long enough to gasp out an answer.
“We were playin' Injuns, mamma, an' we couldn't make believe 'twas real,” she said, “an' it isn't any fun unless you can make believe, so I lit the woodpile and pretended it was a fort, an' Big Abel, he was an Injun with the axe for a tomahawk; but the woodpile blazed right up, an' the Major came runnin' out. He asked Dan who did it, an' Dan wouldn't say 'twas me,—an' I wouldn't say, either,—so he took Dan in to whip him. Oh, I wish I'd told! I wish I'd told!”
“Hush, Betty,” said Mrs. Ambler, and she called to the Governor in the hall, “Mr. Ambler, Betty has set fire to the Major's woodpile!” Her voice was hopeless, and she looked up blankly at her husband as he entered.
“Set fire to the woodpile!” whistled the Governor. “Why, bless my soul, we aren't safe in our beds!”
“He whipped Dan,” wailed Betty.
“We aren't safe in our beds,” repeated the Governor, indignantly. “Julia, this is really too much.”
“Well, you will have to ride right over there,” said his wife, decisively. “Petunia, run down and tell Hosea to saddle his master's horse. Betty, I hope this will be a lesson to you. You shan't have any preserves for supper for a week.”
“I don't want any preserves,” sobbed Betty, her apron to her eyes.
“Then you mustn't go fishing for two weeks. Mr. Ambler, you'd better be starting at once, and don't forget to tell the Major that Betty is in great distress—you are, aren't you, Betty?”
“Yes, ma'am,” wept Betty.
The Governor went out into the hall and took down his hat and riding-whip.
“The sins of the children are visited upon the fathers,” he remarked gloomily as he mounted his horse and rode away from his supper.