CHAPTER XLIV.HOW SHE SPED.
The night drave on * * *The wind blew as ’twad blaun its last,The rattling showers rushed on the blast,The speedy gleams the darkness swallowed.Deep, lang and loud the tempest bellowed,From heav’n the clouds pour all their floods,The doubling storm roars through the woods.—Burns.
The night drave on * * *The wind blew as ’twad blaun its last,The rattling showers rushed on the blast,The speedy gleams the darkness swallowed.Deep, lang and loud the tempest bellowed,From heav’n the clouds pour all their floods,The doubling storm roars through the woods.—Burns.
The night drave on * * *The wind blew as ’twad blaun its last,The rattling showers rushed on the blast,The speedy gleams the darkness swallowed.Deep, lang and loud the tempest bellowed,From heav’n the clouds pour all their floods,The doubling storm roars through the woods.—Burns.
The night drave on * * *
The wind blew as ’twad blaun its last,
The rattling showers rushed on the blast,
The speedy gleams the darkness swallowed.
Deep, lang and loud the tempest bellowed,
From heav’n the clouds pour all their floods,
The doubling storm roars through the woods.—Burns.
Light here and there, like sparks of fire in seas of darkness. Darkness within and without. The two red lamps that flanked the coachman’s seat, the single lantern carried by the guard, and the bright point of Dick’s cigar as he sat smoking on the top of the coach, only seemed by contrast to make that darkness deeper.
The coach slowly clawed up a long hill at the summit of which was a country inn, with its usual accessories of grocery-store, blacksmith’s shop and post-office.
Here all was cheerful bustle, with the glancing lights, the voices of men, the tramp of steeds, and all the merry movement of a way station.
And here the coach stopped to change horses.
The outside passenger jumped down and went into the little bar-room of the inn, which Drusilla could see from her window was half filled with country loafers and village politicians, drinking, smoking, discussing the news, and settling the elections. In two minutes the outside passenger was “hail fellow, well met,” with every one of them, and generously treating the whole company with the best in the bar. Ah, poor Dick!
Meanwhile the guard came to the coach door with his lantern, and inquired if any of the ladies or gentlemen desired to get out for refreshments, as they should stop there fifteen minutes.
The two gentlemen on the front seat at once left thecoach. As they got out, Drusilla saw that one was the Reverend Mr. Hopper. The other was the stranger they had taken up first in Washington.
When they had disappeared, the guard turned to Drusilla and repeated his question, whether she or her attendant would like to leave the coach.
Drusilla politely declined to do so. But mammy got up and tumbled out of the coach, and called to one of the hostlers;
“Hey! I say! Come here, you sir, and fetch a light this way.”
The man who was thus summoned, thinking that some accident had happened, ran to the spot, demanding:
“What is it?”
“I want you just to look in that there leather place behind, and see if them there little red morocky trunks is all right.”
“Blast you and your trunks too! Who do you think is going to be bothered with them?” angrily retorted the man as he left her.
“Come in, nurse. Oh,docome in,” pleaded Drusilla, from the window. “I amsurethe trunks are all safe.”
But mammy was not in a very compliant humor. She ran splashing through slop and mire, and burst into the bar-room, exclaiming:
“Oh, do, kind gentlemen, some of you come out and see if them there two little red morocky trunks of the madam’s is all right.”
The company around the fire stared at her in astonishment and ridicule.
But Dick, the most good-natured of all creatures, took up a light and followed her.
“Here, sir,” she said, leading the way to the boot, “just you pull apart these here flaps and hold the light so I can peep in and see.”
Dick laughingly complied with her request.
“Yes, there they is, thank goodness, safe asyet. Thanky’ sir. Now I’ll get in the coach, please,” she said, with a courtesy as she returned to the side of her charge.
“Is it raining?” inquired Drusilla.
“No, honey, but black as Beelzebub; so it must come down heavy enough afore long. And now, honey, while them there men is all out’n the way let me make you comfortable for the night. You come over on this middle seat while I make you a bed on the back one.”
Drusilla complied, for she was very, very weary with sitting up so long.
Mammy, with the help of a softly-packed carpet bag, that served for a pillow, with a clean pocket handkerchief spread over it for a case, and two large shawls for coverings, made a very comfortable couch.
Drusilla took off her bonnet and hung it up, and loosened her hair and her clothes, and lay down. And mammy tucked her up.
Just at this moment came the guard with a tray and a tumbler.
“One of the gentlemen from the inn has sent this to the lady with his respectful compliments, and begs she will take it,” he said, as he handed the oiler in at the window.
“Yes, honey, you take it, and drink it, too. It’s a hot mulled port wine negus, spiced; and it will warm you and put you to sleep,” said mammy, as she took the glass from the messenger and passed it to the mistress.
The poor, chilled, tired and nervous creature really needed and felt that she needed just such a cordial at just that hour. She inhaled its steamy, spicy fragrance with satisfaction and desire, yet she hesitated to take it.
“I don’t know who sent it, nurse,” she said.
“Now what the mischiefthatgot to do with it? Dothatmake it hotter or worse? I s’pect the good-naturedyoung man who ’cused me o’ scalping him and breaking of his legs sent it. But that’s nyther here nor there. Whoever sent it, sent it in kindness; and don’t you ever ’fuse human kindness when you needs it, come from where it will, ’cause it hurts the feelings in the saftest place. Here, honey, drink it while it’s steaming hot—hot as love.”
“Well,” said Drusilla, taking the glass and sipping the cordial, “when you return the glass, send word to the gentleman that I thank him very much for his thoughtfulness in sending me this restorative, and that I know it will do me good.”
Five minutes after, when Drusilla, having finished her cordial, was comfortably reposing on her couch, and the guard came for the glass, mammy delivered her message thus:
“Tell the young man as sent this that the madam says how she’s very much obleeged to him for the hot stuff, which it has gone right to the right place, and done her good and no mistake.”
The next moment the three gentlemen passengers took their places inside the coach, two of them sitting on the front seat in opposite corners, and one of them, Dick, sitting on the middle seat beside mammy.
The coach started again. The night was so dark, and the down-hill road so steep, that its progress was cautiously slow.
The male passengers wrapped themselves closely in their “mauds,” pulled their caps down over their eyes, and composed themselves to sleep.
Mammy opened her luncheon basket, and, having first hospitably offered to share its contents with each and all of her fellow-passengers and been politely refused, set to work and ate a very hearty supplementary supper off the best it contained of food and drink, and then gathered up the fragments and put them away.
Finally, she took off her best bonnet—of the Quaker or Methodist pattern,—hung it up beside her mistress’s, tied a little woollen shawl over her head, wrapped a big one around her shoulders, and resigned herself to rest.
Soon all were sleeping except Drusilla, who, physically speaking, was more favorably placed for sleep than any of the others. She lay very comfortably, really rocked, not racked, by the swinging motion of the coach as it rolled down hill. She was very tired, and so, in a bodily sense, she almost enjoyed this soft reposing and easy rocking; but she was not sleepy, for her mind was too active with the thoughts of what lay around and before her.
Where was Dick Hammond and Mr. Hopper going? Who was the tall, dark gentleman they had taken up at Washington, and who certainly seemed to be of the same party, since she had seen him signalling to Mr. Hopper? Was their errand in the country connected with the same sad business that was taking herself thither?
Dick might be only going down in answer to his uncle’s invitation to the wedding, she reflected. “But, no, not so!” she thought, instantly repudiating the idea that Richard Hammond, after all that he had said in reprobation of the iniquitous marriage, could possibly sanction it by his presence.
But what then was he going for? and why was he taking Mr. Hopper and that other gentleman—who looked as if he were in some way connected with the law, along with him?
Was he going to denounce Alick to his uncle and cousin? Was he taking Mr. Hopper down as a witness to Alick’s former marriage? And the mysterious legal-looking gentleman as a prosecutor?
As these thoughts chased themselves through her mind, she clasped her hands and moaned.
Oh, were they all three combining to go and overwhelmher Alick, and cover him with humiliation and confusion? she asked herself; and for the moment her Alick appeared to her, not as a criminal pursued by the just avengers, but as a victim hunted down by relentless persecutors, of whom she saw herself the chief.
“Oh, why—oh, why couldn’t I have kept still and let him marry his cousin and be happy with her? Oh, Alick! oh, poor Alick! But that would have been a crime. Ah, Heaven, how hard is my lot to have to choose between making him wretched or leaving him criminal!” she moaned, twisting her fingers and weeping.
She dreaded the coming of the morning. She feared the daylight that might discover her face to these men, who she thought were confederated to ruin her husband. She dreaded their recognizing and speaking to her. But she was determined to have nothing to say to them, or to do with them; for, under present circumstances she felt that any intercourse between her and them would look too much like entering into their conspiracy. And now her whole gentle soul revolted in horror from those three harmless and unconscious gentlemen, who were reclining on the seats before her, and “sleeping the sleep of innocence.”
Yes; all in the coach were at rest except herself. Nor could she, with all her mental distress, very long resist the influences that were wooing her to repose. Her excessive bodily fatigue, combined with the soporific qualities of the spiced cordial she had taken, the swinging motion of the coach and the lulling sound of the falling rain, soon overcame her consciousness, and she too slumbered in forgetfulness of all her sorrows.
She slept on for several hours, until she was awakened by the flashing of lights, the hallooing of men and the trampling of beasts, as the coach stopped to change horses at one of the nosiest post-houses on the road.
The other passengers were aroused at the same time.
Mammy awoke from some dream of her professional duties, yawned, stretching her jaws almost to dislocation, and thereby discovering a most fearful abyss, and still dreaming, exclaiming:
“Yaw-aw! Yes, honey! Tell the madam I’ll be up and dressed in one minute. And tell that boy to run for the doctor. Ow! Yaw-aw!”
But at this noisy station the people were very active. And before the good woman could collect her faculties the coach started, and she herself was again precipitated down into the land of “Nod.”
Drusilla could not sleep again, so to ease her position she sat up and reclined back in the corner of her seat, and in a dreamy, half-conscious condition she gazed through the opposite window.
At first it seemed but a solid wall of darkness past which the coach was so swiftly whirling; but gradually, as her eyes accustomed themselves to the circumstances, this darkness grew less opaque, this obscurity less impenetrable, until at length she could dimly discern the boundaries of mountains, valleys, forests, and the outlines of rocks, trees and buildings.
At long intervals she could perceive the form of some solitary farm-house, with its barn, shed, cattle-pen, field, orchard and garden. Half waking, she would wonder who lived and worked there; and half sleeping, she would people the place with the beings of her dream.
Sometimes she saw a lonely woodcutter’s cottage on the edge of a forest, and vaguely conjectured what sort of life its denizens led. Once in such a place she saw a single light burning in the tiny window of a little upper chamber, in the interior of which the shadow of a woman was bending over the shadow of a sick-bed. She had but a glimpse of all this, as the coach rolled past, yet her ready sympathies went forth to the poor watcher and the suffering invalid.
Once she was treated to a brilliant picture in the darkness—an oasis in the desert. It was a bran new, commodious country house, well seated on a hill; lights were glancing from every window; music was borne forth upon the wind; even in that inclement weather, somebody seemed to be giving a great party and to be keeping it up all night. But before she could observe more the coach had rushed by and left the festive scene far behind.
Once she noticed a little road-side hut, and in its doorway, a poor, old woman, thinly clad, holding a lantern in her hand and bending outward in an attitude of intense anxiety, as if looking for some one. “In her poor way, she is watching and waiting, as I used to do. Has she a husband, or perhaps a son, who is breaking her heart?” mused Drusilla, as the coach swung onward and left this sad picture also in its rear.
Such signs of life, however, were very rare, on that lonely road, at that late hour. The few hamlets, farms and huts they passed were for the most part shut up, dark and silent as graves.
But they were now penetrating deeper and deeper into the mountain fastnesses; and farm-houses and villages were fewer and farther between. For miles and miles nothing but the most savage solitudes loomed in the blackness of darkness through which they passed. And Drusilla, reclining back in her corner, dreamily gazing forth through the rain-dimmed window upon this obscure scene, vaguely wondered when these solitudes would be peopled, when this wilderness would “bloom and blossom as the rose.”
And so, while all her fellow-passengers were deeply buried in unconsciousness, she dreamed on her waking dream. But often in the midst of these reveries the sudden sharp recollection of her own trouble pierced her heart like a sword and drew from her lips a bitter groan. Then again the influence of the scene and hour, the obscurity, the picturesqueness,the rocking motion of the coach, the soothing sound of the falling rain without, the silence and stillness of all within, lulled her senses to repose if not to sleep.
Thus, slumbering, dreaming, starting, waking, she passed this weird night, that ever in her after life seemed to her less like the reality than like the phantasmagoria of a hasheesh-conjured vision.
Towards morning, being very much wearied with sitting up, she lay down again, and, as is usual with uneasy sleepers, just at daylight she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.