The Voice of the People Part 26

The general was suppressed, and after breakfast he got into the carriage beside his daughter and drove slowly into town. When he returned to dinner he met Miss Chris with triumphant eyes.

"By the way, Chris, you were mistaken this morning about that Burr boy.

He's quite a decent person. I don't see how you got it into your head there was something wrong about him."

"I'm glad to hear it," responded Miss Chris good-humouredly. She had never uttered a harsh word about anybody in her life, but she was a long-suffering woman, and she philosophically accepted the accusation.

Twenty-four hours later the general had a pa.s.sage at arms with Bernard.

"You can watch the thres.h.i.+ng this morning, my boy," he remarked as he sat down to breakfast. "You won't go in to town, I suppose?"

Bernard shook his head.

"I thought of riding in for the mail," he answered; "there's a letter I'm looking for."

The general flushed and put out a preliminary feeler. "How are you going?" he inquired; "not on one of my horses, I hope?"

Eugenia shook her head at Bernard, but he went on recklessly:

"Why, yes, I thought I'd take the gray mare."

The general shook his head until his flabby face grew purple.

"The gray mare!" he thundered. "You mean to take out my gray mare, do you? Well, I'd like to see you, sir. Not a step does the gray mare stir--not a step, sir."

"Oh, all right," agreed Bernard so quietly that the general's rage increased. "Keep her in the stables, for all I care." And, having finished his breakfast, he bowed to Miss Chris and left the table.

But an hour later, as he pa.s.sed through the hall, he found the general waiting. "Aren't you ready?" he asked irascibly. "Are you going to waste the whole morning? Why aren't you in town?"

Bernard's temper was well enough as long as there was no reason it should be better; but he couldn't stand his father, and he knew it.

"I'm not going," he returned sullenly.

"Not going!" cried the general hotly, "not going after all the fuss you've raised? What do you mean by changing your mind every minute?"

Bernard took his hat from the old mahogany rack. "I've nothing to ride,"

he replied irritably, "and I don't choose to walk--that's what I mean."

But his answer only exasperated his hovering parent.

"Damme, sir, do you want to make me lose my temper?" he demanded. "Isn't the stable full of horses? Where's the gray mare, I'd like to know, sir?"

"Eugie!" called Bernard angrily, "come here." And as the girl appeared he made a break from the house. He possessed an abiding faith in the endurance of Eugenia's clannish soul that was proof against even the suggestion that it might succ.u.mb. His father was unquestionably trying, but Eugie was unquestionably strong, and she loved her people with a pa.s.sion which he felt to be romantically unsurpa.s.sable. Yes, Eugie was the hope of the family, after all.

As for the girl, she put her arm about the general and drew him to his chair. He was failing rapidly; this she saw and suffered at seeing.

There were wrinkles crossing and recrossing his hanging cheeks, and swollen bluish pockets beneath his eyes. When he moved he carried his great weight uneasily. During the day she hung over him with multiplied caresses; as he sat upon the porch in the afternoon she read to him from the Bible and Shakespeare, the only books his library contained.

"After G.o.d and Shakespeare, what was left for any man to write?" the general had once demanded of the judge.

Now he asked the question of Eugenia, and she smiled and was silent. Her eyes pa.s.sed from the porch to the lawn and the walk and the immemorial gloom of the great cedars. Suns.h.i.+ne lay over all the warm, sleepy land, and suns.h.i.+ne lay across her white dress and across the senile droop of the general's mouth.

"For He maketh sore, and bindeth up," read the girl slowly. "He woundeth and His hands make whole."

"He shall deliver thee in six troubles;--yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee."

"In famine He shall redeem thee from death: and in war from the power of the sword."

She stopped suddenly and looked up, for the general's eyes were full of tears.

BOOK III

WHEN FIELDS LIE FALLOW

I

On an October afternoon Nicholas Burr was walking along the branch road that led to his father's farm. He carried a well filled bag upon his shoulder, the musty surface of which betrayed that it contained freshly ground meal, but, despite the additional weight, his figure was unflinchingly erect. There was a splendid vigour in his thick-set frame and in the swinging strides of his hardy limbs. His face--the square-jawed, large-featured face of a philosopher or a farmer--possessed, with its uncompromising ugliness, a certain eccentric power. Rugged, gray, alert-eyed as it was, large-browed and overhung by his waving red hair--it was a face to attract or to repel--not to be ignored.

Now, as he swung on vigorously in the October light, there was about him a joyousness of purpose which belonged to his age and his aspirations.

It was an atmosphere, an emanation thrown off by respiring vitality.

Across the road the suns.h.i.+ne fell in long, level shafts. The spirit of October was abroad in the wood--veiling itself in a faint, bluish haze like the smoke of the greenwood when it burns. Overhead, crimson and yellow ran riot among the trees, the flame of the maple extinguis.h.i.+ng the dull red of the oak, the clear gold of the hickory flas.h.i.+ng through the gloss of the holly. As yet the leaves had not begun to fall; they held tenaciously to the living branches, fluttering light heads in the first autumn chill. In the underbrush, where the deerberry showed hectic blotches, a squirrel worked busily, completing its winter store, while in the slanting sun rays a tawny b.u.t.terfly, like a wind-blown, loosened tiger lily, danced its last mad dance with death.

To Nicholas the scene was without significance. With a gesture he threw off the spell of its beauty, as he s.h.i.+fted the "sack" of corn meal upon his shoulder. He had found Uncle Ish tottering homeward with the load, and he had taken it from him with a careless promise to leave it at the old negro's cabin door--then, pa.s.sing him by a stride, he had gone on his kindly, confident way. He forgot Uncle Ish as readily as he forgot the bag he carried. His mind was busily reviewing the points of his last case and the possible facts of a more important one he believed to be coming to him. In this connection he went back to his first fight in the little court-house, and he laughed with an appreciation of the humour of his success. It was Turner, after all, who had given it to him; Turner, who, having bought a horse that died upon the journey home, wanted revenge as well as recompense. He remembered his perturbation as he rose to cross-examine the defendant--the nervousness with which he drove his weapons home. It had all seemed so important to him then--the court, his client, the great, greasy horse dealer forced into the witness stand.

He had proved his case by the defendant, and he had won as well a mild reputation among the farmers who had a.s.sembled for the day. Since then he had done well, and the judge's patronage had placed much in his hands that, otherwise, would have gone elsewhere.

Beyond the wood, the uncultivated wasteland sported its annual carnival of golden rod and sumach, and across the brilliant plumes a round, red sun hung suspended in a quiet sky. In the corn field, where the late crop was fast maturing, negro women chanted shrilly as they pulled the "fodder," their high-coloured kerchiefs blending, like autumn foliage, with the landscape. Around them the bared stalks rose boldly row on row, reserving their scarred and yellow husks for the last harvest of the year.

When Nicholas reached his father's house he did not enter the little whitewashed gate, but kept on to the log cabin on the edge of General Battle's land, where Uncle Ish was pa.s.sing his declining years in poverty and independence. The cabin stood above a little gully which skirted the dividing line of the pastures, facing, in its primitive nudity, the level stretch of the shadowless highway. It was a rotting, one-room dwelling, with a wide doorway opening upon a small, bare strip of ground where a gnarled oak grew. In the rear there was a small garden, denuded now of its modest vegetables, only the leafy foliage of a late pea crop retaining a semblance of fruitfulness.

Nicholas went up the narrow path leading from the road to the hut, and placed the bag on the smooth, round stone which served for a step. As he did so, the doorway abruptly darkened, and a girl came from the interior and paused with her foot upon the threshold. He saw, in an upward glance, that it was Eugenia Battle, and, from the light wicker basket on her arm, he inferred that, in the absence of Uncle Ish, she had been engaged in supplying his simple wants. That the old negro was still cared for by the Battles he was aware, though upon the means of his livelihood Uncle Ish, himself, was singularly reticent.

As Eugenia saw him she flushed slightly, as one caught in a secret charity, and promptly pointed to the bag of meal.

"Whose is that?"

He looked from the girl to the bag and back again, his own cheek reddening. At the instant it occurred to him that it was a peculiar greeting after a separation of years.

"It belongs to Uncle Ish," he answered, with unreasonable embarra.s.sment.

"I believe your father gave it to him."

"He might have brought it home for him," was her comment, and immediately: