The Deliverance Part 5

He fastened the cage and placed it carefully beneath the bench.

Then, closing and bolting the door, he took the lamp from Carraway and motioned him up the dusky staircase to the spare chamber at the top.

CHAPTER V. The Wreck of the Blakes

When Christopher left Blake Hall, he swung vigorously in the twilight across the newly ploughed fields, until, at the end of a few minutes' walk, he reached the sunken road that branched off by the abandoned ice-pond. Here the bullfrogs were still croaking hoa.r.s.ely, and far away over the gray-green rushes a dim moon was mounting the steep slope of bluish sky.

The air was fresh with the scent of the upturned earth, and the closing day refined into a tranquil beauty; but the young man, as he pa.s.sed briskly, did not so much as draw a lengthened breath, and when presently the cry of a whip-poor-will floated from the old rail fence, he fell into a whistling mockery of the plaintive notes. The dogs at his heels started a rabbit once from the close cover of the underbrush, and he called them to order in a sharp, peremptory tone. Not until he reached the long, whitewashed gate opening before the frame house of the former overseers did he break the easy swing of his accustomed stride.

The house, a common country dwelling of the sort used by the poorer cla.s.s of farmers, lost something of its angularity beneath the moonlight, and even the half-dried garments, spread after the day's was.h.i.+ng on the bent old rose-bushes, shone in soft white patches amid the gra.s.s, which looked thick and fine under the heavy dew. In one corner of the yard there was a spreading peach-tree, on which the shriveled little peaches ripened out of season, and against the narrow porch sprawled a gray and crippled aspen, where a flock of turkeys had settled to roost along its twisted boughs.

In one of the lower rooms a lamp was burning, and as Christopher crunched heavily along the pebbled path, a woman with a piece of sewing in her hand came into the hall and spoke his name.

"Christopher, you are late."

Her voice was deep and musical, with a richness of volume which raised deluding hopes of an impa.s.sioned beauty in the speaker--who, as she crossed the illumined square of the window-frame, showed as a tall, thin woman of forty years, with squinting eyes, and a face whose misshapen features stood out like the hasty drawing for a grotesque. When she reached him Christopher turned from the porch, and they walked together slowly out into the moonlight, pa.s.sing under the aspen where the turkeys stirred and fluttered in their sleep.

"Has her cat come home, Cynthia?" were the young man's first anxious words.

"About sunset. Uncle Boaz found her over at Aunt Daphne's, hunting mice under the joists. Mother had fretted terribly over the loss."

"Is she easier now?"

"Much more so, but she still asks for the port. We pretend that Uncle Boaz has mislaid the key of the wine-cellar. She upbraided him, and he bore it so patiently, poor old soul!"

Christopher quickly reached into the deep pocket of his overalls and drew out the scanty wages of his last three days' labour.

"Send this by somebody down to Tompkins," he said, "and get the wine he ordered. He refuses to sell on credit any longer, so I had to find the money."

She looked up, startled.

"Oh, Christopher, you have worked for Fletcher?"

Tears shone in her eyes and her mouth quivered. "Oh, Christopher!" she repeated, and the emotional quality in her voice rang strong and true. He fell back, angered, while the hand she had stretched out dropped limply to her side.

"For G.o.d's sake, don't snivel," he retorted harshly. "Send the money and give her the wine, but dole it out like a miser, for where the next will come from is more than I can tell."

"The pay for my sewing is due in three days," said Cynthia, raising her roughened hand on which the needle-scars showed even in the moonlight. "Mother has worried so to-day that I couldn't work except at odd moments, but I can easily manage to sit up to-night and get it done. She thinks I'm embroidering an ottoman, you see, and this evening she asked to feel the silks."

He uttered a savage exclamation.

"Oh, I gave her some ravellings from an old tidy," she hastened to a.s.sure him. "She played with them awhile and knew no better, as I told her the colours one by one. Afterward she planned all kinds of samplers and fire-screens that I might work. Her own knitting has wearied her of late, so we haven't been obliged to buy the yarn."

"She doesn't suspect, you think?"

Cynthia shook her head. "After fifteen years of deception there's no danger of my telling the truth to-day. I only wish I could,"

she added, with that patient dignity which is the outward expression of complete renouncement. When she lifted her tragic face the tears on her cheeks softened the painful hollows, as the moonbeams, playing over her gown of patched and faded silk, revived for a moment the freshness of its discoloured flowers.

"The truth would be the death of her," said the young man, in a bitter pa.s.sion of anxiety. "Tell her that Fletcher owns the Hall, and that for fifteen years she has lived, blind and paralysed, in the overseer's house! Why, I'd rather stick a knife into her heart myself!"

"Her terrible pride would kill her--yes, you're right. We'll keep it up to the end at any cost."

He turned to her with a sudden terror in his face. "She isn't worse, is she?"

"Worse? Oh, no; I only meant the cost to us, the cost of never speaking the truth within the house."

"Well, I'm not afraid of lying, G.o.d knows," he answered, in the tone of one from whom a burden has been removed. "I'm only wondering how much longer I'll be able to afford the luxury."

"But we're no worse off than usual, that's one comfort. Mother is quite happy now since Beulah has been found, and the only added worry is that Aunt Dinah is laid up in her cabin and we've had to send her soup. Uncle Isam has come to see you, by the way. I believe he wants you to give him some advice about his little hut up in the woods, and to look up his birth in the servants'

age-book, too. He lives five miles away, you know, and works across the river at Farrar's Mills."

"Uncle Isam!" exclaimed Christopher, wonderingly; "why, what do I know about the man? I haven't laid eyes on him for the last ten years."

"But he wants help now, so of course he's come to you, and as he's walked all the distance--equally of course--he'll stay to supper. Mother has her young chicken, and there's bacon and cornbread for the rest of us, so I hope the poor man won't go back hungry. Ever since Aunt Polly's chimney blew down she has had to fry the middling in the kitchen, and mother complains so of the smell. She can't understand why we have it three times a day, and when I told her that Uncle Tucker acquired the habit in the army, she remarked that it was very inconsiderate of him to insist upon gratifying so extraordinary a taste."

Christopher laughed shortly.

"Well, it's a muck of a world," he declared cheerfully, taking off his coa.r.s.e harvest hat and running his hand through his cl.u.s.tering fair hair. In the mellow light the almost brutal strength of his jaw was softened, and his sunburned face paled to the beauty of some ancient ivory carving. Cynthia, gazing up at him, caught her breath with a sob.

"How big you are, and strong! How fit for any life in the world but this!"

"Don't whimper," he responded roughly, adding, after a moment, "Precious fit for anything but the stable or the tobacco field!

Why, I couldn't so much as write a decently spelled letter to save my soul. A darky asked me yesterday to read a postbill for him down at the store, and I had to skip a big word in the first line."

He made his confession defiantly, with a certain boorish pride in his ignorance and his degradation.

"My dear, my dear, I wanted to teach you--I will teach you now.

We will read together."

"And let mother and Uncle Tucker plough the field, and plant the crop, and cut the wood. No, it won't answer; your learning would do me no good, and I don't want it--I told you that when you first took me from my study and put me to do all the ch.o.r.es upon the place."

"I take you! Oh, Christopher, what could we do? Uncle Tucker was a hopeless cripple, there wasn't a servant strong enough to spade the garden, and there were only Lila and you and I."

"And I was ten. Well, I'm not blaming you, and I've done what I was forced to--but keep your confounded books out of my sight, that's all I ask. Is that mother calling?"

Cynthia bent her ear. "I thought Lila was with her, but I'll go at once. Be sure to change your clothes, dear, before she touches you."

"Hadn't I better chop a little kindling-wood before supper?"

"No--no, not to-night. Go and dress, while I send Uncle Boaz for the wine."

She entered the house with a hurried step, and Christopher, after an instant's hesitation, pa.s.sed to the back, and, taking off his clumsy boots, crept softly up the creaking staircase to his little garret room in the loft.

Ten minutes later he came down again, wearing a decent suit of country-made clothes, with the dust washed from his face, and his hair smoothly brushed across his forehead. In the front hall he took a white rosebud from a little vase of Bohemian gla.s.s and pinned it carefully in the lapel of his coat. Then, before entering, he stood for a moment silent upon the threshold of the lamplighted room.

In a ma.s.sive Elizabethan chair of blackened oak a stately old lady was sitting straight and stiff, with her useless legs stretched out upon an elaborately embroidered ottoman. She wore a dress of rich black brocade, made very full in the skirt, and sleeves after an earlier fas.h.i.+on, and her beautiful snow-white hair was piled over a high cus.h.i.+on and ornamented by a cap of fine thread lace. In her face, which she turned at the first footstep with a pitiable, blind look, there were the faint traces of a proud, though almost extinguished, beauty--traces which were visible in the impetuous flash of her sightless eyes, in the n.o.ble arch of her brows, and in the transparent quality of her now yellowed skin, which still kept the look of rare porcelain held against the sunlight. On a dainty, rose-decked tray beside her chair there were the half of a broiled chicken, a thin gla.s.s of port, and a plate of b.u.t.tered waffles; and near her high footstool a big yellow cat was busily lapping a saucer of new milk.