Audrey Part 13

At last he looked up. "I myself will take you home, child. This fellow shall not come near you. And cease to think of these gruesome things that happened long ago. You are young and fair; you should be happy. I will see to it that"--

He broke off, and again looked thoughtfully at the ground. The book which he had tossed aside was lying upon the gra.s.s, open at the poem which he had been reading. He stooped and raised the volume, and, closing it, laid it upon the bench beside her. Presently he laughed. "Come, child!" he said. "You have youth. I begin to think my own not past recall. Come and let me show you my dial that I have just had put up."

There was no load at Audrey's heart: the vision of Molly had pa.s.sed; the fear of Hugon was a dwindling cloud. She was safe in this old sunny garden, with harm shut without. And as a flower opens to the suns.h.i.+ne, so because she was happy she grew more fair. Audrey every day, Audrey of the infrequent speech and the wide dark eyes, the startled air, the shy, fugitive smiles,--that was not Audrey of the garden. Audrey of the garden had s.h.i.+ning eyes, a wild elusive grace, laughter as silvery as that which had rung from her sister's lips, years agone, beneath the sugar-tree in the far-off blue mountains, quick gestures, quaint fancies which she feared not to speak out, the charm of mingled humility and spirit; enough, in short, to make Audrey of the garden a name to conjure with.

They came to the sun-dial, and leaned thereon. Around its rim were graved two lines from Herrick, and Audrey traced the letters with her finger.

"The philosophy is sound," remarked Haward, "and the advice worth the taking. Let us go see if there are any rosebuds to gather from the bushes yonder. Damask buds should look well against your hair, child."

When they came to the rosebushes he broke for her a few scarce-opened buds, and himself fastened them in the coils of her hair. Innocent and glad as she was,--glad even that he thought her fair,--she trembled beneath his touch, and knew not why she trembled. When the rosebuds were in place they went to see the clove pinks, and when they had seen the clove pinks they walked slowly up another alley of box, and across a gra.s.s plot to a side door of the house; for he had said that he must show her in what great, lonely rooms he lived.

Audrey measured the height and breadth of the house with her eyes. "It is a large place for one to live in alone," she said, and laughed. "There's a book at the Widow Constance's; Barbara once showed it to me. It is all about a pilgrim; and there's a picture of a great square house, quite like this, that was a giant's castle,--Giant Despair. Good giant, eat me not!"

Child, woman, spirit of the woodland, she pa.s.sed before him into a dim, cool room, all littered with books. "My library," said Haward, with a wave of his hand. "But the curtains and pictures are not hung, nor the books in place. Hast any schooling, little maid? Canst read?"

Audrey flushed with pride that she could tell him that she was not ignorant; not like Barbara, who could not read the giant's name in the pilgrim book.

"The crossroads schoolmaster taught me," she explained. "He has a scar in each hand, and is a very wicked man, but he knows more than the Commissary himself. The minister, too, has a cupboard filled with books, and he buys the new ones as the s.h.i.+ps bring them in. When I have time, and Mistress Deborah will not let me go to the woods, I read. And I remember what I read. I could"--

A smile trembled upon her lips, and her eyes grew brighter. Fired by the desire that he should praise her learning, and in her very innocence bold as a Wortley or a Howe, she began to repeat the lines which he had been reading beneath the cherry-tree:--

"'When from the censer clouds of fragrance roll'"--

The rhythm of the words, the pa.s.sion of the thought, the pleased surprise that she thought she read in his face, the gesture of his hand, all spurred her on from line to line, sentence to sentence. And now she was not herself, but that other woman, and she was giving voice to all her pa.s.sion, all her woe. The room became a convent cell; her ragged dress the penitent's trailing black. That Audrey, lithe of mind as of body; who in the woods seemed the spirit of the woods, in the garden the spirit of the garden, on the water the spirit of the water,--that this Audrey, in using the speech of the poet, should embody and become the spirit of that speech was perhaps, considering all things, not so strange. At any rate, and however her power came about, at that moment, in Fair View house, a great actress was speaking.

"'Fresh blooming Hope, gay daughter of the skies, And Faith'"--

The speaker lost a word, hesitated, became confused. Finally silence; then the Audrey of a while before, standing with heaving bosom, shy as a fawn, fearful that she had not pleased him, after all. For if she had done so, surely he would have told her as much. As it was, he had said but one word, and that beneath his breath, "_Elosa!_"

It would seem that her fear was unfounded; for when he did speak, there were, G.o.d wot, sugar-plums enough. And Audrey, who in her workaday world was always blamed, could not know that the praise that was so sweet was less wholesome than the blame.

Leaving the library they went into the hall, and from the hall looked into great, echoing, half-furnished rooms. All about lay packing-cases, many of them open, with rich stuffs streaming from them. Ornaments were huddled on tables, mirrors and pictures leaned their faces to the walls; everywhere was disorder.

"The negroes are careless, and to-day I held their hands," said Haward. "I must get some proper person to see to this gear."

Up stairs and down they went through the house, that seemed very large and very still, and finally they came out of the great front door, and down the stone steps on to the terrace. Below them, sparkling in the suns.h.i.+ne, lay the river, the opposite sh.o.r.e all in a haze of light. "I must go home," Audrey shyly reminded him, whereat he smiled a.s.sent, and they went, not through the box alley to the gate in the wall, but down the terrace, and out upon the hot brown boards of the landing. Haward, stepping into a boat, handed her to a seat in the stern, and himself took the oars.

Leaving the landing, they came to the creek and entered it. Presently they were gliding beneath the red brick wall with the honeysuckle atop. On the opposite gra.s.sy sh.o.r.e, seated in a blaze of noon suns.h.i.+ne, was Hugon.

They in the boat took no notice. Haward, rowing, spoke evenly on, his theme himself and the gay and lonely life he had led these eleven years; and Audrey, though at first sight of the waiting figure she had paled and trembled, was too safe, too happy, to give to trouble any part of this magic morning. She kept her eyes on Haward's face, and almost forgot the man who had risen from the gra.s.s and in silence was following them.

Now, had the trader, in his hunting s.h.i.+rt and leggings, his moccasins and fur cap, been walking in the great woods, this silence, even with others in company, would have been natural enough to his Indian blood; but Monsieur Jean Hugon, in peruke and laced coat, walking in a civilized country, with words a-plenty and as hot as fire-water in his heart, and none upon his tongue, was a figure strange and sinister. He watched the two in the boat with an impa.s.sive face, and he walked like an Indian on an enemy's trail, so silently that he scarce seemed to breathe, so lightly that his heavy boots failed to crush the flowers or the tender gra.s.s.

Haward rowed on, telling Audrey stories of the town, of great men whose names she knew, and beautiful ladies of whom she had never heard; and she sat before him with her slim brown hands folded in her lap and the rosebuds withering in her hair, while through the reeds and the gra.s.s and the bushes of the bank over against them strode Hugon in his Blenheim wig and his wine-colored coat. Well-nigh together the three reached the stake driven in among the reeds, a hundred yards below the minister's house.

Haward fastened the boat, and, motioning to Audrey to stay for the moment where she was, stepped out upon the bank to confront the trader, who, walking steadily and silently as ever, was almost upon them.

But it was broad daylight, and Hugon, with his forest instincts, preferred, when he wished to speak to the point, to speak in the dark. He made no pause; only looked with his fierce black eyes at the quiet, insouciant, fine gentleman standing with folded arms between him and the boat; then pa.s.sed on, going steadily up the creek toward the bend where the water left the open smiling fields and took to the forest. He never looked back, but went like a hunter with his prey before him. Presently the shadows of the forest touched him, and Audrey and Haward were left alone.

The latter laughed. "If his courage is of the quality of his lace--What, cowering, child, and the tears in your eyes! You were braver when you were not so tall, in those mountain days. Nay, no need to wet your shoe."

He lifted her in his arms, and set her feet upon firm gra.s.s. "How long since I carried you across a stream and up a dark hillside!" he said. "And yet to-day it seems but yesternight! Now, little maid, the Indian has run away, and the path to the house is clear."

In his smoke-filled, untidy best room Darden sat at table, his drink beside him, his pipe between his fingers, and open before him a book of jests, propped by a tome of divinity. His wife coming in from the kitchen, he burrowed in the litter upon the table until he found an open letter, which he flung toward her. "The Commissary threatens again, d.a.m.n him!" he said between smoke puffs. "It seems that t'other night, when I was in my cups at the tavern, Le Neve and the fellow who has Ware Creek parish--I forget his name--must needs come riding by. I was dicing with Paris. Hugon held the stakes. I dare say we kept not mum. And out of pure brotherly love and charity, my good, kind gentlemen ride on to Williamsburgh on a tale-bearing errand! Is that child never coming back, Deborah?"

"She's coming now," answered his wife, with her eyes upon the letter. "I was watching from the upper window. He rowed her up the creek himself."

The door opened, and Audrey entered the room. Darden turned heavily in his chair, and took the long pipe from between his teeth. "Well?" he said.

"You gave him my letter?"

Audrey nodded. Her eyes were dreamy; the red of the buds in her hair had somehow stolen to her cheeks; she could scarce keep her lips from smiling.

"He bade me tell you to come to supper with him on Monday," she said. "And the Falcon that we saw come in last week brought furnis.h.i.+ng for the great house. Oh, Mistress Deborah, the most beautiful things! The rooms are all to be made fine; and the negro women do not the work aright, and he wants some one to oversee them. He says that he has learned that in England Mistress Deborah was own woman to my Lady Squander, and so should know about hangings and china and the placing of furniture. And he asks that she come to Fair View morning after morning until the house is in order.

He wishes me to come, too. Mistress Deborah will much oblige him, he says, and he will not forget her kindness."

Somewhat out of breath, but very happy, she looked with eager eyes from one guardian to the other. Darden emptied and refilled his pipe, scattering the ashes upon the book of jests. "Very good," he said briefly.

Into the thin visage of the ex-waiting-woman, who had been happier at my Lady Squander's than in a Virginia parsonage, there crept a tightened smile. In her way, when she was not in a pa.s.sion, she was fond of Audrey; but, in temper or out of temper, she was fonder of the fine things which for a few days she might handle at Fair View house. And the grat.i.tude of the master thereof might appear in coins, or in an order on his store for silk and lace. When, in her younger days, at Bath or in town, she had served fine mistresses, she had been given many a guinea for carrying a note or contriving an interview, and in changing her estate she had not changed her code of morals. "We must oblige Mr. Haward, of course," she said complacently. "I warrant you that I can give things an air! There's not a parlor in this parish that does not set my teeth on edge! Now at my Lady Squander's"--She embarked upon reminiscences of past splendor, checked only by her husband's impatient demand for dinner.

Audrey, preparing to follow her into the kitchen, was stopped, as she would have pa.s.sed the table, by the minister's heavy hand. "The roses at Fair View bloom early," he said, turning her about that he might better see the red cl.u.s.ter in her hair. "Look you, Audrey! I wish you no great harm, child. You mind me at times of one that I knew many years ago, before ever I was chaplain to my Lord Squander or husband to my Lady Squander's waiting-woman. A hunter may use a decoy, and he may also, on the whole, prefer to keep that decoy as good as when 'twas made. Buy not thy roses too dearly, Audrey."

To Audrey he spoke in riddles. She took from her hair the loosened buds, and looked at them lying in her hand. "I did not buy them," she said.

"They grew in the sun on the south side of the great house, and Mr. Haward gave them to me."

CHAPTER XII

THE PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN

June came to tide-water Virginia with long, warm days and with the odor of many roses. Day by day the cloudless suns.h.i.+ne visited the land: night by night the large pale stars looked into its waters. It was a slumberous land, of many creeks and rivers that were wide, slow, and deep, of tobacco fields and lofty, solemn forests, of vague marshes, of white mists, of a haze of heat far and near. The moon of blossoms was past, and the red men--few in number now--had returned from their hunting, and lay in the shade of the trees in the villages that the English had left them, while the women brought them fish from the weirs, and strawberries from the vines that carpeted every poisoned field or neglected clearing. The black men toiled amidst the tobacco and the maize; at noontide it was as hot in the fields as in the middle pa.s.sage, and the voices of those who sang over their work fell to a dull crooning. The white men who were bound served listlessly; they that were well were as lazy as the weather; they that were newly come over and ill with the "seasoning" fever tossed upon their pallets, longing for the cooling waters of home. The white men who were free swore that the world, though fair, was warm, and none walked if he could ride. The sunny, dusty roads were left for shadowed bridle paths; in a land where most places could be reached by boat, the water would have been the highway but that the languid air would not fill the sails.

It was agreed that the heat was unnatural, and that, likely enough, there would be a deal of fever during the summer.

But there was thick shade in the Fair View garden, and when there was air at all it visited the terrace above the river. The rooms of the house were large and high-pitched; draw to the shutters, and they became as cool as caverns. Around the place the heat lay in wait: heat of wide, shadowless fields, where Haward's slaves toiled from morn to eve; heat of the great river, unstirred by any wind, hot and sleeping beneath the blazing sun; heat of sluggish creeks and of the marshes, shadeless as the fields. Once reach the mighty trees drawn like a cordon around house and garden, and there was escape.

To and fro and up and down in the house went the erst waiting-woman to my Lady Squander, carrying matters with a high hand. The negresses who worked under her eye found her a hard taskmistress. Was a room clean to-day, to-morrow it was found that there was dust upon the polished floor, finger marks on the paneled walls. The same furniture must be placed now in this room, now in that; china slowly washed and bestowed in one closet transferred to another; an eternity spent upon the household linen, another on the sewing and resewing, the hanging and rehanging, of damask curtains. The slaves, silent when the greenish eyes and tight, vixenish face were by, chattered, laughed, and sung when they were left alone. If they fell idle, and little was done of a morning, they went unrebuked; thoroughness, and not haste, appearing to be Mistress Deborah's motto.

The master of Fair View found it too noisy in his house to sit therein, and too warm to ride abroad. There were left the seat built round the cherry-tree in the garden, the long, cool box walk, and the terrace with a summer-house at either end. It was pleasant to read out of doors, pacing the box walk, or sitting beneath the cherry-tree, with the ripening fruit overhead. If the book was long in reading, if morning by morning Haward's finger slipped easily in between the selfsame leaves, perhaps it was the fault of poet or philosopher. If Audrey's was the fault, she knew it not.

How could she know it, who knew herself, that she was a poor, humble maid, whom out of pure charity and knightly tenderness for weak and sorrowful things he long ago had saved, since then had maintained, now was kind to; and knew him, that he was learned and great and good, the very perfect gentle knight who, as he rode to win the princess, yet could stoop from his saddle to raise and help the herd girl? She had found of late that she was often wakeful of nights; when this happened, she lay and looked out of her window at the stars and wondered about the princess. She was sure that the princess and the lady who had given her the guinea were one.

In the great house she would have worked her fingers to the bone. Her strong young arms lifted heavy weights; her quick feet ran up and down stairs for this or that; she would have taken the waxed cloths from the negroes, and upon her knees and with willing hands have made to s.h.i.+ne like mirrors the floors that were to be trodden by knight and princess. But almost every morning, before she had worked an hour, Haward would call to her from the box walk or the seat beneath the cherry-tree; and "Go, child," would say Mistress Deborah, looking up from her task of the moment.

The garden continued to be the enchanted garden. To gather its flowers, red and white, to pace with him cool paved walks between walls of scented box, to sit beside him beneath the cherry-tree or upon the gra.s.sy terrace, looking out upon the wide, idle river,--it was dreamy bliss, a happiness too rare to last. There was no harm; not that she ever dreamed there could be. The house overlooked garden and terrace; the slaves pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed the open windows; Juba came and went; now and then Mistress Deborah herself would sally forth to receive instructions concerning this or that from the master of the house. And every day, at noon, the slaves drew to all the shutters save those of the master's room, and the minister's wife and ward made their curtsies and went home. The latter, like a child, counted the hours upon the clock until the next morning; but then she was not used to happiness, and the wine of it made her slightly drunken.

The master of Fair View told himself that there was infection in this lotus air of Virginia. A fever ran in his veins that made him languid of will, somewhat sluggish of thought, willing to spend one day like another, and all in a long dream. Sometimes, in the afternoons, when he was alone in the garden or upon the terrace, with the house blank and silent behind him, the slaves gone to the quarters, he tossed aside his book, and, with his chin upon his hand and his eyes upon the sweep of the river, first asked himself whither he was going, and then, finding no satisfactory answer, fell to brooding. Once, going into the house, he chanced to come upon his full-length reflection in a mirror newly hung, and stopped short to gaze upon himself. The parlor of his lodgings at Williamsburgh and the last time that he had seen Evelyn came to him, conjured up by the memory of certain words of his own.

"A truer gla.s.s might show a shrunken figure," he repeated, and with a quick and impatient sigh he looked at the image in the mirror.