Audrey Part 7

The candle moved to one side, and there was disclosed a large white face atop of a shambling figure dressed in some coa.r.s.e, dark stuff. "Neither, sir," said an expressionless voice. "Will it please your Honor to dismount?"

Haward swung himself out of the saddle, tossed the reins to a negro, and, with Juba at his heels, climbed the five low stone steps and entered the wide hall running through the house and broken only by the broad, winding stairway. Save for the glimmer of the solitary candle all was in darkness; the bare floor, the paneled walls, echoed to his tread. On either hand squares of blackness proclaimed the open doors of large, empty rooms, and down the stair came a wind that bent the weak flame. The negro took the light from the hand of the man who had opened the door, and, pressing past his master, lit three candles in a sconce upon the wall.

"Yo' room's all ready, Ma.r.s.e Duke," he declared. "Dere's candles enough, an' de fire am laid an' yo' bed aired. Ef you wan' some supper, I kin get you bread an' meat, an' de wine was put in yesterday."

Haward nodded, and taking the candle began to mount the stairs. Half way up he found that the man in the sad-colored raiment was following him. He raised his brows, but being in a taciturn humor, and having, moreover, to s.h.i.+eld the flame from the wind that drove down the stair, he said nothing, going on in silence to the landing, and to the great eastward-facing room that had been his father's, and which now he meant to make his own. There were candles on the table, the dresser, and the mantelshelf. He lit them all, and the room changed from a place of shadows and monstrous shapes to a gentleman's bedchamber,--somewhat spa.r.s.ely furnished, but of a comfortable and cheerful aspect. A cloth lay upon the floor, the windows were curtained, and the bed had fresh hangings of green and white Kidderminster. Over the mantel hung a painting of Haward and his mother, done when he was six years old. Beneath the laughing child and the smiling lady, young and flower-crowned, were crossed two ancient swords. In the middle of the room stood a heavy table, and pushed back, as though some one had lately risen from it, was an armchair of Russian leather. Books lay upon the table; one of them open, with a horn snuffbox keeping down the leaf.

Haward seated himself in the great chair, and looked around him with a thoughtful and melancholy smile. He could not clearly remember his mother.

The rings upon her fingers and her silvery laughter were all that dwelt in his mind, and now only the sound of that merriment floated back to him and lingered in the room. But his father had died upon that bed, and beside the dead man, between the candles at the head and the candles at the foot, he had sat the night through. The curtains were half drawn, and in their shadow his imagination laid again that cold, inanimate form. Twelve years ago! How young he had been that night, and how old he had thought himself as he watched beside the dead, chilled by the cold of the crossed hands, awed by the silence, half frighted by the shadows on the wall; now filled with natural grief, now with surrept.i.tious and shamefaced thoughts of his changed estate,--yesterday son and dependent, to-day heir and master!

Twelve years! The sigh and the smile were not for the dead father, but for his own dead youth, for the unjaded freshness of the morning, for the world that had been, once upon a time.

Turning in his seat, his eyes fell upon the man who had followed him, and who was now standing between the table and the door. "Well, friend?" he demanded.

The man came a step or two nearer. His hat was in his hand, and his body was obsequiously bent, but there was no discomposure in his lifeless voice and manner. "I stayed to explain my presence in the house, sir," he said.

"I am a lover of reading, and, knowing my weakness, your overseer, who keeps the keys of the house, has been so good as to let me, from time to time, come here to this room to mingle in more delectable company than I can choose without these walls. Your Honor doubtless remembers yonder goodly a.s.semblage?" He motioned with his hand toward a half-opened door, showing a closet lined with well-filled bookshelves.

"I remember," replied Haward dryly. "So you come to my room alone at night, and occupy yourself in reading? And when you are wearied you refresh yourself with my wine?" As he spoke he clinked together the bottle and gla.s.s that stood beside the books.

"I plead guilty to the wine," answered the intruder, as lifelessly as ever, "but it is my only theft. I found the bottle below, and did not think it would be missed. I trust that your Honor does not grudge it to a poor devil who tastes Burgundy somewhat seldomer than does your Wors.h.i.+p.

And my being in the house is pure innocence. Your overseer knew that I would neither make nor meddle with aught but the books, or he would not have given me the key to the little door, which I now restore to your Honor's keeping." He advanced, and deposited upon the table a large key.

"What is your name?" demanded Haward, leaning back in his chair.

"Bartholomew Paris, sir. I keep the school down by the swamp, where I impart to fifteen or twenty of the youth of these parts the rudiments of the ancient and modern tongues, mathematics, geography, fortifications, navigation, philosophy"--

Haward yawned, and the schoolmaster broke the thread of his discourse. "I weary you, sir," he said. "I will, with your permission, take my departure. May I make so bold as to beg your Honor that you will not mention to the gentlemen hereabouts the small matter of this bottle of wine? I would wish not to be prejudiced in the eyes of my patrons and scholars."

"I will think of it," Haward replied. "Come and take your snuffbox--if it be yours--from the book where you have left it."

"It is mine," said the man. "A present from the G.o.dly minister of this parish."

As he spoke he put out his hand to take the snuffbox. Haward leaned forward, seized the hand, and, bending back the fingers, exposed the palm to the light of the candles upon the table.

"The other, if you please," he commanded.

For a second--no longer--a wicked soul looked blackly out of the face to which he had raised his eyes. Then the window shut, and the wall was blank again. Without any change in his listless demeanor, the schoolmaster laid his left hand, palm out, beside his right.

"Humph!" exclaimed Haward. "So you have stolen before to-night? The marks are old. When were you branded, and where?"

"In Bristol, fifteen years ago," answered the man unblus.h.i.+ngly. "It was all a mistake. I was as innocent as a newborn babe"--

"But unfortunately could not prove it," interrupted Haward. "That is of course. Go on."

"I was transported to South Carolina, and there served out my term. The climate did not suit me, and I liked not the society, nor--being of a peaceful disposition--the constant alarms of pirates and buccaneers. So when I was once more my own man I traveled north to Virginia with a party of traders. In my youth I had been an Oxford servitor, and schoolmasters are in demand in Virginia. Weighed in the scales with a knowledge of the humanities and some skill in imparting them, what matters a little mishap with hot irons? My patrons are willing to let bygones be bygones. My school flourishes like a green bay-tree, and the minister of this parish will speak for the probity and sobriety of my conduct. Now I will go, sir."

He made an awkward but deep and obsequious reverence, turned and went out of the door, pa.s.sing Juba, who was entering with a salver laden with bread and meat and a couple of bottles. "Put down the food, Juba," said Haward, "and see this gentleman out of the house."

An hour later the master dismissed the slave, and sat down beside the table to finish the wine and compose himself for the night. The overseer had come hurrying to the great house, to be sent home again by a message from the owner thereof that to-morrow would do for business; the negro women who had been called to make the bed were gone; the noises from the quarter had long ceased, and the house was very still. In his rich, figured Indian nightgown and his silken nightcap, Haward sat and drank his wine, slowly, with long pauses between the emptying and the filling of the slender, tall-stemmed gla.s.s. A window was open, and the wind blowing in made the candles to flicker. With the wind came a murmur of leaves and the wash of the river,--stealthy and mournful sounds that sorted not with the lighted room, the cheerful homeliness of the flowered hangings, the gleeful lady and child above the mantelshelf. Haward felt the incongruity: a slow sea voyage, and a week in that Virginia which, settled one hundred and twenty years before, was yet largely forest and stream, had weaned him, he thought, from sounds of the street, and yet to-night he missed them, and would have had the town again. When an owl hooted in the walnut-tree outside his window, and in the distance, as far away as the creek quarter, a dog howled, and the silence closed in again, he rose, and began to walk to and fro, slowly, thinking of the past and the future. The past had its ghosts,--not many; what spectres the future might raise only itself could tell. So far as mortal vision went, it was a rose-colored future; but on such a night of silence that was not silence, of loneliness that was filled with still, small voices, of heavy darkness without, of lights burning in an empty house, it was rather of ashes of roses that one thought.

Haward went to the open window, and with one knee upon the window seat looked out into the windy, starlit night. This was the eastern face of the house, and, beyond the waving trees, there were visible both the river and the second and narrower creek which on this side bounded the plantation.

The voice with which the waters swept to the sea came strongly to him. A large white moth sailed out of the darkness to the lit window, but his presence scared it away.

Looking through the walnut branches, he could see a light that burned steadily, like a candle set in a window. For a moment he wondered whence it shone; then he remembered that the glebe lands lay in that direction.

The parish was building a house for its new minister, when he left Virginia, those many years ago. Suddenly he recalled that the minister--who had seemed to him a bluff, downright, honest fellow--had told him of a little room looking out upon an orchard, and had said that it should be the child's.

It was possible that the star which pierced the darkness might mark that room. He knit his brows in an effort to remember when, before this day, he had last thought of a child whom he had held in his arms and comforted, one splendid dawn, upon a hilltop, in a mountainous region. He came to the conclusion that he must have forgotten her quite six years ago. Well, she would seem to have thriven under his neglect,--and he saw again the girl who had run for the golden guinea. It was true that when he had put her there where that light was s.h.i.+ning, it was with some shadowy idea of giving her gentle breeding, of making a lady of her. But man's purposes are fleeting, and often gone with the morrow. He had forgotten his purpose; and perhaps it was best this way,--perhaps it was best this way.

For a little longer he looked at the light and listened to the voice of the river; then he rose from the window seat, drew the curtains, and began thoughtfully to prepare for bed.

CHAPTER VII

THE RETURN OF MONSIEUR JEAN HUGON

To the north the glebe was bounded by a thick wood, a rank and dense "second growth" springing from earth where had once stood, decorously apart, the monster trees of the primeval forest; a wild maze of young trees, saplings and underbrush, overrun from the tops of the slender, bending pines to the bushes of dogwood and sa.s.safras, and the rotting, ancient stumps and fallen logs, by the uncontrollable, all-spreading vine.

It was such a fantastic thicket as one might look to find in fairyland, th.o.r.n.y and impenetrable: here as tall as a ten years' pine, there sunken away to the height of the wild honeysuckles; everywhere backed by blue sky, heavy with odors, filled, with the flash of wings and the songs of birds. To the east the thicket fell away to low and marshy grounds, where tall cypresses grew, and myriads of myrtle bushes. Later in the year women and children would venture in upon the unstable earth for the sake of the myrtle berries and their yield of fragrant wax, and once and again an outlying slave had been tracked by men and dogs to the dark recesses of the place; but for the most part it was given over to its immemorial silence. To the south and the west the tobacco fields of Fair View closed in upon the glebe, taking the fertile river bank, and pressing down to the crooked, slow-moving, deeply shadowed creek, upon whose farther bank stood the house of the Rev. Gideon Darden.

A more retired spot, a completer sequestration from the world of mart and highway, it would have been hard to find. In the quiet of the early morning, when the shadows of the trees lay across the dewy gra.s.s, it was an angle of the earth as cloistral and withdrawn as heart of scholar or of anchorite could wish. On one side of the house lay a tiny orchard, and the windows of the living room looked out upon a mist of pink and white apple blooms. The fragrance of the blossoms had been in the room, but could not prevail against the odor of tobacco and rum lately introduced by the master of the house and minister of the parish. Audrey, sitting beside a table which had been drawn in front of the window, turned her face aside, and was away, sense and soul, out of the meanly furnished room into the midst of the great bouquets of bloom, with the blue between and above.

Darden, walking up and down, with his pipe in his mouth, and the tobacco smoke curling like an aureole around his bullet head, glanced toward the window.

"When you have written that which I have told you to write, say so, Audrey," he commanded. "Don't sit there staring at nothing!"

Audrey came back to the present with a start, took up a pen, and drew the standish nearer. "'Answer of Gideon Darden, Minister of Fair View Parish, in Virginia, to the several Queries contained in my Lord Bishop of London's Circular Letter to the Clergy in Virginia,'" she read, and poised her pen in air.

"Read out the questions," ordered Darden, "and write my answer to each in the s.p.a.ce beneath. No blots, mind you, and spell not after the promptings of your woman's nature."

Going to a side table, be mixed for himself, in an old battered silver cap, a generous draught of bombo; then, with the drink in his hand, walked heavily across the uncarpeted floor to his armchair, which creaked under his weight as he sank into its leathern lap. He put down the rum and water with so unsteady a hand that the liquor spilled, and when he refilled his pipe half the contents of his tobacco box showered down upon his frayed and ancient and unclean coat and breeches. From the pocket of the latter he now drew forth a silver coin, which he balanced for a moment upon his fat forefinger, and finally sent spinning across the table to Audrey.

"'Tis the dregs of thy guinea, child, that Paris and Hugon and I drank at the crossroads last night. 'Burn me,' says I to them, 'if that long-legged la.s.s of mine shan't have a drop in the cup!' And say Hugon"--

What Hugon said did not appear, or was confided to the depths of the tankard which the minister raised to his lips. Audrey looked at the splendid s.h.i.+lling gleaming upon the table beside her, but made no motion toward taking it into closer possession. A little red had come into the clear brown of her cheeks. She was a young girl, with her dreams and fancies, and the golden guinea would have made a dream or two come true.

"'Query the first,'" she read slowly, "'How long since you went to the plantations as missionary?'"

Darden, leaning back in his chair, with his eyes uplifted through the smoke clouds to the ceiling, took his pipe from his mouth, for the better answering of his diocesan. "'My Lord, thirteen years come St. Swithin's day,'" he dictated. "'Signed, Gideon Darden.' Audrey, do not forget thy capitals. Thirteen years! Lord, Lord, the years, how they fly! Hast it down, Audrey?"

Audrey, writing in a slow, fair, clerkly hand, made her period, and turned to the Bishop's second question: "'Had you any other church before you came to that which you now possess?'"

"'No, my Lord,'" said the minister to the Bishop; then to the ceiling: "I came raw from the devil to this parish. Audrey, hast ever heard children say that Satan comes and walks behind me when I go through the forest?"

"Yes," said Audrey, "but their eyes are not good. You go hand in hand."

Darden paused in the lifting of his tankard. "Thy wits are brightening, Audrey; but keep such observations to thyself. It is only the schoolmaster with whom I walk. Go on to the next question."

The Bishop desired to know how long the minister addressed had been inducted into his living. The minister addressed, leaning forward, laid it off to his Lords.h.i.+p how that the vestries in Virginia did not incline to have ministers inducted, and, being very powerful, kept the poor servants of the Church upon uneasy seats; but that he, Gideon Darden, had the love of his flock, rich and poor, gentle and simple, and that in the first year of his ministry the gentlemen of his vestry had been pleased to present his name to the Governor for induction. Which explanation made, the minister drank more rum, and looked out of the window at the orchard and at his neighbor's tobacco.