Audrey Part 9

"This is the thicket between Fair View and the glebe lands," said Audrey, who knew not what bark of tree and milk and honey had to do with the case.

"Over yonder, sir, is the road to the great house. This path ends here; you must go back to the edge of the wood, then turn to the south"--

"I have not lost my way," answered Haward, still smiling. "It is pleasant here in the shade, after the warmth of the open. May I not sit down upon the leaves and talk to you for a while? I came out to find you, you know."

As he spoke, and without waiting for the permission which he asked, he crossed the rustling leaves, and threw himself down upon the earth between two branching roots. Her skirt brushed his knee; with a movement quick and shy she put more distance between them, then stood and looked at him with wide, grave eyes. "Why do you say that you came here to find me?" she asked. "I do not know you."

Haward laughed, nursing his knee and looking about him. "Let that pa.s.s for a moment. You have the prettiest woodland parlor, child! Tell me, do they treat you well over there?" with a jerk of his thumb toward the glebe house. "Madam the shrew and his reverence the bully, are they kind to you?

Though they let you go like a beggar maid,"--he glanced kindly enough at her bare feet and torn gown,--"yet they starve you not, nor beat you, nor deny you aught in reason?"

Audrey drew herself up. She had a proper pride, and she chose to forget for this occasion a bruise upon her arm and the thrusting upon her of Hugon's company. "I do not know who you are, sir, that ask me such questions," she said sedately. "I have food and shelter and--and--kindness. And I go barefoot only of week days"--

It was a brave beginning, but of a sudden she found it hard to go on. She felt his eyes upon her and knew that he was unconvinced, and into her own eyes came the large tears. They did not fall, but through them she saw the forest swim in green and gold. "I have no father or mother," she said, "and no brother or sister. In all the world there is no one that is kin to me."

Her voice, that was low and full and apt to fall into minor cadences, died away, and she stood with her face raised and slightly turned from the gentleman who lay at her feet, stretched out upon the sere beech leaves.

He did not seem inclined to speech, and for a time the little brook and the birds and the wind in the trees sang undisturbed.

"These woods are very beautiful," said Haward at last, with his gaze upon her, "but if the land were less level it were more to my taste. Now, if this plain were a little valley couched among the hills, if to the westward rose dark blue mountains like a rampart, if the runlet yonder were broad and clear, if this beech were a sugar-tree"--

He broke off, content to see her eyes dilate, her bosom rise and fall, her hand go trembling for support to the column of the beech.

"Oh, the mountains!" she cried. "When the mist lifted, when the cloud rested, when the sky was red behind them! Oh, the clear stream, and the sugar-tree, and the cabin! Who are you? How did you know about these things? Were you--were you there?"

She turned upon him, with her soul in her eyes. As for him, lying at length upon the ground, he locked his hands beneath his head and began to sing, though scarce above his breath. He sang the song of Amiens:--

"Under the greenwood tree, Who loves to lie with me."

When he had come to the end of the stanza he half rose, and turned toward the mute and breathless figure leaning against the beech-tree. For her the years had rolled back: one moment she stood upon the doorstep of the cabin, and the air was filled with the trampling of horses, with quick laughter, whistling, singing, and the call of a trumpet; the next she ran, in night-time and in terror, between rows of rustling corn, felt again the clasp of her pursuer, heard at her ear the comfort of his voice. A film came between her eyes and the man at whom she stared, and her heart grew cold.

"Audrey," said Haward, "come here, child."

The blood returned to her heart, her vision cleared, and her arm fell from its clasp upon the tree. The bark opened not; the hamadryad had lost the spell. When at his repeated command she crossed to him, she went as the trusting, dumbly loving, dumbly grateful child whose life he had saved, and whose comforter, protector, and guardian he had been. When he took her hands in his she was glad to feel them there again, and she had no blushes ready when he kissed her upon the forehead. It was sweet to her who hungered for affection, who long ago had set his image up, loving him purely as a sovereign spirit or as a dear and great elder brother, to hear him call her again "little maid;" tell her that she had not changed save in height; ask her if she remembered this or that adventure, what time they had strayed in the woods together. Remember! When at last, beneath his admirable management, the wonder and the shyness melted away, and she found her tongue, memories came in a torrent. The hilltop, the deep woods and the giant trees, the house he had built for her out of stones and moss, the grapes they had gathered, the fish they had caught, the thunderstorm when he had s.n.a.t.c.hed her out of the path of a stricken and falling pine, an alarm of Indians, an alarm of wolves, finally the first faint sounds of the returning expedition, the distant trumpet note, the nearer approach, the bursting again into the valley of the Governor and his party, the journey from that loved spot to Williamsburgh,--all sights and sounds, thoughts and emotions, of that time, fast held through lonely years, came at her call, and pa.s.sed again in procession before them.

Haward, first amazed, then touched, reached at length the conclusion that the years of her residence beneath the minister's roof could not have been happy; that she must always have put from her with shuddering and horror the memory of the night which orphaned her; but that she had pa.s.sionately nursed, cherished, and loved all that she had of sweet and dear, and that this all was the memory of her childhood in the valley, and of that brief season when he had been her savior, protector, friend, and playmate. He learned also--for she was too simple and too glad either to withhold the information or to know that she had given it--that in her girlish and innocent imaginings she had made of him a fairy knight, clothing him in a panoply of power, mercy, and tenderness, and setting him on high, so high that his very heel was above the heads of the mortals within her ken.

Keen enough in his perceptions, he was able to recognize that here was a pure and imaginative spirit, strongly yearning after ideal strength, beauty, and goodness. Given such a spirit, it was not unnatural that, turning from sordid or unhappy surroundings as a flower turns from shadow to the full face of the sun, she should have taken a memory of valiant deeds, kind words, and a protecting arm, and have created out of these a man after her own heart, endowing him with all heroic attributes; at one and the same time sending him out into the world, a knight-errant without fear and without reproach, and keeping him by her side--the side of a child--in her own private wonderland. He saw that she had done this, and he was ashamed. He did not tell her that that eleven-years-distant fortnight was to him but a half-remembered incident of a crowded life, and that to all intents and purposes she herself had been forgotten. For one thing, it would have hurt her; for another, he saw no reason why he should tell her. Upon occasion he could be as ruthless as a stone; if he were so now he knew it not, but in deceiving her deceived himself. Man of a world that was corrupt enough, he was of course quietly a.s.sured that he could bend this woodland creature--half child, half dryad--to the form of his bidding. To do so was in his power, but not his pleasure. He meant to leave her as she was; to accept the adoration of the child, but to attempt no awakening of the woman. The girl was of the mountains, and their higher, colder, purer air; though he had brought her body thence, he would not have her spirit leave the climbing earth, the dreamlike summits, for the hot and dusty plain. The plain, G.o.d knew, had dwellers enough.

She was a thing of wild and sylvan grace, and there was fulfillment in a dark beauty all her own of the promise she had given as a child. About her was a pathos, too,--the pathos of the flower taken from its proper soil, and drooping in earth which nourished it not. Haward, looking at her, watching the sensitive, mobile lips, reading in the dark eyes, beneath the felicity of the present, a hint and prophecy of woe, felt for her a pity so real and great that for the moment his heart ached as for some sorrow of his own. She was only a young girl, poor and helpless, born of poor and helpless parents dead long ago. There was in her veins no gentle blood; she had none of the world's goods; her gown was torn, her feet went bare. She had youth, but not its heritage of gladness: beauty, but none to see it; a nature that reached toward light and height, and for its home the house which he had lately left. He was a man older by many years than the girl beside him, knowing good and evil; by instinct preferring the former, but at times stooping, open-eyed, to that degree of the latter which a lax and gay world held to be not incompatible with a convention somewhat misnamed "the honor of a gentleman." Now, beneath the beech-tree in the forest which touched upon one side the glebe, upon the other his own lands, he chose at this time the good; said to himself, and believed the thing he said, that in word and in deed he would prove himself her friend.

Putting out his hand he drew her down upon the leaves; and she sat beside him, still and happy, ready to answer him when he asked her this or that, readier yet to sit in blissful, dreamy silence. She was as pure as the flower which she held in her hand, and most innocent in her imaginings.

This was a very perfect knight, a great gentleman, good and pitiful, that had saved her from the Indians when she was a little girl, and had been kind to her,--ah, so kind! In that dreadful night when she had lost father and mother and brother and sister, when in the darkness her childish heart was a stone for terror, he had come, like G.o.d, from the mountains, and straightway she was safe. Now into her woods, from over the sea, he had come again, and at once the load upon her heart, the dull longing and misery, the fear of Hugon, were lifted. The chaplet which she laid at his feet was not loosely woven of gay-colored flowers, but was compact of austerer blooms of grat.i.tude, reverence, and that love which is only a longing to serve. The glamour was at hand, the enchanted light which breaks not from the east or the west or the north or the south was upon its way; but she knew it not, and she was happy in her ignorance.

"I am tired of the city," he said. "Now I shall stay in Virginia. A longing for the river and the marshes and the house where I was born came upon me"--

"I know," she answered. "When I shut my eyes I see the cabin in the valley, and when I dream it is of things which happen in a mountainous country."

"I am alone in the great house," he continued, "and the floors echo somewhat loudly. The garden, too; beside myself there is no one to smell the roses or to walk in the moonlight. I had forgotten the isolation of these great plantations. Each is a province and a despotism. If the despot has neither kith nor kin, has not yet made friends, and cares not to draw company from the quarters, he is lonely. They say that there are ladies in Virginia whose charms well-nigh outweigh their dowries of sweet-scented and Oronoko. I will wed such an one, and have laughter in my garden, and other footsteps than my own in my house."

"There are beautiful ladies in these parts," said Audrey. "There is the one that gave me the guinea for my running yesterday. She was so very fair. I wished with all my heart that I were like her."

"She is my friend," said Haward slowly, "and her mind is as fair as her face. I will tell her your story."

The gilded streak upon the earth beneath the beech had crept away, but over the ferns and weeds and flowering bushes between the slight trees without the ring the suns.h.i.+ne gloated. The blue of the sky was wonderful, and in the silence Haward and Audrey heard the wind whisper in the treetops. A dove moaned, and a hare ran past.

"It was I who brought you from the mountains and placed you here," said Haward at last. "I thought it for the best, and that when I sailed away I left you to a safe and happy life. It seems that I was mistaken. But now that I am at home again, child, I wish you to look upon me, who am so much your elder, as your guardian and protector still. If there is anything which you lack, if you are misused, are in need of help, why, think that your troubles are the Indians again, little maid, and turn to me once more for help!"

Having spoken honestly and well and very unwisely, he looked at his watch and said that it was late. When he rose to his feet Audrey did not move, and when he looked down upon her he saw that her eyes, that had been wet, were overflowing. He put out his hand, and she took it and touched it with her lips; then, because he said that he had not meant to set her crying, she smiled, and with her own hand dashed away the tears.

"When I ride this way I shall always stop at the minister's house," said Haward, "when, if there is aught which you need or wish, you must tell me of it. Think of me as your friend, child."

He laid his hand lightly and caressingly upon her head. The ruffles at his wrist, soft, fine, and perfumed, brushed her forehead and her eyes. "The path through your labyrinth to its beechen heart was hard to find," he continued, "but I can easily retrace it. No, trouble not yourself, child.

Stay for a time where you are. I wish to speak to the minister alone."

His hand was lifted. Audrey felt rather than saw him go. Only a few feet, and the dogwood stars, the purple mist of the Judas-tree, the white fragrance of a wild cherry, came like a painted arras between them. For a time she could hear the movement of the branches as he put them aside; but presently this too ceased, and the place was left to her and to all the life that called it home.

It was the same wood, surely, into which she had run two hours before, and yet--and yet--When her tears were spent, and she stood up, leaning, with her loosened hair and her gown that was the color of oak bark, against the beech-tree, she looked about her and wondered. The wonder did not last, for she found an explanation.

"It has been blessed," said Audrey, with all reverence and simplicity, "and that is why the light is so different."

CHAPTER IX

MACLEAN TO THE RESCUE

Saunderson, the overseer, having laboriously written and signed a pa.s.s, laid down the quill, wiped his inky forefinger upon his sleeve, and gave the paper to the storekeeper, who sat idly by.

"Ye'll remember that the store chiefly lacks in broadcloth of Witney, frieze and camlet, and in women's shoes, both silk and callimanco. And dinna forget to trade with Alick Ker for three small swords, a chafing dish, and a dozen mourning and hand-and-heart rings. See that you have the skins' worth. Alick's an awfu' man to get the upper hand of."

"I'm thinking a MacLean should have small difficulty with a Ker," said the storekeeper dryly. "What I'm wanting to know is why I am saddled with the company of Monsieur Jean Hugon." He jerked his thumb toward the figure of the trader standing within the doorway. "I do not like the gentleman, and I'd rather trudge it to Williamsburgh alone."

"Ye ken not the value of the skins, nor how to show them off," answered the other. "Wherefore, for the consideration of a measure of rum, he's engaged to help you in the trading. As for his being half Indian, Gude guide us! It's been told me that no so many centuries ago the Highlandmen painted their bodies and went into battle without taking advantage even of feathers and silk gra.s.s. One half of him is of the French n.o.beelity; he told me as much himself. And the best of ye--sic as the Campbells--are no better than that."

He looked at MacLean with a caustic smile. The latter shrugged his shoulders. "So long as you tie him neck and heels with a Campbell I am content," he answered. "Are you going? I'll just bar the windows and lock the door, and then I'll be off with yonder copper cadet of a French house.

Good-day to you. I'll be back to-night."

"Ye'd better," said the overseer, with another widening of his thin lips.

"For myself, I bear ye no ill-will; for my grandmither--rest her soul!--came frae the north, and I aye thought a Stewart better became the throne than a foreign-speaking body frae Hanover. But if the store is not open the morn I'll raise hue and cry, and that without wasting time. I've been told ye're great huntsmen in the Highlands; if ye choose to turn red deer yourself, I'll give ye a chase, _and trade ye down, man, and track ye down_."

MacLean half turned from the window. "I have hunted the red deer," he said, "in the land where I was born, and which I shall see no more, and I have been myself hunted in the land where I shall die. I have run until I have fallen, and I have felt the teeth of the dogs. Were G.o.d to send a miracle--which he will not do--and I were to go back to the glen and the crag and the deep birch woods, I suppose that I would hunt again, would drive the stag to bay, holloing to my hounds, and thinking the sound of the horns sweet music in my ears. It is the way of the earth. Hunter and hunted, we make the world and the pity of it."

Setting to work again, he pushed to the heavy shutters. "You'll find them open in the morning," he said, "and find me selling,--selling clothing that I may not wear, wine that I may not drink, powder and shot that I may not spend, swords that I may not use; and giving,--giving pride, manhood, honor, heart's blood"--

He broke off, shot to the bar across the shutters, and betook himself in silence to the other window, where presently he burst into a fit of laughter. The sound was harsh even to savagery. "Go your ways, Saunderson," he said. "I've tried the bars of the cage; they're too strong. Stop on your morning round, and I'll give account of my trading."

The overseer gone, the windows barred, and the heavy door shut and locked behind him, MacLean paused upon the doorstep to look down upon his appointed companion. The trader, half sitting, half reclining upon a log, was striking at something with the point of his hunting-knife, lightly, delicately, and often. The something was a lizard, about which, as it lay in the suns.h.i.+ne upon the log, he had wrought a pen of leafy twigs. The creature, darting for liberty this way and that, was met at every turn by the steel, and at every turn suffered a new wound. MacLean looked; then bent over and with a heavy stick struck the thing out of its pain.

"There's a time to work and a time to play, Hugon," he said coolly.