Audrey Part 21

Out of the house the sunlight beat and blinded. Houses of red brick, houses of white wood; the long, wide, dusty Duke of Gloucester Street; gnarled mulberry-trees broad-leafed against a September sky, deeply, pa.s.sionately blue; glimpses of wood and field,--all seemed remote without distance, still without stillness, the semblance of a dream, and yet keen and near to oppression. It was a town of stores, of ordinaries and public places; from open door and window all along Duke of Gloucester Street came laughter, round oaths, now and then a sc.r.a.p of drinking song. To Haward, giddy, ill at ease, sickening of a fever, the sounds were now as a cry in his ear, now as the noise of a distant sea. The minister of James City parish and the minister of Ware Creek were walking before him, arm in arm, set full sail for dinner after a stormy morning. "For lo! the wicked prospereth!" said one, and "Fair View parish bound over to the devil again!" plained the other. "He's firm in the saddle; he'll ride easy to the day he drinks himself to death, thanks to this sudden complaisance of Governor and Commissary!"

"Thanks to"--cried the other sourly, and gave the thanks where they were due.

Haward heard the words, but even in the act of quickening his pace to lay a heavy hand upon the speaker's shoulder a listlessness came upon him, and he forbore. The memory of the slurring speech went from him; his thoughts were thistledown blown hither and yon by every vagrant air. Coming to Marot's ordinary he called for wine; then went up the stair to his room, and sitting down at the table presently fell asleep, with his head upon his arms.

After a while the sounds from the public room below, where men were carousing, disturbed his slumber. He stirred, and awoke refreshed. It was afternoon, but he felt no hunger, only thirst, which he quenched with the wine at hand. His windows gave upon the Capitol and a green wood beyond; the waving trees enticed, while the room was dull and the noises of the house distasteful. He said to himself that he would walk abroad, would go out under the beckoning trees and be rid of the town. He remembered that the Council was to meet that afternoon. Well, it might sit without him! He was for the woods, where dwelt the cool winds and the shadows deep and silent.

A few yards, and he was quit of Duke of Gloucester Street; behind him, porticoed Capitol, gaol, and tiny vineclad debtor's prison. In the gaol yard the pirates sat upon a bench in the sunshine, and one smoked a long pipe, and one brooded upon his irons. Gold rings were in their ears, and their black hair fell from beneath colored handkerchiefs twisted turbanwise around their brows. The gaoler watched them, standing in his doorway, and his children, at play beneath a tree, built with sticks a mimic scaffold, and hanged thereon a broken puppet. There was a shady road leading through a wood to Queen's Creek and the Capitol Landing, and down this road went Haward. His step was light; the dullness, the throbbing pulses, the oppression of the morning, had given way to a restlessness and a strange exaltation of spirit. Fancy was quickened, imagination heightened; to himself he seemed to see the heart of all things. Across his mind flitted fragments of verse,--now a broken line just hinting beauty, now the pure pa.s.sion of a lovely stanza. His thoughts went to and fro, mobile as the waves of the sea; but firm as the reefs beneath them stood his knowledge that presently he was going back to Fair View.

To-morrow, when the Governor's ball was over, when he could decently get away, he would leave the town; he would go to his house in the country.

Late flowers bloomed in his garden; the terrace was fair above the river; beneath the red brick wall, on the narrow little creek shining like a silver highway, lay a winged boat; and the highway ran past a glebe house; and in the glebe house dwelt a dryad whose tree had closed against her.

Audrey!--a fair name. Audrey, Audrey!--the birds were singing it; out of the deep, Arcadian shadows any moment it might come, clearly cried by satyr, Pan, or shepherd. Hark! there was song--

It was but a negro on the road behind, singing to himself as he went about his master's business. The voice was the voice of the race, mellow, deep, and plaintive; perhaps the song was of love in a burning land. He pa.s.sed the white man, and the arching trees hid him, but the wake of music was long in fading. The road leading through a cool and shady dell, Haward left it, and took possession of the mossy earth beneath a holly-tree.

Here, lying on the ground, he could see the road through the intervening foliage; else the place had seemed the heart of an ancient wood.

It was merry lying where were glimpses of blue sky, where the leaves quivered and a squirrel chattered and a robin sang a madrigal. Youth the divine, half way down the stair of misty yesterdays, turned upon his heel and came back to him. He pillowed his head upon his arm, and was content.

It was well to be so filled with fancies, so iron of will, so headstrong and gay; to be friends once more with a younger Haward, with the Haward of a mountain pa.s.s, of mocking comrades and an irate Excellency.

From the road came a rumble of oaths. Sailors, sweating and straining, were rolling a very great cask of tobacco from a neighboring warehouse down to the landing and some expectant sloop. Haward, lying at ease, smiled at their weary task, their grunting and swearing; when they were gone, smiled at the blankness of the road. All things pleased. There was food for mirth in the call of a partridge, in the inquisitive gaze of a squirrel, in the web of a spider gaoler to a gilded fly. There was food for greater mirth in the appearance on the road of a solitary figure in a wine-colored coat and bushy black peruke.

Haward sat up. "Ha, Monacan!" he cried, with a laugh, and threw a stick to attract the man's attention.

Hugon turned, stood astare, then left the road and came down into the dell.

"What fortune, trader?" smiled Haward. "Did your traps hold in the great forest? Were your people easy to fool, giving twelve deerskins for an old match-coat? There is charm in a woodsman life. Come, tell me of your journeys, dangers, and escapes."

The half-breed looked down upon him with a twitching face. "What hinders me from killing you now?" he demanded, with a backward look at the road.

"None may pa.s.s for many minutes."

Haward lay back upon the moss, with his hands locked beneath his head.

"What indeed?" he answered calmly. "Come, here is a velvet log, fit seat for an emperor--or a sachem; sit and tell me of your life in the woods.

For peace pipe let me offer my snuffbox." In his mad humor he sat up again, drew from his pocket, and presented with the most approved flourish, his box of chased gold. "Monsieur, c'est le tabac pour le nez d'un inonarque," he said lazily.

Hugon sat down upon the log, helped himself to the mixture with a grand air, and shook the yellow dust from his ruffles. The action, meant to be airy, only achieved fierceness. From some hidden sheath he drew a knife, and began to strip from the log a piece of bark. "Tell me, you," he said.

"Have you been to France? What manner of land is it?"

"A gay country," answered Haward; "a land where the men are all white, and where at present, periwigs are worn much shorter than the one monsieur affects."

"He is a great brave, a French gentleman? Always he kills the man he hates?"

"Not always," said the other. "Sometimes the man he hates kills him."

By now one end of the piece of bark in the trader's hands was shredded to tinder. He drew from his pocket his flint and steel, and struck a spark into the frayed ma.s.s. It flared up, and he held first the tips of his fingers, then the palm of his hand, then his bared forearm, in the flame that licked and scorched the flesh. His face was perfectly unmoved, his eyes unchanged in their expression of hatred. "Can he do this?" he asked.

"Perhaps not," said Haward lightly. "It is a very foolish thing to do."

The flame died out, and the trader tossed aside the charred bit of bark.

"There was old Pierre at Monacan-Town who taught me to pray to _le bon Dieu_. He told me how grand and fine is a French gentleman, and that I was the son of many such. He called the English great pigs, with brains as dull and muddy as the river after many rains. My mother was the daughter of a chief. She had strings of pearl for her neck, and copper for her arms, and a robe of white doeskin, very soft and fine. When she was dead and my father was dead, I came from Monacan-Town to your English school over yonder. I can read and write. I am a white man and a Frenchman, not an Indian. When I go to the villages in the woods, I am given a lodge apart, and the men and women gather to hear a white man speak.... You have done me wrong with that girl, that Ma'm'selle Audrey that I wish for wife.

We are enemies: that is as it should be. You shall not have her,--never, never! But you despise me; how is that? That day upon the creek, that night in your cursed house, you laughed"--

The Haward of the mountain pa.s.s, regarding the twitching face opposite him and the hand clenched upon the handle of a knife, laughed again. At the sound the trader's face ceased to twitch. Haward felt rather than saw the stealthy tightening of the frame, the gathering of forces, the closer grasp upon the knife, and flung out his arm. A hare scurried past, making for the deeper woods. From the road came the tramp of a horse and a man's voice, singing,--

"'To all you ladies now on land'"--

while an inquisitive dog turned aside from the road, and plunged into the dell.

The rider, having checked his horse and quit his song in order to call to his dog, looked through the thin veil of foliage and saw the two men beneath the holly-tree. "Ha, Jean Hugon!" he cried. "Is that you? Where is that packet of skins you were to deliver at my store? Come over here, man!"

The trader moistened his dry lips with his tongue, and slipped the knife back into its sheath. "Had we been a mile in the woods," he said, "you would have laughed no more."

Haward watched him go. The argument with the rider was a lengthy one. He upon horseback would not stand still in the road to finish it, but put his beast into motion. The trader, explaining and gesticulating, walked beside his stirrup; the voices grew fainter and fainter,--were gone. Haward laughed to himself; then, with his eyes raised to the depth on depth of blue, serene beyond the grating of thorn-pointed leaves, sent his spirit to his red brick house and silent, sunny garden, with the gate in the ivied wall, and the six steps down to the boat and the lapping water.

The shadows lengthened, and a wind of the evening entered the wood. Haward shook off the lethargy that had kept him lying there for the better part of an afternoon, rose to his feet, and left the green dell for the road, all shadow now, winding back to the toy metropolis, to Marot's ordinary, to the ball at the Palace that night.

The ball at the Palace!--he had forgotten it. Flare of lights, wail of violins, a painted, silken crowd, laughter, whispers, magpie chattering, wine, and the weariness of the dance, when his soul would long to be with the night outside, with the rising wind and the shining stars. He half determined not to go. What mattered the offense that would be taken? Did he go he would repent, wearied and ennuye, watching Evelyn, all rose-colored, moving with another through the minuet; tied himself perhaps to some pert miss, or cornered in a card-room by boisterous gamesters, or, drinking with his peers, called on to toast the lady of his dreams. Better the dull room at Marot's ordinary, or better still to order Mirza, and ride off at the planter's pace, through the starshine, to Fair View. On the river bank before the store MacLean might be lying, dreaming of a mighty wind and a fierce death. He would dismount, and sit beside that Highland gentleman, Jacobite and strong man, and their moods would chime as they had chimed before. Then on to the house and to the eastern window!

Not to-night, but to-morrow night, perhaps, would the darkness be pierced by the calm pale star that marked another window. It was all a mistake, that month at Westover,--days lost and wasted, the running of golden sands ill to spare from Love's brief gla.s.s....

His mood had changed when, with the gathering dusk, he entered his room at Marot's ordinary. He would go to the Palace that night; it would be the act of a boy to fling away through the darkness, shirking a duty his position demanded. He would go and be merry, watching Evelyn in the gown that Peterborough had praised.

When Juba had lighted the candles, he sat and drank and drank again of the red wine upon the table. It put maggots in his brain, fired and flushed him to the spirit's core. An idea came, at which he laughed. He bade it go, but it would not. It stayed, and his fevered fancy played around it as a moth around a candle. At first he knew it for a notion, bizarre and absurd, which presently he would dismiss. All day strange thoughts had come and gone, appearing, disappearing, like will-o'-the-wisps for which a man upon a firm road has no care. Never fear that he will follow them! He sees the marsh, that it has no footing. So with this Jack-o'-lantern conception,--it would vanish as it came.

It did not so. Instead, when he had drunken more wine, and had sat for some time methodically measuring, over and over again, with thumb and forefinger, the distance from candle to bottle, and from bottle to gla.s.s, the idea began to lose its wildfire aspect. In no great time it appeared an inspiration as reasonable as happy. When this point had been reached, he stamped upon the floor to summon his servant from the room below. "Lay out the white and gold, Juba," he ordered, when the negro appeared, "and come make me very fine. I am for the Palace,--I and a brown lady that hath bewitched me! The white sword knot, sirrah; and c.o.c.k my hat with the diamond brooch"--

It was a night that was thronged with stars, and visited by a whispering wind. Haward, walking rapidly along the almost deserted Nicholson Street, lifted his burning forehead to the cool air and the star-strewn fields of heaven. Coming to the gate by which he had entered the afternoon before, he raised the latch and pa.s.sed into the garden. By now his fever was full upon him, and it was a man scarce to be held responsible for his actions that presently knocked at the door of the long room where, at the window opening upon Palace Street, Audrey sat with Mistress Stagg and watched the people going to the ball.

CHAPTER XIX

THE GOVERNOR'S BALL

For an hour it had been very quiet, very peaceful, in the small white house on Palace Street. Darden was not there; for the Commissary had sent for him, having certain inquiries to make and a stern warning to deliver.

Mistress Deborah had been asked to spend the night with an acquaintance in the town, so she also was out and gone. Mistress Stagg and Audrey kept the lower rooms, while overhead Mr. Charles Stagg, a man that loved his art, walked up and down, and, with many wavings of a laced handkerchief and much resort to a gilt snuffbox, reasoned with Plato of death and the soul.

The murmur of his voice came down to the two women, and made the only sound in the house. Audrey, sitting by the window, her chin upon her hand and her dark hair shadowing her face, looked out upon the dooryard and the Palace Street beyond. The street was lit by torches, and people were going to the ball in coaches and chariots, on foot and in painted chairs. They went gayly, light of heart, fine of person, a free and generous folk.

Laughter floated over to the silent watcher, and the torchlight gave her glimpses of another land than her own.

Many had been Mistress Stagg's customers since morning, and something had she heard besides admiration of her wares and exclamation at her prices.

Now, as she sat with some gay sewing beneath her nimble fingers, she glanced once and again at the shadowed face opposite her. If the look was not one of curiosity alone, but had in it an admixture of new-found respect; if to Mistress Stagg the Audrey of yesterday, unnoted, unwhispered of, was a being somewhat lowlier than the Audrey of to-day, it may be remembered for her that she was an actress of the early eighteenth century, and that fate and an old mother to support had put her in that station.

The candles beneath their gla.s.s shades burned steadily; the house grew very quiet; the noises of the street lessened and lessened, for now nearly all of the people were gone to the ball. Audrey watched the round of light cast by the nearest torch. For a long time she had watched it, thinking that he might perhaps cross the circle, and she might see him in his splendor. She was still watching when he knocked at the garden door.

Mistress Stagg, sitting in a dream of her own, started violently. "La, now, who may that be?" she exclaimed. "Go to the door, child. If 'tis a stranger, we shelter none such, to be taken up for the harboring of runaways!"

Audrey went to the door and opened it. A moment's pause, a low cry, and she moved backward to the wall, where she stood with her slender form sharply drawn against the white plaster, and with the fugitive, elusive charm of her face quickened into absolute beauty, imperious for attention.

Haward, thus ushered into the room, gave the face its due. His eyes, bright and fixed, were for it alone. Mistress Stagg's curtsy went unacknowledged save by a slight, mechanical motion of his hand, and her inquiry as to what he lacked that she could supply received no answer. He was a very handsome man, of a bearing both easy and commanding, and to-night he was splendidly dressed in white satin with embroidery of gold.

To one of the women he seemed the king, who could do no wrong; to the other, more learned in the book of the world, he was merely a fine gentleman, whose way might as well be given him at once, since, spite of denial, he would presently take it.