Crittenden Part 2

IV

It was growing dusk outside. Chickens were going to roost with a great chattering in some locust-trees in one corner of the yard. An aged darkey was swinging an axe at the woodpile and two little pickaninnies were gathering a basket of chips. Already the air was filled with the twilight sounds of the farm--the lowing of cattle, the bleating of calves at the cowpens, the bleat of sheep from the woods, and the nicker of horses in the barn. Through it all, Crittenden could hear the nervous thud of Raincrow's hoofs announcing rain--for that was the way the horse got his name, being as black as a crow and, as Bob claimed, always knowing when falling weather was at hand and speaking his prophecy by stamping in his stall. He could hear Basil noisily making his way to the barn. As he walked through the garden toward the old family graveyard, he could still hear the boy, and a prescient t.i.the of the pain, that he felt would strike him in full some day, smote him so sharply now that he stopped a moment to listen, with one hand quickly raised to his forehead. Basil was whistling--whistling joyously. Foreboding touched the boy like the brush of a bird's wing, and death and sorrow were as remote as infinity to him. At the barn-door the lad called sharply:

"Bob!"

"Suh!" answered a m.u.f.fled voice, and Bob emerged, gray with oatdust.

"I want my buggy to-night." Bob grinned.

"Sidebar?"

"Yes."

"New whip--new harness--little buggy mare--reckon?"

"I want 'em all."

Bob laughed loudly. "Oh, I know. You gwine to see Miss Phyllis dis night, sho--yes, Lawd!" Bob dodged a kick from the toe of the boy's boot--a playful kick that was not meant to land--and went into the barn and came out again.

"Yes, an' I know somewhur else you gwine--you gwine to de war. Oh, I know; yes, suh. Dere's a white man in town tryin' to git n.i.g.g.e.rs to 'list wid him, an' he's got a n.i.g.g.e.r sojer what say he's a officer hisself; yes, mon, a corpril. An' dis n.i.g.g.e.r's jes a-gwine through town drawin' n.i.g.g.e.rs right _an'_ left. He talk to me, but I jes laugh at him, an' say I gwine wid Ole Cap'n ur Young Cap'n, I don't keer which. An'

lemme tell you, Young Capn', ef you ur Ole Cap'n doan lemme go wid you, I'se gwine wid dat n.i.g.g.e.r corpril an' dat white man what 'long to a n.i.g.g.e.r regiment, an' I know you don't want me to bring no sech disgrace on de fambly dat way--no, suh. He axe what you de cap'n of," Bob went on, aiming at two birds with one stone now, "an' I say you de cap'n of ever'body an' ever'ting dat come 'long--dat's what I say-an' he be cap'n of you wid all yo' unyform and sich, I say, if you jest come out to de fahm--yes, mon, dat he will sho."

The boy laughed and Bob reiterated:

"Oh, I'se gwine--I'se gwine wid you--" Then he stopped short. The turbaned figure of Aunt Keziah loomed from behind the woodpile.

"What dat I heah 'bout you gwine to de wah, n.i.g.g.e.r, what dat I heah?"

Bob laughed--but it was a laugh of propitiation.

"Law, mammy. I was jes projeckin' wid Young Cap'n."

"Fool n.i.g.g.e.r, doan know what wah is--doan lemme heah you talk no more 'bout gwine to de wah ur I gwine to w'ar you out wid a hickory--dat's whut I'll do--now you min'." She turned on Basil then; but Basil had retreated, and his laugh rang from the darkening yard. She cried after him:

"An' doan lemme heah you puttin' dis fool n.i.g.g.e.r up to gittin' hisself killed by dem Cubians neither; no suh!" She was deadly serious now. "I done spanked you heap o' times, an' 'tain't so long ago, an' you ain'

too big yit; no, suh." The old woman's wrath was rising higher, and Bob darted into the barn before she could turn back again to him, and a moment later darted his head, like a woodp.e.c.k.e.r, out again to see if she were gone, and grinned silently after her as she rolled angrily toward the house, scolding both Bob and Basil to herself loudly.

A song rose from the cowpens just then. Full, clear, and quivering, it seemed suddenly to still everything else into silence. In a flash, Bob's grin settled into a look of sullen dejection, and, with his ear c.o.c.ked and drinking in the song, and with his eye on the corner of the barn, he waited. From the cowpens was coming a st.u.r.dy negro girl with a bucket of foaming milk in each hand and a third balanced on her head, singing with all the strength of her lungs. In a moment she pa.s.sed the corner.

"Molly--say, Molly."

The song stopped short.

"Say, honey, wait a minute--jes a minute, won't ye?" The milkmaid kept straight ahead, and Bob's honeyed words soured suddenly.

"Go on, gal, think yo'self mighty fine, don't ye? Nem' min'!"

Molly's nostrils swelled to their full width, and, at the top of her voice, she began again.

"Go on, n.i.g.g.e.r, but you jes wait."

Molly sang on:

"Take up yo' cross, oh, sinner-man."

Before he knew it, Bob gave the response with great unction:

"Yes, Lawd."

Then he stopped short.

"I reckon I got to break dat gal's head some day. Yessuh; she knows whut my cross is," and then he started slowly after her, shaking his head and, as his wont was, talking to himself.

He was still talking to himself when Basil came out to the stiles after supper to get into his buggy.

"Young Cap'n, dat gal Molly mighty nigh pesterin' de life out o' me. I done tol' her I'se gwine to de wah."

"What did she say?"

"De fool n.i.g.g.e.r--she jes laughed--she jes laughed."

The boy, too, laughed, as he gathered the reins and the mare sprang forward.

"We'll see--we'll see."

And Bob with a triumphant snort turned toward Molly's cabin.

The locust-trees were quiet now and the barn was still except for the occasional stamp of a horse in his stall or the squeak of a pig that was pushed out of his warm place by a stronger brother. The night noises were strong and clear--the cricket in the gra.s.s, the croaking frogs from the pool, the whir of a night-hawk's wings along the edge of the yard, the persistent wail of a whip-poor-will sitting lengthwise of a willow limb over the meadow-branch, the occasional sleepy caw of crows from their roost in the woods beyond, the bark of a house-dog at a neighbour's home across the fields, and, further still, the fine high yell of a fox-hunter and the faint answering yelp of a hound.

And inside, in the mother's room, the curtain was rising on a tragedy that was tearing open the wounds of that other war--the tragedy upon which a b.l.o.o.d.y curtain had fallen more than thirty years before. The mother listened quietly, as had her mother before her, while the son spoke quietly, for time and again he had gone over the ground to himself, ending ever with the same unalterable resolve.

There had been a Crittenden in every war of the nation--down to the two Crittendens who slept side by side in the old graveyard below the garden.

And the Crittenden--of whom he had spoken that morning--the gallant Crittenden who led his Kentuckians to death in Cuba, in 1851, was his father's elder brother. And again he repeated the dying old Confederate's deathless words with which he had thrilled the Legion that morning--words heard by her own ears as well as his. What else was left him to do--when he knew what those three brothers, if they were alive, would have him do?

And there were other untold reasons, hid in the core of his own heart, faced only when he was alone, and faced again, that night, after he had left his mother and was in his own room and looking out at the moonlight and the big weeping willow that drooped over the one white tomb under which the two brothers, who had been enemies in the battle, slept side by side thus in peace. So far he had followed in their footsteps, since the one part that he was fitted to play was the _role_ they and their ancestors had played beyond the time when the first American among them, failing to rescue his king from Carisbrooke Castle, set sail for Virginia on the very day Charles lost his royal head. But for the Civil War, Crittenden would have played that _role_ worthily and without question to the end. With the close of the war, however, his birthright was gone--even before he was born--and yet, as he grew to manhood, he had gone on in the serene and lofty way of his father--there was nothing else he could do--playing the gentleman still, though with each year the audience grew more restless and the other and lesser actors in the drama of Southern reconstruction more and more resented the particular claims of the star. At last, came with a shock the realization that with the pa.s.sing of the war his occupation had forever gone. And all at once, out on his ancestral farm that had carried its name Canewood down from pioneer days; that had never been owned by a white man who was not a Crittenden; that was isolated, and had its slaves and the children of those slaves still as servants; that still clung rigidly to old traditions--social, agricultural, and patriarchal--out there Crittenden found himself one day alone. His friends--even the boy, his brother--had caught the modern trend of things quicker than he, and most of them had gone to work--some to law, some as clerks, railroad men, merchants, civil engineers; some to mining and speculating in the State's own rich mountains. Of course, he had studied law--his type of Southerner always studies law--and he tried the practice of it. He had too much self-confidence, perhaps, based on his own brilliant record as a college orator, and he never got over the humiliation of losing his first case, being handled like putty by a small, black-eyed youth of his own age, who had come from nowhere and had pa.s.sed up through a philanthropical old judge's office to the dignity, by and by, of a license of his own. Losing the suit, through some absurd little technical mistake, Crittenden not only declined a fee, but paid the judgment against his client out of his own pocket and went home with a wound to his foolish, sensitive pride for which there was no quick cure. A little later, he went to the mountains, when those wonderful hills first began to give up their wealth to the world; but the pace was too swift, compet.i.tion was too undignified and greedy, and business was won on too low a plane. After a year or two of rough life, which helped him more than he knew, until long afterward, he went home.

Politics he had not yet tried, and politics he was now persuaded to try.

He made a brilliant canva.s.s, but another element than oratory had crept in as a new factor in political success. His opponent, Wharton, the wretched little lawyer who had bested him once before, bested him now, and the weight of the last straw fell crushingly. It was no use. The little touch of magic that makes success seemed to have been denied him at birth, and, therefore, deterioration began to set in--the deterioration that comes from idleness, from energy that gets the wrong vent, from strong pa.s.sions that a definite purpose would have kept under control--and the worse elements of a nature that, at the bottom, was true and fine, slowly began to take possession of him as weeds will take possession of an abandoned field.

But even then n.o.body took him as seriously as he took himself. So that while he fell just short, in his own eyes, of everything that was worth while; of doing something and being something worth while; believing something that made the next world worth while; or gaining the love of a woman that would have made this life worth while--in the eyes of his own people he was merely sowing his wild oats after the fashion of his race, and would settle down, after the same fashion, by and by--that was the indulgent summary of his career thus far. He had been a brilliant student in the old university and, in a desultory way, he was yet. He had worried his professor of metaphysics by puzzling questions and keen argument until that philosopher was glad to mark him highest in his cla.s.s and let him go. He surprised the old lawyers when it came to a discussion of the pure theory of law, and, on the one occasion when his mother's pastor came to see him, he disturbed that good man no little, and closed his lips against further censure of him in pulpit or in private. So that all that was said against him by the pious was that he did not go to church as he should; and by the thoughtful, that he was making a shameful waste of the talents that the Almighty had showered so freely down upon him. And so without suffering greatly in public estimation, in spite of the fact that the ideals of Southern life were changing fast, he pa.s.sed into the old-young period that is the critical time in the lives of men like him--when he thought he had drunk his cup to the dregs; had run the gamut of human experience; that nothing was left to his future but the dull repet.i.tion of his past. Only those who knew him best had not given up hope of him, nor had he really given up hope of himself as fully as he thought. The truth was, he never fell far, nor for long, and he always rose with the old purpose the same, even if it stirred him each time with less and less enthusiasm--and always with the beacon-light of one star shining from his past, even though each time it shone a little more dimly. For usually, of course, there is the hand of a woman on the lever that prizes such a man's life upward, and when Judith Page's clasp loosened on Crittenden, the castle that the lightest touch of her finger raised in his imagination--that he, doubtless, would have reared for her and for him, in fact, fell in quite hopeless ruins, and no similar shape was ever framed for him above its ashes.

It was the simplest and oldest of stories between the two--a story that began, doubtless, with the beginning, and will never end as long as two men and one woman, or two women and one man are left on earth--the story of the love of one who loves another. Only, to the sufferers the tragedy is always as fresh as a knife-cut, and forever new.

Judith cared for n.o.body. Crittenden laughed and pleaded, stormed, sulked, and upbraided, and was devoted and indifferent for years--like the wilful, pa.s.sionate youngster that he was--until Judith did love another--what other, Crittenden never knew. And then he really believed that he must, as she had told him so often, conquer his love for her.

And he did, at a fearful cost to the best that was in him--foolishly, but consciously, deliberately. When the reaction came, he tried to reestablish his relations to a world that held no Judith Page. Her absence gave him help, and he had done very well, in spite of an occasional relapse. It was a relapse that had sent him to the mountains, six weeks before, and he had emerged with a clear eye, a clear head, steady nerves, and with the one thing that he had always lacked, waiting for him--a purpose. It was little wonder, then, that the first ruddy flash across a sky that had been sunny with peace for thirty years and more thrilled him like an electric charge from the very clouds. The next best thing to a n.o.ble life was a death that was n.o.ble, and that was possible to any man in war. One war had taken away--another might give back again; and his chance was come at last.

It was midnight now, and far across the fields came the swift faint beat of a horse's hoofs on the turnpike. A moment later he could hear the hum of wheels--it was his little brother coming home; n.o.body had a horse that could go like that, and n.o.body else would drive that way if he had.

Since the death of their father, thirteen years after the war, he had been father to the boy, and time and again he had wondered now why he could not have been like that youngster. Life was an open book to the boy--to be read as he ran. He took it as he took his daily bread, without thought, without question. If left alone, he and the little girl whom he had gone that night to see would marry, settle down, and go hand in hand into old age without questioning love, life, or happiness. And that was as it should be; and would to Heaven he had been born to tread the self-same way. There was a day when he was near it; when he turned the same fresh, frank face fearlessly to the world, when his nature was as unspoiled and as clean, his hopes as high, and his faith as child-like; and once when he ran across a pa.s.sage in Stevenson in which that gentle student spoke of his earlier and better self as his "little brother" whom he loved and longed for and sought persistently, but who dropped farther and farther behind at times, until, in moments of darkness, he sometimes feared that he might lose him forever--Crittenden had clung to the phrase, and he had let his fancy lead him to regard this boy as his early and better self--better far than he had ever been--his little brother, in a double sense, who drew from him, besides the love of brother for brother and father for son, a tenderness that was almost maternal.