Lewis Rand Part 3

"David an' Cephas, an' ole brer Mingo, Saul an' Paul, an' de w'ite folk sinners-- Oh, my chillern, follow de Lawd!"

Supper was eaten in silence. When it was over, Gideon Rand sat with his back against a pine and smoked his pipe. His son went down to the river and stretched his length upon a mossed and lichened boulder. The deep water below the stone did not give him back himself as had done the streamlet five days before. This was a river, marred with eddies and with drifting wood, and red with the soil. The evening wind was blowing, and the sycamore above him cast its bronze leaves into the flood which sucked them under, or bore them with it on its way to the larger river and the ultimate sea. This stream had no babbling voice; its note was low and grave. Youth and mountain sources forgotten, it hearkened before the time to ocean voices. The boy, idle upon the lichened stone, listened too, to distant utterances, to the sirens singing beyond the shadowy cape. The earth soothed him; he lay with half shut eyes, and after the day's hot communion with old wrongs, he felt a sudden peace.

He was at the turn; the brute within him quiet behind the eternal bars; the savage receding, the man beckoning, the after man watching from afar. The inner stage was cleared and set for a new act. He had lowered the light, he had rested, and he had filled the interval with forms and determinations beautiful and vague, vague as the mists, the sounds, the tossed arms of the Ossian he had dared to open last night, before his father, by the camp-fire of the mountaineers. In the twilight of his theatre he rested; a shadowy figure, full of mysteries, full of possibilities, a boy in the grasp of the man within him, neither boy nor man unlovable, nor wholly unadmirable, both seen, and seeing, "through a gla.s.s darkly."

He turned on his side, and the light went up sharply. A man riding a beautiful and spirited horse was coming over the hilltop. Horse and rider paused a moment upon the crest, standing clear against the eastern sky. In the crystal air and the sunset glow they crowned the hill like a horse and rider n.o.bly done in bronze. A moment thus, then they began to pick their way down the rocky road. Lewis Rand looked, and started to his feet. That horse had been bred in Albemarle, and that horseman he had met in Richmond. The boy's heart beat fast and the colour surged to his cheek. There was little, since the hour in the bookshop, that he would not have done or suffered for the approaching figure. All along the road from Richmond his imagination had conjured up a score of fantastic instances, in each of which he had rescued, or died for, or had in some impossibly romantic and magnificent fashion been the benefactor of the man who was drawing near to the river and camp-fire.

As superbly generous as any other youth, he was, at present, in his progress through life, in the land of shrines. He must have his idol, must worship and follow after some visible hero, some older, higher, stronger, more subtle-fine and far-ahead adventurer. Heretofore, in his limited world, Adam Gaudylock had seemed nearest the gates of escape.

But Adam, he thought, was of the woods and the earth, even as his father was, and as the tobacco was, and as he himself was. His enormous need was for some one to follow whose feet were above the fat, red fields and the leafy trails. All this was present with him as he watched the oncoming figure. Great men kept their word. Had not Mr. Jefferson said that he would overtake them?--and there he was! He was coming down to the camp-fire, he was going to stop and talk to the surly giant, like Giant Despair, who sat and smoked beside it.

Lewis Rand left the river and the windy sycamore and hastened across the sere gra.s.s. "Father, father!" he cried. "Do you know who that is?" In his young voice there was both warning and appeal. Adam Gaudylock, he knew, had spoken to his father, but Gideon had given no sign. Suppose, no matter _who_ spoke, his father would give, forever, no other sign than that oft seen and always hated jerk of the head toward the tobacco-fields?

Gideon Rand took his pipe from his lips. "It's Mr. Jefferson," he answered laconically. "He's the one man in this country to whom I'd listen."

Jefferson rode up to the group about the camp-fire, checked his horse, and gave the tobacco-roller and his son a plain man's greeting to plain men. The eagerness of the boy's face did not escape him; when he dismounted, flung the reins of Wildair to his groom, and crossed the bit of turf to the fire beneath the pines, he knew that he was pleasing a young heart. He loved youth, and to the young he was always n.o.bly kind.

"Good-evening, Mr. Rand," he said. "You are homeward bound, as I am. It is good to see Albemarle faces after years of the French. I had the pleasure of making your son's acquaintance yesterday. It is a great thing to be the father of a son, for so one ceases to be a loose end and becomes a link in the great chain. Your son, I think, will do you honour. And, man to man, you must pay him in the same coin. We on a lower rung of the ladder must keep our hands from the ankles of the climbers above us! Make room for me on that log, my lad! Your father and I will talk awhile."

Thus it was that an able lawyer took up the case of young Lewis Rand. It was the lawyer's pleasure to give aid to youth, and to mould the mind of youth. He had many proteges, to all of whom he was invariably kind, invariably generous. The only return he exacted was that of homage. The yoke was not heavy, for, after all, the homage was to Ideas, to large, sagacious, and far-reaching Thought. It was in the year 1790 that he broke Gideon Rand's resistance to his son's devotion to other G.o.ds than those of the Rands. The year that followed that evening on the Albemarle road found Lewis Rand reading law in an office in Charlottesville. A few more years, and he was called to the bar; a little longer, and his name began to be an oft-spoken one in his native county, and not unknown throughout Virginia.

CHAPTER III

FONTENOY

In the springtime of the year 1804 the spectacle of human conduct ranged from grave to gay, from gay to grave again much as it had done in any other springtime of any other year. In France the consular chrysalis was about to develop imperial wings. The British Lion and the Russian Bear were cheek by jowl, and every Englishman turned his spygla.s.s toward Boulogne, where was gathered Buonaparte's army of invasion. In the New World Spanish troops were reluctantly withdrawing from the vast territory sold by a Corsican to a Virginian, while to the eastward of that movement seventeen of the United States of America pursued the uneven tenor of their way. Washington had been dead five years.

Alexander Hamilton was yet the leading spirit of the Federalist party, while Thomas Jefferson was the idol of the Democrat-Republicans.

In the sovereign State of Virginia politics was the staple of conversation as tobacco was the staple of trade. Party feeling ran high.

The President of the Union was a Virginian and a Republican; the Chief Justice was a Virginian and a Federalist. Old friends looked askance, or crossed the road to avoid a meeting, and hot bloods went a-duelling. The note of the time was Ambition; the noun most in use the name of Napoleon Buonaparte. It seemed written across the firmament; to some in letters of light and to others in h.e.l.l fire. With that sign in the skies, men might shudder and turn to a private hearth, or they might give loosest rein to desire for Fame. In the columns of the newspapers, above the name of every Roman patriot, each party found voice. From a lurid background of Moreau's conspiracy and d'Enghien's death, of a moribund English King and Premier, of Hayti aflame, and Tripoli insolent, they thundered, like Ca.s.sandra, of home woes. To the Federalist, reverencing the dead Washington, still looking for leadership to Hamilton, now so near that fatal Field of Honour, unconsciously nourishing love for that mother country from which he had righteously torn himself, the name of Democrat-Republican and all that it implied was a stench in the nostrils. On the other hand, the lover of Jefferson, the believer in the French Revolution and that rider of the whirlwind whom it had bred, the far-sighted iconoclast, and the poor bawler for simplicity and red breeches, all found the Federalist a mete burnished fly in the country's pot of ointment. Nowhere might be found a man so sober or so dull as to cry, "A plague o' both your houses!"

In the county of Albemarle April was blending with May. The days were soft and sunshiny, apt to be broken by a hurry of clouds, of slanting trees, and silver rain. When the sun came out again, it painted a great bow in the heavens. Beneath that bright token bloomed a thousand orchards; and the wheat and the young corn waved in the wet breeze. The land was rolling and red in colour, with beautiful trees and narrow rivers. Eastward it descended to misty plains, westward the mountains rose, bounding a n.o.ble landscape of field and forest. For many years the axe had swung and trees had fallen, but the forest yet descended to the narrow roads, observed itself in winding streams, gloomed upon the sunlit clearings where negroes sang as they tilled the soil. In the all-surrounding green the plantations showed like intaglios. From pleasant hillsides, shady groves, and hamlets of offices and quarters, the sedate red-brick, white-porticoed "great houses" looked easily forth upon a world which interested them mightily.

Upon a morning in late April of the year 1804, the early sunshine, overflowing such a plantation, dipped at last into a hollow halfway between the house and the lower gates, and overtook two young creatures playing at make-believe, their drama of the moment being that of the runaway servant.

"Oh, the sun!" wailed Deb. "We can't pretend it's dark any longer! G.o.d has gone and made another day! We'll see you running away,--all of us white folk, and the overseer and Mammy Chloe! If you climb this willow, the dogs will tree you like they did Aunt Dinah's Jim! Lie down and I'll cover you with leaves like the babes in the wood!"

Miranda, a slim black limb of Satan in a blue cotton gown, flung herself with prompt.i.tude upon the ground. "Heap de beech leaves an' de oak leaves upon dis heah po' los' n.i.g.g.ah. Oh, my lan'! don' you heah 'um comin'?"

Dead leaves fell upon her in a shower, and her accomplice gathered more with frantic haste. "Oh, it's the ghost in the tobacco-house! it's a rock rolling down the mountain! it's--it's something splashing in the swamp!"

"Is I a-hidin' in de swamp? Den don' th'ow no oak leaves on dis n.i.g.g.ah, for dey don' grow dyar. Gawd A'moughty, lis'en to de river roarin'! I's hidin' by de river--I's hidin' by de river! I's hidin' by de river Jordan!"

Deb swayed to and fro, beating her hands in her excitement. "I see a boat--a great big boat! It's as big as the Ark! The finders are in it, and the dogs and the guns! Let us pray! O Jesus, save Miranda, even though it is a scarlet sin to run away! O Jesus, don't let them take her to the Court House! O Jesus, let them take me--"

Miranda reared herself from her leafy bed. "Humph! what you gwine do at de Co'te House? Answer me dat! I knows what de Lawd gwine say. He gwine say, 'Run for it, n.i.g.g.ah!' Yaas, Lawd, I sholy gwine do what _you_ say--I gwine run to de very aidge of de yearth.

"Oh, I fool you, Mister Oberseer Man!

Oh, I fool you, my ole Marster!

Cotch de mockin'bird co'tin' in de locus', Cotch de bullfrog gruntin' in de ma'sh, Cotch de black snake trabellin' 'long his road, But you ain' gwine see dis n.i.g.g.ah enny mo'!

"Miss Deb, ef I gets to de big gate fust, you gwine lemme hol' dat doll baby Ma.r.s.e Edward gin you?"

Deb brushed the last oak leaf from the skirt of her green gown, tossed her yellow hair out of her brown eyes, and scrambled up the steep side of the dell to a level of lawn and flowers. Her handmaiden followed her, and they paused for breath beneath the white blooms of a mighty catalpa.

A hundred yards away, across an expanse of dewy turf, rose the great house, bathed in sunlight. Box, syringa, and honeysuckle environed it, and a row of poplars made a background of living green. It had tall white pillars, and shallow steps leading down to a gravelled drive. The drive was over-arched by elm and locust, and between the trees was planted purple lilac. All of fresh and fair and tender met in the late April weather, in the bright and song-filled morning, in the dew and in the flowers. Upon the steps, between the white pillars, were gathered several muslined figures, flowery bright to match the morning. In the drive below, two hors.e.m.e.n, booted and spurred, clad in many-caped riding-coats and attended by a negro groom, were in the act of lifting tall hats to the ladies of the house they were quitting.

"Hi!" panted Miranda. "Ma.r.s.e Ludwell Cary, Ma.r.s.e Fairfax Cary, an' dat brack n.i.g.g.ah Eli! Whar dey gwine dis mawnin'?"

"To the Court House--to the election," answered Deb. "I know all about it, for I asked Uncle Edward. If the Federalists win, the crops will be good, and General Washington and my father and my grandfather will lie quiet in their graves. We are Federalists. If the Republicans win, the country will go to the devil."

"Hi, dat so?" said Miranda. "Le's run open de big gate. Dey two gent'men moughty free wid dey money."

Racing over the jewelled turf, mistress and maid arrived at the big gate in time to swing it open before the approaching riders. Young Fairfax Cary laughed and tossed a coin to Miranda, who bobbed and showed her teeth, while his elder brother stooped gallantly to the pretty child of the house he was leaving. "Do you know what you are like in your narrow green gown and your blowing, yellow hair? You are like a daffodil in your sister's garden."

"If you were to swing me up from the ground," said Deb meditatively, "I could stand upon the toe of your boot, and hold by Pluto's mane, and ride with you as far as the creek.--What flower is Jacqueline like?"

"Like no flower that blooms," said Mr. Ludwell Cary. "Ah, well sprung, Proserpina! Now shall we go fast as the wind?"

They went fast as the wind to the creek, and then went like the wind back to the gate, where Ludwell Cary swung the child down to earth and the waiting Miranda.

Deb curtsied to him. "Wish me good luck, Daffy-down-Dilly!" he said, with his charming smile.

"I do," she answered earnestly. "I hope that you will kill the Devil."

He looked puzzled. "Is that feasible? I don't know where to find him."

"Aren't you going to fight him at the Court House? Uncle Edward said that you were going to put down Lucifer."

The two brothers broke into laughter. "I say, Fair!" cried the elder.

"Has Lewis Rand a cloven hoof? I've scarcely seen him, you know, since I went to England!"

"He's all cloven hoof, d.a.m.n him!" the other answered cheerfully. "Best ride on. He'll have been at the Court House this hour!"

Ludwell Cary glanced at his watch. "Early or late, the result will be the same. The county's going for him twice over!"

"A d.a.m.ned tobacco-roller's son!" growled the other.

The elder brother laughed. "'A man's a man for a' that,' Fair. I dare say old Gideon rolled tobacco with all his might. As for his son, his worst enemy--and I don't know that I am that--couldn't deny him courage and energy."

"He's a dangerous man--"

"Most men are who have won by fighting. But I don't think he loves violence. Well, well, I'm coming! Good-bye, little one!"

Deb curtsied and Miranda bobbed, the gentlemen touched their hats, black Eli grinned, the horses began to canter, and, the leafy road bending sharply, the party for the Court House pa.s.sed suddenly from view as though the earth had swallowed them up.

Miranda bent her eyes upon her mistress. "Hit's time you wuz in de schoolroom. An' Lan' o' Goshen! Jes' look at yo' wet shoes! I reckon Mammy Chloe gwine whup me!"

Deb considered her stockings and slippers. "There's no school to-day.