Oldfield Part 16

The officer, a good-looking, good-humored young giant, bared his head with an embarra.s.sed smile. He made a brief explanation, turning his hat in his awkward hands, and resting his huge bulk first on one foot and then on the other.

Old lady Gordon hardly allowed him to finish what he found to say, which was very little. "Now, what's the use of your telling me any such nonsense as that, Jim Sloc.u.m? You know I'm not going to let you come here, interfering with my cook's getting my dinner."

"Yes, ma'am," said Jim, deferentially. "I do hate to inconvenience you, ma'am. But you see, ma'am, there's the law and here's the warrant. I'm bound to do what the law requires--I'll have to serve it."

"Indeed, you won't do anything of the kind! Who ever heard of such impudence!" exclaimed old lady Gordon. "The very idea! Taking my cook away from getting my dinner to lock her up in jail! Upon my word, Jim Sloc.u.m, I thought you had some sense. But I'm not going to allow you to annoy me or get me stirred up on a warm morning like this. I'm not even going to discuss the matter. Just you run along now, Jim, that's a good fellow, and let Eunice alone--she's busy--and don't bother me any more."

She settled herself back in her wide, low chair, and began to wave the turkey-wing fan with one hand, turning the leaves of her novel with the other.

"But you see, ma'am, it's a mighty grave charge, attempted murder,--the state--"

"Grave fiddlesticks!" retorted old lady Gordon, looking up from her novel with real fire blazing now in her fine dark eyes. "The state!"

with infinite scorn. "What difference would it make to me if it were the United States? I tell you I won't have another word!"

Her raised voice, the lower tone of the officer's mild, but firm, persistence, the hurried gathering and smothered whispering of the servants around the windows and doors, all these combined had finally attracted the attention of Lynn Gordon, who was absorbed in reading in his own room overhead, and he now came hurrying downstairs. Entering his grandmother's room, he looked in surprise at the group which he found there; at her, at the constable, and lastly at Eunice, who had stood quietly by throughout the whole controversy with the manner of a coolly disinterested spectator. The officer turned eagerly to Lynn with the relief that every man feels upon the entrance of another man into a difficult business transaction with women.

"Maybe you can persuade your grandmother to let Eunice go," the constable said, addressing him, when a few words had made the matter clear to Lynn. "It is really the quickest way to get her cook back. The county judge is in town; I saw him tying his horse to the tavern hitching-post as I pa.s.sed coming down here. He'd hurry up the case and get it over in no time to accommodate your grandma, being as they're kinder kin--him and your grandma's folks."

"Mr. Sloc.u.m is right, grandmother. That is certainly the quickest way, and the easiest," Lynn said. "Let Eunice go and I'll defend her; I'll take her as my first case,--shall I?" he added smilingly, looking at old lady Gordon.

"I don't care what any of you do, so long as you let me alone and have Eunice back here in time to get my dinner. What have you been up to, anyway?" she said, suddenly turning to Eunice as if the nature of the charge had just occurred to her for the first time. "Well, you'd better be back in plenty of time to boil that blackberry roll, that's all I've got to say to you. Lynn, send somebody to tell Davy,--that's the judge, Judge Thompson,--to tell Davy Thompson that I would be much obliged if he would go to the court-house at once and get this bother over, so that Eunice may be back within an hour. Please ask him to take the trouble to hurry; tell him I asked it. Send Enoch Cotton--where is Enoch, anyway?"

she said, glancing over the a.s.semblage of black masks crowding the windows and doors.

Enoch--naturally enough--was not to be found then nor for hours afterward, but another servant was despatched running in his stead; and then the procession moved briskly out through the side gate and on up the big road toward the court-house. Eunice walked behind the officer as manners required, but there was nothing abject in her carriage. She held her head high, feeling glad that she happened to be wearing her gayest bandanna head-handkerchief and that her white ap.r.o.n was still spotlessly clean. Hers was an imposing figure, and she knew it, and consequently bore herself with dignified pride. Her friends, too, began to flock around her as the procession advanced, thus swelling the crowd; and the white people living along the big road came to the doors and windows of their houses to see what was going on.

From the opposite direction approached a much larger and longer procession, headed by Merica, fairly flamboyant in an ecstasy of triumph, and tailed by dusky ragged figures, some of them little black children, trailing in the distance, indistinct as a smoky antique frieze. Merica's forces largely outnumbered Eunice's, as the attacking army nearly always outnumbers the defending force. Merica came marching at the very forefront, as if to the throb of inaudible drums and to the waving of invisible banners. Eunice trod more slowly, as the garrison goes cautiously to man the walls.

There was one tense, dangerous moment when the opposing forces met at the court-house steps; but the judge, the prosecuting attorney, and the prisoner's counsel chanced, luckily, to arrive at the same instant, so that, owing to their restraining presence, the danger pa.s.sed with no greater violence than an exchange of threatening glances between the contending parties. Side by side the furious factions crowded into the small court-room, and straightway the examining trial of Eunice for attempted murder was then and there begun, without an instant's delay.

And yet everything was done decently and in order. It was a complete surprise to the defence to find that the a.s.sault which had taken place in the b.u.t.ter-bean bower was entirely ignored in the indictment. The charge was that Eunice had put poison in the well from which Merica drew water, thereby attempting to kill, to murder, and to do deadly harm etc., to the plaintiff. The prosecuting witness testified that she had heard a noise about daylight; that on going to the well she had found an empty box, which she was certain had contained rat-poison, lying beside it; and that a white powder which she was mortally sure was the rat-poison itself--and nothing else--was plainly to be seen floating on the surface of the water. Such was the case made out by the prosecution.

It was not at all what the defence was prepared for, but the prisoner's counsel showed himself to be a person of resources upon sudden demand.

He readily admitted that the prosecuting witness might have heard a noise about daylight. There were, as he had himself observed, a great many cats in that part of the village. Also he admitted with equal readiness that she might have found an empty box which had once contained a rat-poison. He pointed out the fact that this particular variety of rat-poison was in such general use in Oldfield,--where rat-poison was one of the necessities of life, not merely one of its luxuries,--that the empty boxes which had contained it were to be found almost anywhere. As for the alleged poison itself, which a notoriously untruthful and untrustworthy witness had just testified to seeing still afloat on the surface of the water in the well, after the acknowledged lapse of several hours--the court could judge the worth of that evidence without any a.s.sistance from the defence.

Here Mr. Pettus unexpectedly appeared in the court-room. He kept the rat-poison, as he kept everything in daily Oldfield demand, and he had been hurriedly summoned as an expert witness for the defence, and he now took the stand. He testified to having handled that particular variety of rat-poison in very large quant.i.ties for many years. He claimed, on cross-examination, to be perfectly familiar with the kind of box used by the manufacturers of the rat-poison, and he gave it as his opinion that the particular box in question--the one which he then held in his hand, and which he was examining minutely--had been used for several other purposes, and harmless ones, apparently, since being emptied of its original deadly contents. He called the attention of the court to the fact that a particle of sugar still adhered to one corner, while a grain of coffee still lingered in another corner. Finally, when the prisoner's counsel was quite ready for the grand stroke, he allowed the witness--who was an amateur chemist in the line of his business--to testify from his own personal knowledge of the rat-poison that it dissolved instantly upon coming in contact with water.

"And yet, your Honor, the prosecution rests its case upon the testimony of an ignorant, vindictive savage, who swears--who solemnly testifies under oath, your Honor--that she saw this identical poison, and no other, floating on the surface of the water in the well several hours after she claims to have heard a noise; that it was there, plainly to be seen, several hours after my innocent client is known to have been at work in her mistress's kitchen and was seen in her mistress's garden, openly and constantly in view of the whole community. I can summon any number of unimpeachable witnesses--"

"The declaration is dismissed. The complaint is denied for lack of evidence," said the judge, as seriously as possible. "Call the next case."

"You may go home now, Eunice," said Lynn, smiling.

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," said Eunice, calm as ever, and deliberately dropping a clumsy courtesy.

She courtesied still more clumsily to the court and to Mr. Pettus, and to all the white persons present, and then she turned slowly and ponderously, like some large and heavy royal personage, and she cast openly a high glance of infinite scorn over the humbled heads of her enemies. They might flock like coal-black crows as much as they had a mind to, she remarked in the dialect which they best understood; they were no more to her than the dust of the big road which she had "trompled under foot." She had white folks for her friends, she said triumphantly. With this single parting volley she went slowly and calmly down the court-house steps and set off homeward, bearing herself with all the arrogance of Semiramis returning victorious to Nineveh.

"Well, so you are back in time! No," said old lady Gordon, holding up the turkey-wing fan with a restraining gesture and resuming her novel with a yawn, "I don't want to hear a word about it. I know well enough that you ought to be in the penitentiary. Go on and get my dinner."

At the other end of the village Merica, deeply dejected, utterly crushed, stole toward home close in the shelter of the fence. She was returning entirely alone, as the leader of a lost cause nearly always returns, if he return at all. One by one her followers had dropped away, one disappearing here in a back yard, another vanishing there in a wood-lot, till all were gone. Desertion is the bitter hemlock of defeat that the vanquished are always forced to drink. The board was still off the fence at its farthest corner; Merica had squeezed through the hole on her flamboyant departure, so that Miss Judy might not see her and prevent her going; and she now dragged herself through it again on her downcast coming back, and thus reached the coveted shelter of her own domain and was able to hide her diminished head wholly un.o.bserved by her unsuspicious, gentle little mistress.

"Merica's very quiet this morning. I haven't heard her stirring," Miss Judy said to Miss Sophia, as they sat placidly side by side in their little rocking-chairs--swaying gently--as they so loved to sit. They were talking, too, with that inexhaustible interest in one another's conversation which made their lifelong companionship the beautiful and perfect thing it was.

"Perhaps the poor creature is distressed over the falling down of the bower. She seemed to be real fond of it. And how strange to think there could have been such a violent storm without a drop of rain or our hearing the wind. I thought at first that we might have the bean-poles set up again, but the poles are broken and the vines are actually torn up by the roots. Oh, yes,--going back to what we were discussing before I happened to think of the bower,--I am sure that you are quite right in thinking that Doris's character has developed very rapidly of late. Her ideals really appear surprisingly well formed for so young a girl. And, as you say, there could hardly be anything unsettling now in her reading about the troubles that poor Becky went through. It can hardly do the dear child any harm now even to read about the mistakes which poor Becky made. For you know, sister Sophia, Becky was really good-hearted. You remember that Amelia might have gone sorrowing all her life, but for Becky's being so kind-hearted."

Miss Judy pleaded as though Miss Sophia was some keen and merciless critic from whose stern justice she strove gently to save the innocently erring.

"Just so, sister Judy," responded Miss Sophia, so promptly, so firmly, so comprehensively, so conclusively, that Miss Judy beamed at her, positively radiant with admiration, and sighed a deep sigh of relief and satisfaction at having the long and sorely vexing question thus thoroughly disposed of at last.

XX

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN FAITH AND LOVE

About that time of the year an aspect of great, glowing beauty and a feeling of deep, sweet peace always comes to this beautiful, pastoral country.

The long, warm days are then of the rarest gold, and the short, cool nights are of the purest silver. The ripened grain has been garnered, and its golden sheaves no longer tent the rich, broad lands. The tall, ta.s.selling corn now flows free in rippling, murmuring, ever widening silvery seas. The ocean of the vast tobacco fields rolls and rolls its mighty billows of deepening green into the darkening purple haze of the misty horizon. The wooded hillsides are now very still, and dark blue shadows linger all day among the trees--which stir scarcely a leaf--waiting to creep down toward the village at nightfall to meet the snow-white mist loitering over the resting meadows. The birds, too, are resting, half asleep in the heart of the ancient wood; they sing more seldom and their songs are sweeter and softer and come forth touched with a tender melancholy. The very shrilling of the crickets in the long gra.s.s sounds less shrill, and seems to rise and fall with the waves of heat. The b.u.t.terflies, cl.u.s.tering on the commonest wayside weeds like tropical flowers, hardly move their dazzling wings of yellow and white, waving them as languorously as a flower unfurls its petals. And then--in those radiant days--the thistledown also softly spreads its pinions of gossamer silver, and, borne on the breath of the south breeze, it wings its weightless way over all the snow-ma.s.ses of the elder bloom, and burnishes its lacelike whiteness into the luminous border of the veil which the midsummer heaven lends to the midsummer earth.

The honeysuckle over Tom Watson's window was thinning under the heat and bronzing under the drouth. Its leaves, green-yellow, drifted languidly down to the browning gra.s.s of the neglected lawn. So that there was scarcely a cool shadow left to shield the wretchedness of the stricken man, sitting day after day in the spot to which destiny had chained him; or one to cover the sadness of the wife, keeping her hopeless vigil by his side, in open view for every pa.s.ser-by to see. It was a sight to wring any heart, and the Oldfield people were always kind to one another and always helpful--as simple, poor people are everywhere. But in this sad case there seemed no way to help, nothing that any one could do. No one might penetrate the dumb horror of the sick man's awful gaze, straining all the desolate day through, as long as the light lasted, toward some unseen and unreachable thing, as a wild creature strains dumbly at its chain. No one could pa.s.s the silence of Anne's reserve to share, to lessen, or even completely to comprehend the conflict ceaselessly waging within the high, narrow walls of her spirit.

Up to the beginning of this strife Anne's heart and soul had gone more nearly abreast, more evenly side by side, than most women's hearts and souls are able to go through life. The one nearly always goes before the other in every true woman's breast. And the path of Anne's spirit was very narrow, much narrower than that in which most women tread; so that, at this last steep pa.s.s, there was not room for both to go together, and thus her heart and her soul were forced to strive, the one with the other, for the right of way. There was never a moment's doubt in Anne's single, simple, and most strenuous mind as to which should lead. Now, as always, the road between right and wrong lay straight, clear, and open before her feet. There never was the slightest danger of her wandering or wavering. But oh, the agonized wringing of her heart, the almost unendurable travail of her soul--in this death struggle for her husband's salvation! And yet she suffered the anguish unflinchingly, her very love forbidding her conscience to yield, to barter the hope of the life everlasting for the relief of a few broken years. And every day the conflict grew fiercer as her husband's growing strength increased his piteously powerless resistance to restraint, and fed the flame of his desire for cards, now as strong as any ruling pa.s.sion ever was in death.

Impa.s.sive as Anne was by nature, she used sometimes to wonder if she would be able to bear it any longer and live. Her heart was breaking, her soul was almost at bay, so desperate was the strife between the two.

It is one of life's cruel ironies that the deepest feeling must often find trivial and even absurd expression. In poor Anne's first blind casting about for something to divert her husband's thoughts, in her first futile trying to remember what he used to like,--and she had known very little of his tastes in the days of his strength,--the recollection of seeing him read the county newspaper, which was published weekly in a neighboring town, came suddenly out of the mists of her memory. She sent for the paper and tried to read it to him, beginning at the top line of the first column and going straight through to the last line on the last page, fearing lest she might miss the article which he most wanted to hear. But Anne was not a good reader, and a clouded mind and a racked body do not make a patient listener. Tom gave no sign and he did not try to speak; but Anne saw his miserable, unresting eyes wander away to the far-off purpled hills, beyond which lay the free, bright world; and his thoughts--but who dare wonder whither his thoughts wandered?

After the failure in the reading of the newspaper, Anne turned to books.

There were no new books in Oldfield, had poor Anne known the new from the old, and there were few of any kind. Miss Judy had more than any one else, and she was eager in offering all that had belonged to her father, as well as the handful of more recent ones gathered by her own simple tastes; and these last she urged upon Anne as being lighter and more cheerful, and consequently more suited to the cheering of an invalid.

She was quite sure, so she said, smiling to hearten Anne, that Tom would like to hear about Becky; he had always liked lively, good-hearted people--like himself. But Anne instinctively chose the major's books instead, shrinking from all lightness as unsuited to her husband's need, and believing, as a woman of her type usually believes, that a man is most interested in what she herself least understands.

When the reading of the dry old books had failed even more completely, if possible, than the reading of the newspaper, Anne tried to talk to her husband; and that was the hardest of all. She had always been a silent woman, well named "still-tongued"; and now that her sad heart lay in her bosom like lead, she found less and less to say, so that this last attempt was the most complete and the saddest of her many repeated defeats. It was then, when at the end of her own resources, that she held to Sidney's hand, and asked with her appealing eyes for the help which she knew not how to beg with her lips. After this Sidney went every day to see Tom, and told him, as amusingly as she could tell anything, of everything that was going on, no matter whether he listened or not. And she also sent Doris, who went often (taking Miss Judy's guitar at that little lady's suggestion) to sing to the invalid, and who was careful to choose her gayest songs and to play nothing less cheerful than the Spanish fandango; and it really seemed, once in a while, as if a light came into the sick man's darkened gaze as it rested upon the girl as she tinkled the old guitar, with the broad blue ribbon falling around her beautiful shoulders.

The whole village was, in truth, unwearying in its kindness all the long days, through all those long months; but there were, nevertheless, the lonely hours of the endless nights to be pa.s.sed alone, when the desperate husband and the despairing wife dumbly faced the appalling future,--a burning, unlighted, empty desert,--stretching perhaps through many terrible years. And even then Anne stood firm, with her sad, steady eyes ever on the white heights which she saw beyond the black gulf, wherein she strove perpetually with the powers of darkness for her husband's soul.

She never left him now for a moment, night or day, except when there was preaching in her own church and her faith required the "breaking of bread"; and at rare long intervals to go to prayer-meeting, when she felt her strength failing and hoped to find in the prayers of others new strength for her own ceaseless pet.i.tions. One night of midsummer, when the bell began to ring for prayer-meeting, she felt that she must go.

She accordingly arose--reluctantly as she always left him--and went into the bedroom and put on her quakerish bonnet. Then she came back and stood before her husband, seeking wistfully to do something more for his comfort before leaving him, as she never forgot to try to do. She turned the cushions at his back to make them softer, and moved the pillows behind his head so that it might rest easier, and straightened the cover over his powerless knees. These poor things, which she always did, were all that she ever could do. She would return soon, as soon as she could, she said, as she always said, bending down to press her pale lips to his scarred forehead. At the gate she stopped and lingered, looking back, as she always looked, sorely loath still to leave him even for an hour of uplifting prayer.

Night was near. The last red gold of the sunset had paled from the highest, farthest hilltop, where the graveyard lay. The tombstones--the new white ones that stood so straight, the older gray ones that leaned, the oldest brown ones that had fallen--all were dim now in the soft glory of the afterglow, as many of the cold, hard things of this world are softened by the tender light from the world above. The dusk was already creeping down the darkling arches of the wooded hillsides. Mists were already arising from the low-lying meadows, trailing long white cloud-fleeces, all starred with fireflies, thus making a new heaven of the old earth.

Through the gloaming and the stillness Anne's lonely figure went steadily, swiftly onward toward the church. Lynn Gordon noted the tense paleness and the strange exaltation of her still face, when he met and pa.s.sed her on the big road, faint as the light was, and the sight of it touched him, though his own mind was lightly at peace and his own heart was over-flowing with thoughtless happiness. The impression of suffering that her face had given him was still in his mind when he drew near the window beside which the sick man sat, and because of it, or some other motive that he did not stop to fathom, he suddenly stood still, and after a hesitating pause, and a longing glance toward the silver poplars, he opened the gate and crossed the yard and went to the window to speak to Tom Watson. Nothing was farther from his thoughts than any intent of going into the house--as he told the doctor afterwards when speaking of what followed.

"It was like mesmerism. I have not the vaguest idea of how it really happened. His awful eyes drew me, when I didn't want to go. They dragged me into that house as if a giant hand had been laid upon my collar. The first thing that I knew the negro boy who waits on Watson had set out a table and put the lamp on it, and had laid a pack of cards between him and me." The young man shuddered at the recollection. "I hope I may never again see anything like that poor wretch's face when his palsied hands first touched the cards which I dealt him. I tried to remind myself that there couldn't be any harm in such a game and that there might be some good. But to see such a pa.s.sion as his for gambling looking out of a dead man's face is a sight which I hope never to look upon again."

The lamplight shone far down the big road that night, and Anne saw it almost as soon as she left the meeting-house on her lonely way home. At the sight her heavy heart seemed to leap as if it would escape from its cell of pain; and then, faint with deadly fear, it seemed to fall back as though it could never beat again. Too near to fainting to stand, she sat down on the roadside, and remained without moving for a long time.

She was all alone in the darkness, no one else was going her way; and no one pa.s.sed along the deserted thoroughfare. She knew at once what the streaming lamplight meant; and she tried to think what was best to do, now that the worst was come. She arose tremblingly at last, when she had rallied strength enough, and she went on feebly through the still blackness of the night, like a woman suddenly stricken with great age.

She did not know that she was weeping, and the great, slow, heavy tears of the rarely moved fell unheeded down her white cheeks. The gate was open, as Lynn Gordon had left it, and she entered the yard noiselessly, pa.s.sing the window like an unseen shadow and with an averted face. On the steps at the back of the house she sank down almost p.r.o.ne and lay motionless, hardly conscious, she knew not for how long. The heavy tears still fell silently and unnoticed, as the hardest rain falls without storm. She was trying to think, but she could not; she could do nothing but pray. And she prayed--praying as one having great faith does pray when a tidal wave from life's troubled sea sweeps over a stranded soul.

For Anne's faith stood, even now, firm as a mighty rock anch.o.r.ed to the foundations of the earth. And through all the darkness and turmoil of this supreme spiritual stress a single ray of white light shone steadily as a beacon to her tossed spirit. The abomination had not come through any weakness of hers; her faith had not yielded to her love.