Princess Part 3

CHAPTER V.

In the dining-room at Lanarth stood Pocahontas, an expression of comical dismay upon her face, a pile of dusty volumes on the floor at her feet. The bookcase in the recess by the fireplace, with yawning doors and empty shelves, stood swept and garnished, awaiting re-possession. In a frenzy of untimely cleanliness, she had torn all the books from the repose of years, and now that the deed was beyond recall, she was a prey to disgust, and given over to repentance. The morning promised to be sultry, and the pile was very big; outside bugs and bees and other wise things hummed and sang in leafy places; the leaves on the magnolias were motionless, and the air asleep. A b.u.t.terfly, pa.s.sing to his siesta on the bosom of a rose, paused an instant on the window ledge to contemplate her foolishness; the flowers in the borders hung their heads. Berkeley pa.s.sed the open window, looking cool and fresh in summer clothing, and Pocahontas, catching sight of him, put her fingers to her lips and whistled sharply to attract his attention, which being done, she followed up the advantage with pantomimic gestures, indicative of despair, and need of swift a.s.sistance. Berkeley turned good-naturedly, and came in to the rescue, but when he discovered the service required of him, he regarded it with aversion, and showed a mean desire to retreat, which unworthiness was promptly detected by Pocahontas, and as promptly frustrated.

"Do help me, Berkeley," she entreated. "They must all be put in place again before dinner, and it only wants a quarter to one now. I can't do it all before half-past two, to save my life, unless you help me.

You know, mother dislikes a messy, littered room, and I've got your favorite pudding for dessert. Oh, dear! I'm tired to death already, and it's _so_ warm!" The rising inflection of her voice conveyed an impression of heat intense enough to drive an engine.

"What made you do it?" inquired Berkeley, in a tone calculated to make her sensible of folly.

"Mother asked me to dust the books sometime ago, but I neglected it, and this morning when the sun shone on them I saw that their condition was disgraceful. I was so much disgusted with my untidiness, that I dragged them all out on the impulse of the moment, and only realized how hot it was, and how I hated it, after the deed was done. Come, Berke, do help me. I'm so tired."

Thus adjured, Berkeley laid aside his coat, for lifting is warm work with the sun at the meridian. The empty shirt sleeve had a forlorn and piteous look as it hung crumpled and slightly twisted by his side.

Berkeley caught it with his other hand and thrust the cuff in the waistband of his trowsers. He was well used to his loss, and apparently indifferent to it, but the dangling of the empty sleeve worried him; the arm was gone close up at the shoulder.

Then the pair fell to work briskly, dusting, arranging, re-arranging and chatting pleasantly. Pocahontas plied the duster and her brother sorted the books and replaced them on the shelves. The sun shone in royally, until Pocahontas served a writ of ejectment on his majesty by closing all the shutters; and the sun promptly eluded it by peeping in between the bars. A little vagrant breeze stole in, full of idleness and mischief, and meddled with the books--fluttering the leaves of "The Faery Queen," which lay on its back wide open, lifting up the pages, and flirting them over roguishly as though bent on finding secrets.

The little noise attracted the girl's attention, and she raised the book and wiped the covers with her duster. As she slapped it lightly with her hand to get out all the dust, a letter slipped from among the leaves and fell to the floor near Berkeley's feet.

"Where did this come from?" he inquired, as he picked it up.

"Out of this book," she answered, holding up the volume in her hand.

"It fell out while I was dusting; some one must have left it in to mark a place. It must have been in the book for years; see how soiled it is. Whose is it?"

There is something in the unexpected finding of a stray letter which stimulates curiosity, and Berkeley turned it in his hand to read the address. The envelope was soiled like the coat of a traveler, and the letter was crumpled as though a hand had closed over it roughly. The writing was distinct and clerkly. "Berkeley Mason, Esq., Wintergreen, ---- Co., Virginia." Mr. Mason examined the blurred, indistinct postmark. "Point"--something, it seemed to be; and on the other side, Washington, plain enough, and the date, May, 1865. What letter had been forwarded him from the seat of government in the spring of '65?

Then memory unfolded itself like a map whose spring is loosened.

Seating himself in an easy chair, he drew the letter from its envelope, unfolding it slowly against his knee. It was a half-sheet of ordinary commercial paper and the lines upon it numbered, perhaps, a dozen.

Mason winced at sight of the heading as though an old wound had been pressed. His sister, leaning over the back of his chair, read with him; putting out a hand across his shoulder to help him straighten the page. It ran thus:

POINT LOOKOUT,

May --, 1865.

TO BERKELEY MASON, ESQ., Virginia.

SIR--A Confederate soldier, now a prisoner of war at this place, giving his name as Temple Mason, is lying in the prison hospital at the point of death. He was too ill to be sent south with the general transfer, and in compliance with his urgent request, I write again--the third time, to inform you of his condition. He can't last much longer, and in event of his dying without hearing from his friends, he will be buried in the common cemetery connected with the prison, and his ident.i.ty, in all probability, lost. This is what he appears to dread, and he entreats that you will come to him, in G.o.d's name, if you are still alive. The utmost dispatch will be necessary.

Respectfully,

PERCIVAL SMITH, B. G. U. S. A.

Comdt., U. S. P., Point Lookout.

Mason returned the letter to its envelope and leaned back in his chair thinking. It was one of the many messages of sorrow that had winged their way through the country in the weeks following the close of the war; one of the murmurs of pain that had swelled the funeral dirge vibrating through the land.

Pocahontas came and seated herself on her brother's knee, gazing at him with wide gray eyes filled with inquiry. "When did this come? I never saw it before," she questioned, gravely.

Then with troubled brow, and voice that grew husky at times, he went over for her the sad story of the last months of the last year of that unhappy and fateful struggle. In the autumn of '64 their brother Temple, a lad of seventeen, had been taken prisoner, with others of his troop, while making a reconnoissance, and they had been unable to discover either his condition or place of incarceration. Mason, himself, had been at home on sick leave, weak and worn with the loss of his arm and a saber cut across his head. All through the winter and spring, while calamity followed calamity with stunning rapidity, the wearing anxiety about Temple continued, made more intolerable by the contradictory reports of his fate brought by pa.s.sing soldiers.

Finally, this letter had arrived and converted a dread fear into a worse certainty.

It had been handed to Roy Garnett by a Federal officer at Richmond, and Roy had ridden straight down with it all those weary miles, feeling curiously certain that it contained news of Temple, and sharing their anxiety to the full. Roy had been stanch and helpful in their trouble, aiding in the hurried preparations for the journey, and accompanying the wounded man, and the pale, resolute mother on their desperate mission. Then came the hideous journey, the arrival at the prison, the fearful questioning, the relief akin to pain of the reply; the interview with the bluff, kindly commandant, who took their hands heartily and rendered them every a.s.sistance in his power. Then, in the rough hospital of the hostile prison, the strange, sad waiting for the end, followed by the stranger, sadder home-coming. It was a pitiful story, common enough both north and south--but none the less pitiful for its commonness.

With her head down on her brother's shoulder, Pocahontas sobbed convulsively. She was familiar with the outlines of the tale, and knew vaguely of the weeks of anxiety that had lined her mother's gentle face and silvered her brown hair, but of all particulars she was ignorant.

She had been very young at the time these sad events occurred; the young brother sleeping in the shadow of the cedars in the old burying-ground was scarcely more than a name to her, and the memories of her childhood had faded somewhat, crowded out by the cheerful realities of her glad girl-life.

When she broke the silence, it was very softly. "Berkeley," she said, "it was kindly done of that Federal officer to let us know. This is the third letter he wrote about poor Temple; the others must have miscarried."

"They did; and this one only reached us just in time. You see, communication with the south in those early days was more than uncertain. If Roy hadn't happened to be in Richmond, it's a question whether I should have received this one. It was kindly done, as you say, and this General Smith was a kindly man. I shall never forget his consideration for my mother, nor the kindness he showed poor Temple.

But for his aid we could hardly have managed at the last, in spite of Roy's efforts. We owe him a debt of grat.i.tude I'd fain repay. G.o.d bless him!"

"Amen!" echoed Pocahontas, softly.

CHAPTER VI.

One bright, crisp morning about the middle of October, Pocahontas stood in the back yard surrounded by a large flock of turkeys. They were handsome birds of all shades, from lightish red to deep glossy black; the sunlight on their plumage made flashes of iridescent color, green, purple, and blue, and that royal shade which seems to combine and reflect the glory of all three. Their heads were bent picking up the corn their mistress threw from the little basket in her hand, but occasionally the great gobblers would pause in their meal, and puff themselves out and spread their tails and throw their crimson heads back against their shining feathers, and proudly strut backward and forward, to the admiration, doubtless, of their mates.

Turkeys were the young lady's specialty, and on them alone of all the denizens of the poultry yard did she bestow her personal attention.

From the thrilling moment in early spring when she scribbled the date of its arrival on the first egg, until the full-grown birds were handed over to Aunt Rachel to be fattened for the table, the turkeys were her particular charge, and each morning and afternoon saw her sally forth, armed with a pan full of curds, or a loaf of brown bread, for her flock.

Her usual attendant, on these occasions, was a little colored boy named Sawney--the last of a line of Sawneys extending back to the dining-room servant of Pocahontas's great-grandmother. The economy in nomenclature on a southern plantation in the olden time was worthy of Dandie Dinmont himself. The Sawney in question was a grandson of Aunt Rachel, and an utterly abominable little darkey, inky black, grotesque, and spoiled to a degree. He was devoted to Pocahontas, and much addicted to following her about, wherever she would allow him. At feeding-time he always appeared as duly as the turkeys, for Pocahontas never forgot to put a biscuit, or a lump of sugar, in her pocket for him.

With the largest black gobbler Sawney was on terms of deadly enmity; for on more than one occasion had his precious biscuit been plucked from his unsuspicious hand, and borne away in triumph by the wily bird.

Half of feeding time was usually consumed by Sawney in throwing small stones at his enemy, who, as he was never by any chance smitten, would raise his head from time to time and gobble his a.s.sailant to scorn.

On this particular morning there had been a lull in the feud. Sawney had devoured his biscuit unmolested, and had offered no gratuitous insults to his foe. Pocahontas, having emptied her basket, was watching her flock with interest and admiration, when Berkeley made his appearance on the porch with a letter in his hand. He seemed in a hurry, and called to his sister impatiently.

"Look here, Princess," he said, as she joined him, "here's a letter from Jim to old Aunt Violet, his 'mammy.' He told me he had promised the old woman to write to her. It came with my mail this morning, and I haven't time to go over to Shirley and read it to her; I wish you would. She's too poorly to come after it herself, so put on your bonnet and step over there now, like a good girl."

"Step over there, indeed!" laughed Pocahontas. "How insinuatingly you put it. Aunt Vi'let's cabin is way over at Shirley; half a mile beyond Jim Byrd's line fence."

"General Smith's line fence, you mean. I wish you'd go, Princess.

There's money in the letter, and I don't want to send it by the negroes. I promised Jim we'd look after the old woman for them. The girls want her to come to Richmond, but she won't consent to quit the old place. She hasn't any children of her own, you know."

Pocahontas extended her hand for the letter. "She ought to go to Richmond and live with Belle or Nina," she said, slipping it into her pocket. "She'd die of homesickness way out in California with Susie.

I wonder whether the new people will let her stay at Shirley?"

"Oh, yes; Jim made every arrangement when he found she wouldn't consent to move. He had an understanding with General Smith about the corner of land her cabin stands on; reserved it, or leased it, or something.

It's all right."

Always kind, always considerate, thought the girl, wistfully, even amid the pain and hurry of departure--the sundering of old ties, finding time to care for the comfort of his old nurse. Good, faithful Jim.

"Have the new people come?" she called after her brother, as he disappeared within the house.

"I don't know. I rather think they have," he answered. "I noticed smoke rising from the kitchen chimney this morning. Ask Aunt Rachel--the negroes are sure to know."