The Battle Ground Part 29

"Take me with you," she repeated pa.s.sionately, saying it over and over again with her lips upon his arm.

He stooped and kissed her almost roughly, and then put her gently away from him.

"It is the way my mother went," he said, "and G.o.d help me, I am my father's son. I am afraid,--afraid--do you know what that means?"

"But I am not afraid," answered the girl steadily.

He shivered and turned away; then he came back and knelt down to kiss her skirt. "No, I can't take you with me," he went on rapidly, "but if I live to be a man I shall come back--I _will_ come back--and you--"

"And I am waiting," she replied.

He opened the gate and pa.s.sed out into the road.

"I will come back, beloved," he said again, and went on into the darkness.

Leaning over the gate she strained her eyes into the shadows, crying his name out into the night. Her voice broke and she hid her face in her arm; then, fearing to lose the last glimpse of him, she looked up quickly and sobbed to him to come back for a moment--but for a moment. It seemed to her, clinging there upon the gate, that when he went out into the darkness he had gone forever--that the thud of his footsteps in the dust was the last sound that would ever come from him to her ears.

Had he looked back she would have gone straight out to him, had he raised a finger she would have followed with a cheerful face; but he did not look back, and at last his footsteps died away upon the road.

When she could see or hear nothing more of him, she turned slowly and crept toward the house. Her feet dragged under her, and as she walked she cast back startled glances at the gate. The rustling of the leaves made her stand breathless a moment, her hand at her bosom; but it was only the wind, and she went step by step into the house, turning upon the threshold to throw a look behind her.

In the hall she paused and laid her hand upon the library door, but the Major had bolted her out, and she heard him pacing with restless strides up and down the room. She listened timidly awhile, then, going softly by, went up to Mrs. Lightfoot.

The old lady was asleep, but as the girl entered she awoke and sat up, very straight, in bed. "My pain is much worse, Betty," she complained. "I don't expect to get a wink of sleep this entire night."

"I thought you were asleep when I came in," answered Betty, keeping away from the candlelight; "but I am so sorry you are in pain. Shall I make you a mustard plaster?"

Though she smiled, her voice was spiritless and she moved with an effort.

She felt suddenly very tired, and she wanted to lie down somewhere alone in the darkness.

"I'd just dropped off when Mr. Lightfoot woke me slamming the doors,"

pursued the old lady, querulously. "Men have so little consideration that nothing surprises me, but I do think he might be more careful when he knows I am suffering. No, I won't take the mustard plaster, but you may bring me a cup of hot milk, if you will. It sometimes sends me off into a doze."

Betty went slowly downstairs again and heated the milk on the dining-room fire. When it was ready she daintily arranged it upon a tray and carried it upstairs. "I hope it will do you good," she said gently as she gave it to the old lady. "You must try to lie quiet--the doctor told you so."

Mrs. Lightfoot drank the milk and remarked amiably that it was "very nice though a little smoked--and now, go to bed, my dear," she added kindly. "I mustn't keep you from your beauty sleep. I'm afraid I've worn you out as it is."

Betty smiled and shook her head; then she placed the tray upon a chair, and went out, softly closing the door after her.

In her own room she threw herself upon her bed, and cried for Dan until the morning.

X

THE ROAD AT MIDNIGHT

When Dan went down into the shadows of the road, he stopped short before he reached the end of the stone wall, and turned for his last look at Cheric.o.ke. He saw the long old house, with its peaked roof over which the elm boughs arched, the white stretch of drive before the door, and the leaves drifting ceaselessly against the yellow squares of the library windows. As he looked Betty came slowly from the shadow by the gate, where she had lingered, and crossed the lighted s.p.a.ces amid the falling leaves.

On the threshold, as she turned to throw a glance into the night, it seemed to him, for a single instant, that her eyes plunged through the darkness into his own. Then, while his heart still bounded with the hope, the door opened, and shut after her, and she was gone.

For a moment he saw only blackness--so sharp was the quick shutting off of the indoor light. The vague shapes upon the lawn showed like mere drawings in outline, the road became a pallid blur in the formless distance, and the shine of the lamplight on the drive shifted and grew dim as if a curtain had dropped across the windows. Like a white thread on the blackness he saw the glimmer beneath his grandmother's shutters, and it was as if he had looked in from the high top of an elm and seen her lying with her candle on her breast.

As he stood there the silence of the old house knocked upon his heart like sound--and quick fears sprang up within him of a sudden death, or of Betty weeping for him somewhere alone in the stillness. The long roof under the waving elm boughs lost, for a heartbeat, the likeness of his home, and became, as the clouds thickened in the sky, but a great mound of earth over which the wind blew and the dead leaves fell.

But at last when he turned away and followed the branch road, his racial temperament had triumphed over the forebodings of the moment; and with the flicker of a smile upon his lips, he started briskly toward the turnpike.

As the mind in the first ecstasy of a high pa.s.sion is purified from the stain of mere emotion, so the Major, and the Major's anger, were forgotten, and his own bitter resentment swept as suddenly from his thoughts. He was overpowered and uplifted by the one supreme feeling from which he still trembled. All else seemed childish and of small significance beside the memory of Betty's lips upon his own. What room had he for anger when he was filled to overflowing with the presence of love?

The branch road ran out abruptly into the turnpike, and once off the familiar way by his grandfather's stone wall, he felt the blackness of the night close round him like a vault. Without a lantern there was small hope of striking the tavern or the tavern road till morning. To go on meant a night upon the roadside or in the fields.

As he stretched out his arm, groping in the blackness, he struck suddenly upon the body of the blasted tree, and coming round it, his eyes caught the red light of free Levi's fire, and he heard the sound of a hammer falling upon heated iron. The little path was somewhere in the darkness, and as he vainly sought for it, he stumbled over a row of stripped and headless cornstalks which ran up to the cabin door. Once upon the smooth stone before the threshold, he gave a boyish whistle and lifted his hand to knock. "It is I, Uncle Levi--there are no 'hants' about," he cried.

The hammer was thrown aside, and fell upon the stones, and a moment afterward, the door flew back quickly, showing the blanched face of free Levi and the bright glow of the hearth. "Dis yer ain' no time fur pranks,"

said the old man, angrily. "Ain't yer ever gwine ter grow up, yit?" and he added, slowly, "Praise de Lawd hit's you instid er de devil."

"Oh, it's I, sure enough," returned Dan, lightly, as he came into the cabin. "I'm on my way to Merry Oaks Tavern, Uncle Levi,--it's ten miles off, you know, and this blessed night is no better than an ink-pot. I'd positively be ashamed to send such a night down on a respectable planet.

It's that old lantern of yours I want, by the way, and in case it doesn't turn up again, take this to buy a new one. No, I can't rest to-night. This is my working time, and I must be up and doing." He reached for the rusty old lantern behind the door, and lighted it, laughing as he did so. His face was pale, and there was a nervous tremor in his hands, but his voice had lost none of its old heartiness. "Ah, that's it, old man," he said, when the light was ready. "We'll shake hands in case it's a long parting.

This is a jolly world. Uncle Levi,--good-by, and G.o.d bless you," and, leaving the old man speechless on the hearth, he closed the door and went out into the night.

On the turnpike again, with the lantern swinging in his hand, he walked rapidly in the direction of the tavern road, throwing quick flashes of light before his footsteps. Behind him he heard the falling of free Levi's hammer, and knew that the old negro was toiling at his rude forge for the bread which he would to-morrow eat in freedom.

With the word he tossed back his hair and quickened his steps, as if he were leaving servitude behind him in the house at Cheric.o.ke; and, as the anger blazed up within his heart he found pleasure in the knowledge that at last he was starting out to level his own road. Under the clouds on the long turnpike it all seemed so easy--as easy as the falling of free Levi's hammer, which had faded in the distance.

What was it, after all? A year or two of struggle and of attainment, and he would come back flushed with success, to clasp Betty in his arms. In a dozen different ways he pictured to himself the possible manner of that home-coming, obliterating the year or two that lay between. He saw himself a great lawyer from a little reading and a single speech, or a judge upon his bench, famed for his cla.s.sic learning and his grave decisions. He had only to choose, he felt, and he might be anything--had they not told him so at college? did not even his grandfather admit it? He had only to choose--and, oh, he would choose well--he would choose to be a man, and to come riding back with his honours thick upon him.

Looking ahead, he saw himself a few years hence, as he rode leisurely homeward up the turnpike, while the stray countrymen he met took off their harvest hats, and stared wonderingly long after he was gone. He saw the Governor hastening to the road to shake his hand, he saw his grandfather bowed with the sense of his injustice, tremulous with the flutter of his pride; and, best of all, he saw Betty--Betty, with the rays of light beneath her lashes, coming straight across the drive into his arms.

And then all else faded slowly from him to give place to Betty, and he saw her growing, changing, brightening, as he had seen her from her childhood up. The small white figure in the moonlight, the merry little playmate, hanging on his footsteps, eager to run his errands, the slender girl, with the red braids and the proud shy eyes, and the woman who knelt upon the hearth in Aunt Ailsey's cabin, smiling up at him as she dried her hair--all gathered round him now illuminated against the darkness of the night. Betty, Betty,--he whispered her name softly beneath his breath, he spoke it aloud in the silence of the turnpike, he even cried it out against the mountains, and waited for the echo--Betty, Betty. There was not only sweetness in the thought of her, there was strength also. The hand that had held him back when he would have gone out blindly in his pa.s.sion was the hand of a woman, not of a girl--of a woman who could face life smiling because she felt deep in herself the power to conquer it. Two days ago she had been but the girl he loved, to-night, with her kisses on his lips, she had become for him at once a shield and a religion. He looked outward and saw her influence a light upon his pathway; he turned his gaze within and found her a part of the sacred forces of his life--of his wistful childhood, his boyish purity, and the memory of his mother.

He had pa.s.sed Uplands, and now, as he followed the tavern way, he held the flash of his lantern near the ground, and went slowly by the crumbling hollows in the strip of "corduroy" road. There was a thick carpet of moist leaves underfoot, and above the wind played lightly among the overhanging branches. His lantern made a shining circle in the midst of a surrounding blackness, and where the light fell the scattered autumn leaves sent out gold and scarlet flashes that came and went as quickly as a flame. Once an owl flew across his path, and startled by the lantern, blindly fluttered off again. Somewhere in the distance he heard the short bark of a fox; then it died away, and there was no sound except the ceaseless rustle of the trees.

By the time he came out of the wood upon the open road, his high spirits had gone suddenly down, and the visions of an hour ago showed stale and lifeless to his clouded eyes. After a day's ride and a poor dinner, the ten-mile walk had left him with aching limbs, and a growing conviction that despite his former aspirations, he was fast going to the devil along the tavern road. When at last he swung open the whitewashed gate before the inn, and threw the light of his lantern on the great oaks in the yard, the relief he felt was hardly brighter than despair, and it made very little difference, he grimly told himself, whether he put up for the night or kept the road forever. With a clatter he went into the little wooden porch and knocked upon the door.

He was still knocking when a window was raised suddenly above him, and a man's voice called out, "if he wanted a place for night-hawks to go on to h.e.l.l." Then, being evidently a garrulous body, the speaker leaned comfortably upon the sill, and sent down a string of remarks, which Dan promptly shortened with an oath.

"Hold your tongue, Jack Hicks," he cried, angrily, "and come down and open this door before I break it in. I've walked ten miles to-night and I can't stand here till morning. How long has it been since you had a guest?"

"There was six of 'em changin' stages this mornin'," drawled Jack, in reply, still hanging from the sill. "I gave 'em a dinner of fried chicken and battercakes, and two of 'em being Yankees hadn't never tasted it befo'--and a month ago one dropped in to spend the night--"

He broke off hastily, for his wife had joined him at the window, and as Dan looked up with the flash of the lantern in his face, she gave a cry and called his name.

"Put on your clothes and go down, you fool," she said, "it's Mr. Dan--don't you see it's Mr. Dan, and he's as white as yo' nightshirt. Go down, I tell you,--go down and let him in." There was a skurrying in the room and on the staircase, and a moment later the door was flung open and a lamp flashed in the darkness.

"Walk in, suh, walk right in," said Jack Hicks, hospitably, "day or night you're welcome--as welcome as the Major himself." He drew back and stood with the lamplight full upon him--a loose, ill-proportioned figure, with a flabby face and pale blue eyes set under swollen lids.

"I want something to eat, Jack," returned Dan, as he entered and put down his lantern, "and a place to sleep--in fact I want anything you have to offer."

Then, as Mrs. Hicks appeared upon the stair, he greeted her, despite his weariness, with something of his old jesting manner. "I am begging a supper," he remarked affably, as he shook her hand, "and I may as well confess, by the way, that I am positively starving."