The Battle Ground Part 32

He crossed to the mirror and carefully brushed a stray lock of hair into place; then he took up his hat and gloves and turned toward the door. "I think it is waiting for me now," he added lightly; "a pleasant evening to you."

But she stood straight before him and as he met her eyes his affected jauntiness dropped from him. With a boyish awkwardness he took her hand and held it for an instant as he looked at her. "My dear madam, you are a good woman," he said, and went whistling down to take the stage.

Upon the porch he found Jack Hicks seated between a stout gentleman and a thin lady, who were to be the pa.s.sengers to Hopeville; and as Dan appeared the innkeeper started to his feet and swung open the door of the coach for the thin lady to pa.s.s inside. "You'll find it a pleasant ride, mum," he heartily a.s.sured her. "I've often taken it myself an', rain or shine, thar's not a prettier road in all Virginny," then he moved humbly back as Dan, carelessly drawing on his gloves, came down the steps. "I hope we haven't hurried you, suh," he stammered.

"Not a bit--not a bit," returned Dan, affably, slipping on his overcoat, which Big Abel had run up to hold for him.

"You gwine git right soakin' wet, Ma.r.s.e Dan," said Big Abel, anxiously.

"Oh, I'll not melt," responded Dan, and bowing to the thin lady he stepped upon the wheel and mounted lightly to the box.

"There's no end to this eternal drizzle," he called down, as he tucked the waterproof robe about him and took up the reins.

Then, with a merry crack of the whip, the stage rolled through the gate and on its way.

As it turned into the road, a man on horseback came galloping from the direction of the town, and when he neared the tavern he stood up in his stirrups and shouted his piece of news.

"Thar was a raid on Harper's Ferry in the night," he yelled hoa.r.s.ely. "The a.r.s.enal has fallen, an' they're armin' the d.a.m.ned n.i.g.g.e.rs."

XII

THE NIGHT OF FEAR

Late in the afternoon, as the Governor neared the tavern, he was met by a messenger with the news; and at once turning his horse's head, he started back to Uplands. A dim fear, which had been with him since boyhood, seemed to take shape and meaning with the words; and in a lightning flash of understanding he knew that he had lived before through the horror of this moment. If his fathers had sinned, surely the shadow of their wrong had pa.s.sed them by to fall the heavier upon their sons; for even as his blood rang in his ears, he saw a savage justice in the thing he feared--a recompense to natural laws in which the innocent should weigh as naught against the guilty.

A fine rain was falling; and as he went on, the end of a drizzling afternoon dwindled rapidly into night. Across the meadows he saw the lamps in scattered cottages twinkle brightly through the dusk which rolled like fog down from the mountains. The road he followed sagged between two gray hills into a narrow valley, and regaining its balance upon the farther side, stretched over a cattle pasture into the thick cover of the woods.

As he reached the summit of the first hill, he saw the Major's coach creeping slowly up the incline, and heard the old gentleman scolding through the window at Congo on the box.

"My dear Major, home's the place for you," he said as he drew rein. "Is it possible that the news hasn't reached you yet?"

Remembering Congo, he spoke cautiously, but the Major, in his anger, tossed discretion to the winds.

"Reached me?--bless my soul!--do you take me for a ground hog?" he cried, thrusting his red face through the window. "I met Tom Bickels four miles back, and the horses haven't drawn breath since. But it's what I expected all along--I was just telling Congo so--it all comes from the mistaken tolerance of black Republicans. Let me open my doors to them to-day, and they'll be tempting Congo to murder me in my bed to-morrow."

"Go 'way f'om yer, Ole Marster," protested Congo from the box, flicking at the harness with his long whip.

The Governor looked a little anxiously at the negro, and then shook his head impatiently. Though a less exacting master than the Major, he had not the same childlike trust in the slaves he owned.

"Shall you not turn back?" he asked, surprised.

"Champe's there," responded the Major, "so I came on for the particulars. A night in town isn't to my liking, but I can't sleep a wink until I hear a thing or two. You're going out, eh?"

"I'm riding home," said the Governor, "it makes me uneasy to be away from Uplands." He paused, hesitated an instant, and then broke out suddenly.

"Good G.o.d, Major, what does it mean?"

The Major shook his head until his long white hair fell across his eyes.

"Mean, sir?" he thundered in a rage. "It means, I reckon, that those d.a.m.ned friends of yours have a mind to murder you. It means that after all your speech-making and your brotherly love, they're putting pitchforks into the hands of savages and loosening them upon you. Oh, you needn't mind Congo, Governor. Congo's heart's as white as mine."

"Dat's so, Ole Marster," put in Congo, approvingly.

The Governor was trembling as he leaned down from his saddle.

"We know nothing as yet, sir," he began, "there must be some--"

"Oh, go on, go on," cried the Major, striking the carriage window. "Keep up your speech-making and your handshaking until your wife gets murdered in her bed--but, by G.o.d, sir, if Virginia doesn't secede after this, I'll secede without her!"

The coach moved on and the Governor, touching his horse with the whip, rode rapidly down the hill.

As he descended into the valley, a thick mist rolled over him and the road lost itself in the blur of the surrounding fields. Without slackening his pace, he lighted the lantern at his saddle-bow and turned up the collar of his coat about his ears. The fine rain was soaking through his clothes, but in the tension of his nerves he was oblivious of the weather. The sun might have risen overhead and he would not have known it.

With the coming down of the darkness a slow fear crept, like a physical chill, from head to foot. A visible danger he felt that he might meet face to face and conquer; but how could he stand against an enemy that crept upon him unawares?--against the large uncertainty, the utter ignorance of the depth or meaning of the outbreak, the knowledge of a hidden evil which might be even now brooding at his fireside?

A thousand hideous possibilities came toward him from out the stretch of the wood. The light of a distant window, seen through the thinned edge of the forest; the rustle of a small animal in the underbrush; the drop of a walnut on the wet leaves in the road; the very odours which rose from the moist earth and dripped from the leafless branches--all sent him faster on his way, with a sound within his ears that was like the drumming of his heart.

To quiet his nerves, he sought to bring before him a picture of the house at Uplands, of the calm white pillars and the lamplight shining from the door; but even as he looked the vision of a slave-war rushed between, and the old buried horrors of the Southampton uprising sprang suddenly to life and thronged about the image of his home. Yesterday those tales had been for him as colourless as history, as dry as dates; to-night, with this new fear at his heart, the past became as vivid as the present, and it seemed to him that beyond each lantern flash he saw a murdered woman, or an infant with its brains dashed out at its mother's breast. This was what he feared, for this was what the message meant to him: "The slaves are armed and rising."

And yet with it all, he felt that there was some wild justice in the thing he dreaded, in the revolt of an enslaved and ignorant people, in the pitiable and ineffectual struggle for a freedom which would mean, in the beginning, but the power to go forth and kill. It was the recognition of this deeper pathos that made him hesitate to reproach even while his thoughts dwelt on the evils--that would, if the need came, send him fearless and gentle to the fight. For what he saw was that behind the new wrongs were the old ones, and that the sinners of to-day were, perhaps, the sinned against of yesterday.

When at last he came out into the turnpike, he had not the courage to look among the trees for the lights of Uplands; and for a while he rode with his eyes following the lantern flash as it ran onward over the wet ground. The small yellow circle held his gaze, and as if fascinated he watched it moving along the road, now shining on the silver grains in a ring of sand, now glancing back from the standing water in a wheelrut, and now illuminating a mossy stone or a weed upon the roadside. It was the one bright thing in a universe of blackness, until, as he came suddenly upon an elevation, the trees parted and he saw the windows of his home glowing upon the night. As he looked a great peace fell over him, and he rode on, thanking G.o.d.

When he turned into the drive, his past anxiety appeared to him to be ridiculous, and as he glanced from the clear lights in the great house to the chain of lesser ones that stretched along the quarters, he laughed aloud in the first exhilaration of his relief. This at least was safe, G.o.d keep the others.

At his first call as he alighted before the portico, Hosea came running for his horse, and when he entered the house, the cheerful face of Uncle Shadrach looked out from the dining room.

"Hi! Ma.r.s.e Peyton, I 'lowed you wuz gwine ter spen' de night."

"Oh, I had to get back, Shadrach," replied the Governor. "No, I won't take any supper--you needn't bring it--but give me a gla.s.s of Burgundy, and then go to bed. Where is your mistress, by the way? Has she gone to her room?"

Uncle Shadrach brought the bottle of Burgundy from the cellaret and placed it upon the table.

"Naw, suh, Miss July she set out ter de quarters ter see atter Mahaley," he returned. "Mahaley she's moughty bad off, but 'tain' no night fur Miss July--dat's w'at I tell 'er--one er dese yer spittin' nights ain' no night ter be out in."

"You're right, Shadrach, you're right," responded the Governor; and rising he drank the wine standing. "It isn't a fit night for her to be out, and I'll go after her at once."

He took up his lantern, and as the old negro opened the doors before him, went out upon the back porch and down the steps.

From the steps a narrow path ran by the kitchen, and skirting the garden-wall, straggled through the orchard and past the house of the overseer to the big barn and the cabins in the quarters. There was a light from the barn door, and as he pa.s.sed he heard the sound of fiddles and the shuffling steps of the field hands in a noisy "game." The words they sang floated out into the night, and with the squeaking of the fiddles followed him along his path.

When he reached the quarters, he went from door to door, asking for his wife. "Is this Mahaley's cabin?" he anxiously inquired, "and has your mistress gone by?"

In the first room an old negro woman sat on the hearth wrapping the hair of her grandchild, and she rose with a courtesy and a smile of welcome. At the question her face fell and she shook her head.

"Dis yer ain' Mahaley, Marster," she replied. "En dis yer ain' Mahaley's cabin--caze Mahaley she ain' never set foot inside my do', en I ain' gwine set foot at her buryin'." She spoke shrilly, moved by a hidden spite, but the Governor, without stopping, went on along the line of open doors. In one a field negro was roasting chestnuts in the embers of a log fire, and while waiting he had fallen asleep, with his head on his breast and his gnarled hands hanging between his knees. The firelight ran over him, and as he slept he stirred and muttered something in his dreams.