The Quest of the Silver Fleece Part 68

"Help him, Lord!" cried the mult.i.tude.

Zora stepped into the circle of light. A hush fell on the throng; the preacher paused a moment, then started boldly forward with upraised hands. Then a curious thing happened. A sharp cry arose far off down toward the swamp and the sound of great footsteps coming, coming as from the end of the world; there swelled a rhythmical chanting, wilder and more primitive than song. On, on it came, until it swung into sight. An old man led the band--tall, ma.s.sive, with tufted gray hair and wrinkled leathery skin, and his eyes were the eyes of death. He reached the circle of light, and Zora started: once before she had seen that old man. The singing stopped but he came straight on till he reached Zora's side and then he whirled and spoke.

The words leaped and flew from his lips as he lashed the throng with bitter fury. He said what Zora wanted to say with two great differences: first, he spoke their religious language and spoke it with absolute confidence and authority; and secondly, he seemed to know each one there personally and intimately so that he spoke to no inchoate throng--he spoke to them individually, and they listened awestruck and fearsome.

"G.o.d is done sent me," he declared in pa.s.sionate tones, "to preach His acceptable time. Faith without works is dead; who is you that dares to set and wait for the Lord to do your work?" Then in sudden fury, "Ye generation of vipers--who kin save you?" He bent forward and pointed his long finger. "Yes," he cried, "pray, Sam Collins, you black devil; pray, for the corn you stole Thursday." The black figure moved. "Moan, Sister Maxwell, for the backbiting you did today. Yell, Jack Tolliver, you sneaking scamp, t'wil the Lord tell Uncle Bill who ruined his daughter.

Weep, May Haynes, for that baby--"

But the woman's shriek drowned his words, and he whirled full on the preacher, stamping his feet and waving his hands. His anger choked him; the fat preacher cowered gray and trembling. The gaunt fanatic towered over him.

"You--you--ornery hound of h.e.l.l! G.o.d never knowed you and the devil owns your soul!" There leapt from his lips a denunciation so livid, specific, and impa.s.sioned that the preacher squatted and bowed, then finally fell upon his face and moaned.

The gaunt speaker turned again to the people. He talked of little children; he pictured their sin and neglect. "G.o.d is done sent me to offer you all salvation," he cried, while the people wept and wailed; "not in praying, but in works. Follow me!" The hour was halfway between midnight and dawn, but nevertheless the people leapt frenziedly to their feet.

"Follow me!" he shouted.

And, singing and chanting, the throng poured out upon the black highway, waving their torches. Zora knew his intention. With a half-dozen of younger onlookers she unhitched teams and rode across the land, calling at the cabins. Before sunrise, tools were in the swamp, axes and saws and hammers. The noise of prayer and singing filled the Sabbath dawn.

The news of the great revival spread, and men and women came pouring in.

Then of a sudden the uproar stopped, and the ringing of axes and grating of saws and tugging of mules was heard. The forest trembled as by some mighty magic, swaying and falling with crash on crash. Huge bonfires blazed and crackled, until at last a wide black scar appeared in the thick south side of the swamp, which widened and widened to full twenty acres.

The sun rose higher and higher till it blazed at high noon. The workers dropped their tools. The aroma of coffee and roasting meat rose in the dim cool shade. With ravenous appet.i.tes the dark, half-famished throng fell upon the food, and then in utter weariness stretched themselves and slept: lying along the earth like huge bronze earth-spirits, sitting against trees, curled in dense bushes.

And Zora sat above them on a high rich-scented pile of logs. Her senses slept save her sleepless eyes. Amid a silence she saw in the little grove that still stood, the cabin of Elspeth tremble, sigh, and disappear, and with it flew some spirit of evil.

Then she looked down to the new edge of the swamp, by the old lagoon, and saw Bles Alwyn standing there. It seemed very natural; and closing her eyes, she fell asleep.

_Thirty-four_

THE RETURN OF ALWYN

Bles Alwyn stared at Mrs. Harry Cresswell in surprise. He had not seen her since that moment at the ball, and he was startled at the change.

Her abundant hair was gone; her face was pale and drawn, and there were little wrinkles below her sunken eyes. In those eyes lurked the tired look of the bewildered and the disappointed. It was in the lofty waiting-room of the Washington station where Alwyn had come to meet a friend. Mrs. Cresswell turned and recognized him with genuine pleasure.

He seemed somehow a part of the few things in the world--little and unimportant perhaps--that counted and stood firm, and she shook his hand cordially, not minding the staring of the people about. He took her bag and carried it towards the gate, which made the observers breathe easier, seeing him in servile duty. Someway, she knew not just how, she found herself telling him of the crisis in her life before she realized; not everything, of course, but a great deal. It was much as though she were talking to some one from another world--an outsider; but one she had known long, one who understood. Both from what she recounted and what she could not tell he gathered the substance of the story, and it bewildered him. He had not thought that white people had such troubles; yet, he reflected, why not? They, too, were human.

"I suppose you hear from the school?" he ventured after a pause.

"Why, yes--not directly--but Zora used to speak of it."

Bles looked up quickly.

"Zora?"

"Yes. Didn't you see her while she was here? She has gone back now."

Then the gate opened, the crowd surged through, sweeping them apart, and next moment he was alone.

Alwyn turned slowly away. He forgot the friend he was to meet. He forgot everything but the field of the Silver Fleece. It rose shadowy there in the pale concourse, swaying in ghostly breezes. The purple of its flowers mingled with the silver radiance of tendrils that trembled across the hurrying throng, like threads of mists along low hills. In its midst rose a dark, slim, and quivering form. She had been here--here in Washington! Why had he not known? What was she doing? "She has gone back now"--back to the Sun and the Swamp, back to the Burden.

Why should not he go back, too? He walked on thinking. He had failed.

His apparent success had been too sudden, too overwhelming, and when he had faced the crisis his hand had trembled. He had chosen the Right--but the Right was ineffective, impotent, almost ludicrous. It left him shorn, powerless, and in moral revolt. The world had suddenly left him, as the vision of Carrie Wynn had left him, alone, a mere clerk, an insignificant cog in the great grinding wheel of humdrum drudgery. His chance to do and thereby to be had not come.

He thought of Zora again. Why not go back to the South where she had gone? He shuddered as one who sees before him a cold black pool whither his path leads. To face the proscription, the insult, the lawless hate of the South again--never! And yet he went home and sat down and wrote a long letter to Miss Smith.

The reply that came after some delay was almost curt. It answered few of his questions, argued with none of his doubts, and made no mention of Zora. Yes, there was need of a manager for the new farm and settlement.

She was not sure whether Alwyn could do the work or not. The salary was meagre and the work hard. If he wished it, he must decide immediately.

Two weeks later found Alwyn on the train facing Southward in the Jim Crow car. How he had decided to go back South he did not know. In fact, he had not decided. He had sat helpless and inactive in the grip of great and shadowed hands, and the thing was as yet incomprehensible. And so it was that the vision Zora saw in the swamp had been real enough, and Alwyn felt strangely disappointed that she had given no sign of greeting on recognition.

In other ways, too, Zora, when he met her, was to him a new creature.

She came to him frankly and greeted him, her gladness shining in her eyes, yet looking nothing more than gladness and saying nothing more.

Just what he had expected was hard to say; but he had left her on her knees in the dirt with outstretched hands, and somehow he had expected to return to some corresponding mental att.i.tude. The physical change of these three years was marvellous. The girl was a woman, well-rounded and poised, tall, straight, and quick. And with this went mental change: a self-mastery; a veiling of the self even in intimate talk; a subtle air as of one looking from great and unreachable heights down on the dawn of the world. Perhaps no one who had not known the child and the girl as he had would have noted all this; but he saw and realized the transformation with a pang--something had gone; the innocence and wonder of the child, and in their place had grown up something to him incomprehensible and occult.

Miss Smith was not to be easily questioned on the subject. She took no hints and gave no information, and when once he hazarded some pointed questions she turned on him abruptly, observing acidly: "If I were you I'd think less of Zora and more of her work."

Gradually, in his spiritual perplexity, Alwyn turned to Mary Cresswell.

She was staying with the Colonel at Cresswell Oaks. Her coming South was supposed to be solely for reasons of health, and her appearance made this excuse plausible. She was lonely and restless, and naturally drawn toward the school. Her intercourse with Miss Smith was only formal, but her interest in Zora's work grew. Down in the swamp, at the edge of the cleared s.p.a.ce, had risen a log cabin; long, low, s.p.a.cious, overhung with oak and pine. It was Zora's centre for her settlement-work. There she lived, and with her a half-dozen orphan girls and children too young for the boarding department of the school. Mrs. Cresswell easily fell into the habit of walking by here each day, coming down the avenue of oaks across the road and into the swamp. She saw little of Zora personally but she saw her girls and learned much of her plans.

The rooms of the cottage were clean and light, supplied with books and pictures, simple toys, and a phonograph. The yard was one wide green and golden play-ground, and all day the music of children's glad crooning and the singing of girls went echoing and trembling through the trees, as they played and sewed and washed and worked.

From the Cresswells and the Maxwells and others came loads of clothes for washing and mending. The Tolliver girls had simple dresses made, embroidery was ordered from town, and soon there would be the gardens and cotton fields. Mrs. Cresswell would saunter down of mornings.

Sometimes she would talk to the big girls and play with the children; sometimes she would sit hidden in the forest, listening and glimpsing and thinking, thinking, till her head whirled and the world danced red before her eyes, today she rose wearily, for it was near noon, and started home. She saw Alwyn swing along the road to the school dining-room where he had charge of the students at the noonday meal.

Alwyn wanted Mrs. Cresswell's judgment and advice. He was growing doubtful of his own estimate of women. Evidently something about his standards was wrong; consequently he made opportunities to talk with Mrs. Cresswell when she was about, hoping she would bring up the subject of Zora of her own accord. But she did not. She was too full of her own cares and troubles, and she was only too glad of willing and sympathetic ears into which to pour her thoughts. Miss Smith soon began to look on these conversations with some uneasiness. Black men and white women cannot talk together casually in the South and she did not know how far the North had put notions in Alwyn's head.

Today both met each other almost eagerly.

Mrs. Cresswell had just had a bit of news which only he would fully appreciate.

"Have you heard of the Vanderpools?" she asked.

"No--except that he was appointed and confirmed at last."

"Well, they had only arrived in France when he died of apoplexy. I do not know," added Mrs. Cresswell, "I may be wrong and--I hope I'm not glad." Then there leapt to her mind a hypothetical question which had to do with her own curious situation. It was characteristic of her to brood and then restlessly to seek relief in consulting the one person near who knew her story. She started to open the subject again today.

But Alwyn, his own mind full, spoke first and rapidly. He, too, had turned to her as he saw her come from Zora's home. He must know more about the girl. He could no longer endure this silence. Zora beneath her apparent frankness was impenetrable, and he felt that she carefully avoided him, although she did it so deftly that he felt rather than observed it. Miss Smith still systematically snubbed him when he broached the subject of Zora. With others he did not speak; the matter seemed too delicate and sacred, and he always had an awful dread lest sometime, somewhere, a chance and fatal word would be dropped, a breath of evil gossip which would shatter all. He had hated to obtrude his troubles on Mrs. Cresswell, who seemed so torn in soul. But today he must speak, although time pressed.

"Mrs. Cresswell," he began hurriedly, "there's a matter--a personal matter of which I have wanted to speak--a long time--I--" The dinner-bell rang, and he stopped, vexed.

"Come up to the house this afternoon," she said; "Colonel Cresswell will be away--" Then she paused abruptly. A strange startling thought flashed through her brain. Alwyn noticed nothing. He thanked her cordially and hurried toward the dining-hall, meeting Colonel Cresswell on horseback just as he turned into the school gate.

Mary Cresswell walked slowly on, flushing and paling by turns. Could it be that this Negro had dared to misunderstand her--had presumed? She reviewed her conduct. Perhaps she had been indiscreet in thus making a confidant of him in her trouble. She had thought of him as a boy--an old student, a sort of confidential servant; but what had he thought? She remembered Miss Smith's warning of years before--and he had been North since and acquired Northern notions of freedom and equality. She bit her lip cruelly.

Yet, she mused, she was herself to blame. She had unwittingly made the intimacy and he was but a Negro, looking on every white woman as a G.o.ddess and ready to fawn at the slightest encouragement. There had been no one else here to confide in. She could not tell Miss Smith her troubles, although she knew Miss Smith must suspect. Harry Cresswell, apparently, had written nothing home of their quarrel. All the neighbors behaved as if her excuse of ill-health were sufficient to account for her return South to escape the rigors of a Northern winter. Alwyn, and Alwyn alone, really knew. Well, it was her blindness, and she must right it quietly and quickly with hard ruthless plainness. She blushed again at the shame of it; then she began to excuse.

After all, which was worse--a Cresswell or an Alwyn? It was no sin that Alwyn had done; it was simply ignorant presumption, and she must correct him firmly, but gently, like a child. What a crazy muddle the world was!