The Valiants of Virginia Part 37

"But it had rained and rained and rained for so long that the wood was all wet, and it wouldn't burn, and they all cried because they were so hungry. And then they happened to find the satchelful of tracts, and the tracts were ve-e-ery _dry_. They took them and stuck them under the wet wood, and the tracts burned and the wood caught fire and they _cooked_ the missionary and ATE him.

"Now, little children, which do you think did the most good with her dollar--little Susy or little Mary?"

The front row sn.i.g.g.e.red, and a sigh came from the colored ranks. "Dem ar' can'bals," gasped a dusky infant breathlessly, "--dey done eat up all dat candy en dem goober-peas, too?"

The inquiry was drowned in a shriek from several children in unison.

They scrambled to their feet, casting fearful glances over their shoulders. The man who had been lying behind the bush had risen and was coming toward them at a slouching amble, one foot dragging slightly. His appearance, indeed, was enough to cause panic. With his savage face, set now in a grin, and his tramp-like costume, he looked fierce and animal-like. White and black, the children fled like startled rabbits, older ones dragging younger, without a backward look--all save Rickey, who stood quite still, her widening eyes fixed on him in a kind of blanched fascinated terror.

He came close to her, never taking his eyes from hers, then put his heavy grimy hand under her chin and turned her twitching face upward, chuckling.

"Ain't afeahd, d.a.m.n me!" he said with admiration. "Wouldn't skedaddle with th' fine folks' white-livered young 'uns! Know who I am, don't ye?"

"Greef King." Rickey's lips rather formed than spoke the name.

"Right. An' I know you, too. Got jes' th' same look ez when ye wuzn't no higher'n my knee. So ye ain't at th' Dome no mo', eh? Purkle an' fine linning an' a eddication. Ho-ho! Goin' ter make ye another ladyess like the sweet ducky-dovey that rescooed ye from th' lovin' embrace o' yer fond step-parient, eh?"

Rickey's small arm went suddenly out and her fingers tore at his shirt-band. "Don't you," she burst in a paroxysm of pa.s.sion; "don't you even speak her name! If you do, I'll kill you!"

So fierce was her leap that he fell back a step in sheer surprise. Then he laughed loudly. "Why, ye little spittin' wile-cat!" he grinned.

He leaned suddenly, gripped her wrist and covering her mouth tightly with his palm, dragged her behind a clump of dogwood bushes. A heavy step was coming along the wood-path. He held her motionless and breathless in this cruel grip till the pedestrian pa.s.sed. It was Major Bristow, his spruce white hat on the back of his head, his unsullied waistcoat dappled with the leaf-shadows. He stepped out briskly toward Damory Court, swinging his stick, all unconscious of the fierce scrutiny bent on him from behind the dogwoods.

Greef King did not withdraw his hand till the steps had died in the distance. When he did, he clenched his fist and shook it in the air.

"There he goes!" he said with bitter hatred. "Yer n.o.ble friend that sent me up for six years t' break my heart on th' rock-pile! Oh, he's a top-notcher, he is! But he's got Greef King to reckon with yit!" He looked at her balefully and shook her.

"Look-a-yere," he said in a hissing voice. "Ye remember _me_. I'm a bad one ter fool with. Yer maw foun' that out, I reckon. Now ye'll promise me ye'll tell n.o.body who ye've seen. I'm only a tramp; d'ye hear?" He shook her roughly.

Rickey's fingers and teeth were clenched hard and she said no word. He shook her again viciously, the blood pouring into his scarred face. "Ye snivelin' brat, ye!" he snarled. "I'll show yer!" He began to drag her after him through the bushes. A few yards and they were on the brink of the headlong ugly chasm of Lovers' Leap. She cast one desperate look about her and shut her eyes. Catching her about the waist he leaned over and held her out in mid-air, as if she had been a kitten. "Ye ain't seen me, hev yer? Promise, or over ye go. Ye won't look so pretty when yere layin' down there on them rocks!"

The child's face was paper-white and she had begun to tremble like a leaf, but her eyes remained closed.

"One--two--" he counted deliberately.

Her eyes opened. She turned one shuddering glance below, then her resolution broke. She clutched his arm and broke into wild supplications. "I promise, I promise!" she cried. "Oh, don't let go!

I promise!"

He set her on the solid ground and released her, looking at her with a sneering laugh. "Now we'll see ef ye belong here or up ter h.e.l.l's-Half-Acre," he said. "Fine folks keeps their promises, I've heerd tell."

Rickey looked at him a moment shaking; then she burst into a pa.s.sion of sobs and with her face averted ran from him like a deer through the bushes.

CHAPTER XLII

IN THE RAIN

Shirley stood looking out at the rain. It was falling in no steady downpour which held forth promise of ending, but with a gentle constancy that gave the hills a look of sodden discomfort and made disconsolate miry pools by the roadside. The clouds were not too thick, however, to let through a dismal gray brightness that shone on the foliage and touched with glistening lines of high-light the draggled tufts of the soaked bluegra.s.s. Now and then, across the dripping fields, fraying skeins of mist wandered, to lie curdled in the flooded hollows where, here and there, cattle stood lowing at intervals in a mournful key.

The indoors had become impossible to her. She was sick of trying to read, sick of the endless pacings and purposeless invention of needless tasks. She wanted movement, the cobwebby mist about her knees, the wet rain in her face. She ran up-stairs and came down clad in a close scarlet jersey, with leather gaiters and a soft hat.

Emmaline saw her thus accoutered with disapproval. "Lawdy-mercy, chile!" she urged; "you ain't goin' out? It's rainin' cats en dawgs!"

"I'm neither sugar nor salt, Emmaline," responded Shirley listlessly, dragging on her rain-coat, "and the walk will do me good."

On the sopping lawn she glanced up at her mother's window. Since the night of the ball her own panging self-consciousness had overlaid the fine and sensitive a.s.sociation between them. She had been full of a horrible feeling that her face must betray her and the cause of her loss of spirits be guessed.

Her mother had, in fact, been troubled by this, but was far from guessing the truth. A somewhat long indisposition had followed her first sight of Valiant, and she had not witnessed the tournament. She had hung upon Shirley's description of it, however, with an excited interest that the other was later to translate in the light of her own discovery. If the thought had flitted to her that fate might hold something deeper than friendship in Shirley's acquaintance with Valiant, it had been of the vaguest. His choice of her as Queen of Beauty had seemed a natural homage to that swift and unflinching act of hers which had saved his life. There was in her mind a more obvious explanation of Shirley's altered demeanor. "Perhaps it's Chilly Lusk," she had said to herself.

"Have they had a foolish quarrel, I wonder? Ah, well, in her own time she will tell me."

There was some relief to Shirley's overcharged feelings in the very discomfort of the drenched weather: the sucking pull of the wet clay on her boots and the flirt of the drops on her cheeks and hair. She thrust her dog-skin gloves into her pocket and held her arms outstretched to let the wind blow through her fingers. The moisture clung in damp wreaths to her hair and rolled in great drops down her coat as she went.

The wildest, most secluded walks had always drawn her most and she instinctively chose one of these to-day. It was the road whereon squatted Mad Anthony's whitewashed cabin. "Dah's er man gwine look in dem eyes, honey, en gwine make 'em cry en cry." She had forgotten the incident of that day, when he had read her fortune, but now the quavering prophecy came back to her with a shivering sense of reality.

"Fo' dah's fiah en she ain' afeahd, en dah's watah en she ain' afeahd.

Et's de thing whut eat de ha'at outen de breas'--dat whut she afeahd of!" If it were only fire and water that threatened her!

She struck her hands together with an inarticulate cry. She remembered the laugh in Valiant's eyes as they had planted the roses, the characteristic gesture with which he tossed the waving hair from his forehead--how she had named the ducks and the peac.o.c.k and chosen the spots for his flowers; and she smiled for such memories, even in the stabbing knowledge that these dear trivial things could mean nothing to her in the future. She tried to realize that he was gone from her life, that he was the one man on earth whom to marry would be to strike to the heart her love and loyalty to her mother, and she said this over and over to herself in varying phrases:

"You can't! No matter how much you love him, you can't! His father deliberately ruined your mother's life--your own mother! It's bad enough to love him--you can't help that. But you can help marrying him. You would hate yourself. You can never kiss him again, or feel his arms around you. You can't touch his hand. You mustn't even see him. Not if it breaks your heart--as your mother's heart was broken!"

She had turned into an unbeaten way that ambled from the road through a track of tall oaks and pines, scarce more than a bridle-path, winding aimlessly through bracken-strewn depths so dense that even the wild-roses had not found them. In her childish hurts she had always fled to the companionship of the trees. She had known them every one--the black-gum and pale dogwood and gnarled hickory, the p.r.i.c.kly-balled "b.u.t.ton-wood," the lowly mulberry and the majestic red oak and walnut.

They had seemed friendly and pitying counselors, standing about her with arms intertwined. Now, with the rain weeping in soughing gusts through them, they offered her no comfort. She suddenly threw herself face down on the soaked moss.

"Oh, G.o.d!" she cried. "I love him so! And I had only that one evening.

It doesn't seem just. If I could only have him, and suffer some other way! He's suffering, too, and it isn't our fault! We neither of us harmed any one! He isn't responsible for what his father did--why, he hardly knew him! Oh, G.o.d, why must it be so hard for us? Millions of other people love each other and nothing separates them like this!"

Shirley's warm breath made a little fog against the star-eyed moss. She was scarcely conscious of her wet and clinging clothing, and the soaked strands of her hair. She was so wrapped in her desolation that she no longer heard the sound of the persevering rain and the wet swishing of the bushes--parting now to a hurried step that fell almost without sound on the spongy forest soil. She started up suddenly to see Valiant before her.

He was in a somewhat battered walking suit of brown khaki, with a leather belt and a felt hat whose brim, stiff with the wet, was curved down visor-wise over his brow. In an instant he had drawn her upright, and they stood, looking at each other, drenched and trembling.

"How can you?" he said with a roughness that sounded akin to anger.

"Here in this atrocious weather--like this!" he laid a hand on her arm.

"You're wet through."

"I--don't mind the rain," she answered, drawing away, yet feeling with a guilty thrill the masterfulness of his tone, as well as its real concern. "I'm often wet."

His gaze searched her face, feature by feature, noting her pallor, the blue-black shadows beneath her eyes, the caught breath, uneven like a child's from crying. He still held her hands in his.

"Shirley," he said, "I know what you intended to tell me by those flowers--I went to St. Andrew's that night, in the dark, after I read your letter. Who told you? Your--mother?"

"No, no!" she cried. "She would never have told me!"

His face lighted. With an irresistible movement he caught her to him.

"Shirley!" he cried. "It shan't be! It shan't, I tell you! You can't break our lives in two like this! It's unthinkable."