The Voice of the People Part 14

BOOK II

A RAINY SEASON

I

Mrs. Jane Dudley Webb was a lady who supported an impossible present upon an important past. She had once been heard to remark that if she had not something to look back upon she could not live: and, as her retrospective view was racial rather than individual, the consolation attained might be considered disproportionate to the needs of the case.

The lines of her present had fallen in a white frame house in the main street of Kingsborough; those of her past began with the first Dudley who swung a lance in Merry England, to end with irascible old William of the name, who slept in the family graveyard upon James River.

Mrs. Webb herself was straight and elegant, and inclined to the ironical, when, as Jane Dudley, the belle of the country-side, she fired the fancy of young Julius Webb, an officer in the cavalry of the United States. He danced a minuet with her at a ball in Washington, was heard to swear an oath by her eyes at punch before the supper was over; and proceeded the following week to spur his courtship upon old William as daringly as he had ever spurred his horse upon an Indian wigwam.

The last Dudley of the Virginian line withstood, through several stormy years, the united appeals of his daughter and her lover. In the end he yielded, subdued by opposition and gout, retaining the strength to insert but a single stipulation in the marriage contract, to the effect that his daughter should drop the name of Jane and be known as Dudley in her husband's household. To this the dashing bridegroom acquiesced with readiness, and when, within a year of the wedding, his wife presented him with a son, he called the boy, as he called the mother, by her maiden name.

He was a jovial young buck, who lived in his cards and his cups and loathed a quarrel as he loved a fight.

When the war between the States arose he went with Virginia, caring little for either cause, but conscious that his heart was where his home was. So he kissed the young mother and the boy at her side and rode lightly away with a laugh upon his lips, to fall as lightly in the mad charge of cavalry at Brandy Station.

When the news came Jane Dudley listened to it in silence, her hands clasping the worsteds she was winding. After the words were spoken she laid the worsteds carefully aside, stooping to pick up a fallen ball.

Then she crossed the room and went upstairs.

She said little, refusing herself alike to consolation and to acquaintances, spending her days in the shuttered house with her boy beside her. When he fretted at the restraint she tied a band of crepe on his little jacket and sent him to play on the green, while she took up her worsteds again and finished the m.u.f.fler she had been crocheting. If she wept it was in secret, when the lights were out.

Some years later the house was sold over her head, but when she stood, penniless, upon the threshold it was to cross it as haughtily as she had done as a bride. The stiff folds of her black silk showed no wavering ripple, the repose of her lips betrayed no tremor. The smooth, high pompadour of her black hair pa.s.sed as proudly beneath the arched doorway as it had done in the days of her wifehood and Julius Webb.

Her neighbours opened their wasted stores to her need, and out of their poverty offered her abundance, but she put aside their proffered a.s.sistance and undertook, unaided, the support and education of her child, maintaining throughout the struggle her air of unflinching irony.

She moved into a small white frame house opposite the church, and let out her spare rooms to student boarders. Her pride was never lowered and her crepe was never laid aside. She sat up far into the night to darn the sleeves of her black silk gown, but the st.i.tches were of such exquisite fineness that in the dim light of her drawing-room they seemed but an added gloss.

From behind the ma.s.sive coffee urn at the head of her table she regarded her boarders as so many beneficiaries upon her bounty. When she pa.s.sed a cup of coffee she seemed to confer an honour; when she returned a receipted bill it was as if she repulsed an insult. People said that she had been born to greatness and that she had never adapted herself to the obscurity that had been thrust upon her--but they said it when her back was turned. To her face the subject was never broached, and her former prosperity was ignored along with her present poverty. Of her own sorrows she, herself, made no mention. When she spoke from the depths of her bitterness of the war and the ruin it had left, her resentment was general rather than personal. Above the mantel in her room hung the sword of Julius Webb, sheathed under the tattered colours of the Confederate States. At her throat she wore a b.u.t.ton that had been cut from a gray coat, and, once, after the close of the war, she had pointed to it before a Federal officer, and had said: "Sir, the women of the South have never surrendered!" The officer had looked at the face above the b.u.t.ton as he answered: "Madam, had the women of the South fought its battles, surrender would have been for the men of the North." But Jane Webb had smiled bitterly in silence. To her the Federal officer was but an individual member of a national army of invasion, and the rights of the victors, the wrongs of Virginia.

Her neighbours regarded her with almost pa.s.sionate pride--rebuking their more generous natures by the sight of her unbowed beauty and her solitary revolt. When young Dudley grew old enough to attend school the general and the judge called together upon his mother and offered, with hesitancy, to undertake his education.

"He is only a year or two older than my Tom," began the judge, tripping in his usually steady speech. "I a.s.sure you it will give me pleasure to have the boys thrown together."

Mrs. Webb bowed in unaffirmative fashion.

"On my life, ma'am, I can't forget that Julius Webb fell at Brandy Station," put in the general hotly. "Your husband died for Virginia, and your boy shall not want while I have a penny in my pocket. I'll send him to college with Bernard, and feel it to be a privilege!"

Mrs. Webb bowed again.

"A great privilege, ma'am," protested the general, uneasily.

Mrs. Webb smiled.

"The greatest privilege of my life, ma'am!" cried the general, his face flushing and his eyes growing round with agitation.

In the end they gained their point, and Mrs. Webb consented, but with a reluctance of reserve which caused the general to choke with embarra.s.sment and the judge to become speechless from perplexity. When they rose to leave both thanked her with effusion and both bowed themselves out as gratefully as if it were a royal drawing-room and they had received the honours of knighthood.

"She is a remarkable woman!" exclaimed the general, wiping his eyes on his white silk handkerchief as they descended the steps. "A most unusual woman! Why, I feel positively unworthy to sit in her presence. Her manner brings all my past indiscretions to mind. It is an honour to have such a character in the community, sir!"

The judge acquiesced silently.

The interview had tried his Epicurean fort.i.tude, and he was wondering if it would be necessary to repeat the call before Christmas.

"If Julius Webb had lived she would have made a man of him," continued the general enthusiastically, the purple flush slowly fading from his flabby face. "A creature who could live with that woman and not be made a man of wouldn't be human; he'd be a hound. There is dignity in every inch of her, sir. I will allow no man to question my respect for our immortal Lee--but if Jane Webb had been the commander of our armies, we should be standing now upon Confederate soil--"

"Or upon the ashes of it," suggested the judge, adding apologetically, "she is indeed a woman in a thousand."

He held it to be a lack of courtesy to dissent from praise of any woman whose chast.i.ty was beyond impeachment, as he held it to be an absence of propriety to unite in admiration of one who was wanting in the supremest of the feminine virtues. His code was an obvious one, and he had never seen cause to depart from it.

"I hope the boy will be worthy of her," he said. "It is a good name that he bears."

The general took off his straw hat and mopped his brow.

"Worthy of her!" he exclaimed. "He's got to be worthy of her, sir. If he takes any notion in his head not to be, I'll thrash him within an inch of his life. Let him try it, the young scamp!"

The judge laughed easily, having regained his self-possession. "Well, well, there's no telling," he said; "but he's as bright as a steel trap.

I wish Tom had half his sense." Then he turned past the church on his way home, and the general, declining an invitation to dinner, went on to the post-office, where he awaited his carriage.

From this time Dudley Webb attended cla.s.ses at the judge's house and became the popular tyrant of his little schoolroom. He was a dark, high-bred looking boy, with a rich voice and a nature that was generous in small things and selfish in large ones. There was a convincing air of good-fellowship about him, which won the honest heart of slow-witted Tom Ba.s.sett, and a half-veiled regard for his own youthful pleasures, which aroused the wrath of Eugenia.

"I can't abide him," she had once declared pa.s.sionately to Sally Burwell. "Somehow, he always gets the best of everything."

When, after the first few years, Nicholas Burr entered the schoolroom and took his place upon one of the short green benches, Mrs. Webb called upon the judge in person and demanded an explanation.

"My boy has been carefully brought up," she said; "he is a gentleman, and he will not submit to a.s.sociation with his inferiors. His grandfather would not have done so before him."

The judge quailed, but it was an uncompromising quailing--a surrender of the flesh, not the spirit.

"My dear lady," he began in his softest voice, "your son is a fine, spirited fellow, but he is a boy, and he doesn't care a--a--pardon me, madam--a continental whether anybody else is his inferior or not. No wholesome boy does. He doesn't know the meaning of the word--nor does Tom--and I shan't be the one to teach him. Amos Burr's son is a clever, hard-working boy, and if he will take an education from me, he shall have it."

The judge was firm. Mrs. Webb was firm also.

The judge a.s.sumed his legal manner; she a.s.sumed her hereditary one.

"It is folly to educate a person above his station," she said.

"Men make their stations, madam," replied the judge.

He sat in his great arm-chair and looked at her with reverent but determined eyes. His head was slightly bent, in deference to her dissenting voice, and his words wavered, but his will did not. In his att.i.tude his respect for her s.e.xually and individually was expressed, but he had argued the opposing interests in his mind, and his decision was judicial.

"I am deeply pained, my dear lady," he said, "but I cannot turn the boy away."

Mrs. Webb did not reply. She gathered up her stiff skirt and departed with folded lips.