The Voice of the People Part 32

"Strong enough to hold fast to its friends," returned Eugenia gravely.

He let it fall and looked into her face.

"May its friends be worthy ones," he said.

She rode slowly through the wood, and he walked with his hand on her bridle. The bright branches struck them as they pa.s.sed, and sometimes he stopped to hold them aside for her. His eyes followed her as she rode serenely above him, and he thought, in his folly, of the lady in the old romance who was, to the desire of her lovers, as "a distant flame, a sword afar off."

"It was here that you told me good-bye when you went off to school," he said recklessly.

"Was it?" she asked. "I was very miserable that day and you gave me no comfort. You didn't even come down to the road next morning to see me go by."

"Yes, I know," he admitted.

"I thought you were asleep, and I was angry."

"No, I was not asleep. I was at work."

"But you might have come."

"Yes, I might have come," he repeated absently, and quickly corrected himself. "No, I mean I couldn't come, of course. If you were to go away to-morrow, I couldn't come. Something would rise and prevent. I have a presentiment that I shall never say good-bye to you."

She dissented. "I've a feeling that I shall say 'G.o.d speed' to you when you go off to become a great man."

"A great man? Do you mean a rich man?" he asked quickly.

"Oh, dear, yes," she mocked; "a great, gouty gentleman, who owns a couple of railroads and wears an electric light in his shirt-front."

His lips laughed, but his eyes were grave.

"And when I came back to you with such trophies," he objected, "you would tell me that the railroads belonged to the people and that the electric light only served to illuminate my ugliness."

"And I should take it to wear on my forehead," she added. "What prophetic insight!"

"But 'going off' does not always mean railroads and electric light," he went on half seriously. "Suppose I came back poor, but honest, as they say?"

Laughter rippled on her lips. He watched the humorous tremor of her nostrils.

"Then I should probably kill the fatted chicken for you," she said.

There was a touch of bitterness in his answer. "Only in that case I should stay away." As he spoke he stopped to break off a drooping branch from a sweet-gum tree that grew near the road.

"You once called this your colour," he said quietly as he fastened the leaves on her horse's head. "There is no tree that turns so clear and so fiery."

Then, as she rode on with the branch waving like a banner before her, he laughed with a keen delight in the savage brilliance.

"You remind me of--who is it?" he asked--"'_Clear as the sun and terrible as an army with banners_.'"

Her smile was warm upon him.

"But my banners fall before the wind," she said as several loosened leaves fluttered to the road. "So I am not terrible, after all." The glow of the gum-tree was in her face. His eyes fell before it, and he did not speak. The soft footfalls of the horse on the damp ground sounded distinctly. Overhead the wind rustled among the trees.

As they emerged from the wood and pa.s.sed the Burr farm they saw Amos leaning on his gate, looking moodily upon the morning.

"Good-morning, Mr. Burr!" said Eugenia with the pleasant condescension of the general in her manner. "Fine weather, isn't it?"

He nodded awkwardly and admitted, with a muttered reservation, that the weather might be worse. Then he looked at Nicholas. "If you ain't got nothin' better to do I reckon you might lend a hand at the ploughin',"

he surlily suggested.

"Why, so I might," a.s.sented Nicholas good-humouredly. "I've a couple of hours free."

He fastened more securely the branch in the horse's bridle; then, raising his hat, he turned and vaulted the whitewashed fence, while Eugenia, touching her horse into a gallop, vanished in the distance of the open road, blazing her track with scarlet gum leaves that scattered royally in the wind.

As Nicholas pa.s.sed the peanut field he nodded pleasantly to the congregation of negroes a.s.sembled for the annual festival called "a picking." They ranged in degrees from Uncle Ish, the oldest representative of his race, to Betsey's five-year-old Jeremiah, who had already been detected in an attempt to filch the nuts from an overturned shock, and was being soundly admonished by his mother's avenging palm.

The ground was strewn with baskets and buckets of varying dimensions, into which the nuts were gathered before being consigned to the huge hamper guarded by Amos Burr. A hoa.r.s.e clamour, like that produced by a flock of crows, went up from the animated swarm as it settled to work.

Nicholas crossed to the adjoining field and ploughed deep furrows in the soil, going into breakfast with the smell of the warm earth about him and the glow of exercise in his blood. He ate heartily and listened without remark to the political vagaries of his father. Amos Burr had been "looking into politics" of late, and his stubborn wits had been fixed by a grievance. "If he was a fool befo' now, he's a plum fool now," Marthy Burr had observed dispa.s.sionately. "I ain't never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics. It makes a fool of a man and a worse fool of a fool. The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it."

"I tell you it's done promised to help the farmer," put in Amos heavily, bringing his large red hand down upon the table. "Ain't it been helpin'

the manufacturer all these years? Ain't it been lookin' arter the labourer, black an' white? Ain't it time for it to keep its word to the farmer?"

"In the meantime I'd finish that piece of ploughing, if I were you,"

suggested Nicholas. "The more work in the fall the less in the spring--that's a proverb for you."

"I don't want no proverb," returned Amos sullenly. "I want my rights, an' I want the country to give 'em to me."

"I ain't never seen no good come of settin' down an' wishin' for rights," remarked his wife tartly. "It's a sight better to be up an'

plantin'."

Nicholas finished his breakfast, and a little later walked in to town.

He was in exuberant spirits, and his thoughts were high on the scaffolding where his future was building. Success and Eugenia startled, allured, delighted him. He was at the age of sublime self-confidence, but his eyes were not bandaged by it. He knew that without success--such success as he dreamed of--there could be, for him, no Eugenia. He believed in her as he believed in the sun, and yet he was not sure of her--he could not be until he possessed her and she bore his name. That she might not love him he admitted; that she might even love another he saw to be dimly possible; but he was determined that so long as no other man held her his arms should be open. In the first ardour of his mood his relative position to that society of which she formed a part was lost sight of, if not obscured. Now he realised bitterly that he might work for a lifetime in the cla.s.s in which he was born, and at the end still find Eugenia far from him. He must rise above his work and his people, he must cut his old name anew, he must walk rough-shod where his mind led him--among men who were his superiors only in the accident of a better birthright. And if on that higher plane his ambitions did not betray, he would bring honour to his State and to Eugenia.

Here the two loves of the boy and the man stood out boldly. The old romantic fervour with which he had longed for the days of Marshall and Madison, of Jefferson and Henry, still lingered on as an exotic patriotism in an era of time-servers and unprofitable servants. There was an old-fashioned democracy about him--a pioneer simplicity--as one who had walked from the great days of Virginia into her lesser ones. A century ago he might have left his plough to fight, and, having fought, might have returned thereto; but the battle would have tingled in his blood and the furrows have gone crooked. He would have ploughed, not for love of the plough, but because the time for the sowing of the grain had come.

Now he walked rapidly to his work, seeing Eugenia in the woods, in the sunshine, in the very clouds lifted high above. The thought of her surrounded him as an atmosphere.

As for the girl, she rode home and spent the long day in the garden potting plants for the winter. When she came into the hall in the early afternoon, with her trowel in her hand and her sleeves rolled back from her white arms, her father called her to the porch, and, going out, she found Dudley Webb in one of the cane chairs. He sprang to his feet as she reached the threshold, and held out his hand, but she laughed and showed the earth that clung to her wrists. "Unclean! unclean!" she cried gaily. Her face had flushed from its warm pallor and her hair hung low upon her forehead. A long streak of clay lay across her skirt where she had knelt in the flower-bed.

He seized her protesting hand, admiration lighting his eyes. "Why, little Eugie is a woman!" he exclaimed. "Can you grasp it, General?"

The general shook his head.

"If she wasn't almost as tall as I, I shouldn't believe it," he declared, "though she's as old as her mother was when I married her."

Eugenia seated herself upon the bench, still holding the trowel in her hand. She was watching the interest in her father's face, and she realised, half resentfully, that it was evoked by Dudley Webb.

He had drawn the general's favourite anecdotes from him, and they had plunged together into a discussion of the good old days. After a few light words she sat silent, listening with tender attention to the threadbare stories on the one side and the hearty applause of them on the other. She wondered wistfully why Dudley and herself were the only persons who understood as well as loved the general. Why was it Dudley, and not Nicholas, who brought that youthful look to his face and the heartiness to his voice?

"Some one was telling me the other day--I think it was Colonel Preston--that he fought beside you at Seven Pines," Dudley was saying with that absorption in his subject which won him a friend in every man who told him a joke.