The Voice of the People Part 39

"You must learn to consider your sister," said his father testily.

"Oh! I liked it, papa," declared Eugenia. "I'm well and--I'm hungry."

Congo brought more waffles, and she ate one with grim determination. The alert affection which surrounded her--which proved sensitive to a change of colour or a tremor of voice, filled her with a swift sense of security. She felt a sudden impulse to draw nearer in the shelter of the race--to cling more closely to that unswerving instinct which had united individual to individual and generation to generation.

As they rose from the table, she slipped her arm through her father's and went with him into the hall.

"I'm tired," she said, stopping him on his way to the sitting-room, "so I'll go to bed."

The general held her from him and looked into her face.

"Anybody been troubling you, Eugie?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"You dear old goose--no!"

He patted her shoulder rea.s.suringly.

"If anybody troubles you, you just let me hear of it," he said. "They'll find out Tom Battle wasn't at Appomattox. You've got an old father and he's got an old sword--"

"And he's hungry for a fight," she gaily finished. Then she rubbed her cheek against his brown linen sleeve, which was redolent of tobacco. The firm physical contact inspired her with the courage of life; it seemed to make for her a bulwark against the world and its incoming tribulations.

She threw back her head and looked up into the puffed and scarlet face where the coa.r.s.e veins were congested, her eyes seeing only the love which transfigured it. She was his pet and his pride, and she would always be the final reward of his long life.

As she mounted the stairs, he blew his nose and called cheerfully after her:

"Just remember, if anybody begins plaguing you, that I'm ready for him--the rascal."

Once in her room she threw open the window and sat looking out into the night, the chill autumn wind in her face. Far across the fields a pale moon was rising, bearing a cloudy circle that betokened rain. It flung long, ghostly shadows east and west, which flitted, lean and noiseless and black, before the wind. Overhead the stars shone dimly, piercing a fine mist. Eugenia leaned forward, her chin on her clasped hands. Beyond the gray blur of the pasture she could see, like benighted beacons, the lights in Amos Burr's windows, and she found herself vaguely wondering if Nicholas were at his books--those books that never failed him. He had that consolation at least--his books were more to him than she had been.

She was not conscious of anger; she felt only an indifferent weariness--a nervous shrinking from the brutality of his rage. His face as she had seen it rose suddenly before her, and she put her hand to her eyes as if to shut out the sight. She saw the clear streak of the highway, the gray pasture, the solitary star overhanging the horizon, and she felt the dead leaves blown against her cheek from denuded trees far distant. And lighted by a glare of memory she saw his face--she saw the convulsed features, the furrow that cleft the forehead like a seam, the heavy brows bent above the half-closed eyes, the spasmodic working of the drawn mouth. She saw the man in whom, for its brief instant, evil was triumphant--in whom that self-poise, which had been to her as the secret of his strength, was tumultuously overthrown.

A great fatigue weighed upon her, as if she had emerged, defeated, from a physical contest. Her hands trembled, and something throbbed in her temple like an imprisoned bird.

As she sat in the silence, the door opened softly and Miss Chris came in, bearing a lamp in her hand.

"Eugie," she said, peering into the darkness, "are you there?"

Eugenia lowered the window and came over to the hearth rug, where she stood blinking from the sudden glare of the lamp. There were some half-extinguished embers amid the ashes in the fireplace, and she threw on fresh wood, watching while it caught and blazed up lightly over the old bra.s.s andirons.

Miss Chris set the lamp on the table and came over to the fire. She carried her key basket in her hand, and the keys jingled as she moved.

Her smooth, florid face had a fine moisture over it that showed like dew on a well-sunned peach.

"You aren't worrying about Nick Burr, Eugie," she said with the amiable bluntness which belonged to her. "I wouldn't let it worry me if I were you."

Eugenia turned with a flash of pride.

"No, I am not worrying about him," she answered.

Miss Chris lifted a vase from the mantel-piece, dusted the spot where it had stood, and replaced it carefully.

"Of course, I know you've seen a good deal of him of late," she went on; "but, as I told Tom, I knew it was nothing more than your being playmates together. He's a good boy, and I don't believe that scandal about him any more than I would about Bernard; but he's Amos Burr's son, after all, though he has raised himself a long way above him, and, as poor Aunt Griselda used to say, 'When all's said and done, a Battle's a Battle.'"

Eugenia was looking into the fire.

"Yes," she repeated slowly, "a Battle's a Battle, after all."

"That's right, dear. I knew you'd say so. I always declared that you were more of a Battle than all the rest of us put together--if you do look the image of a Tucker. Tom was telling me only last week that he'd leave you as free as air and trust the name in your hands sooner than he would in his own--and he has a great deal of family pride, you know, though he was so wild in his youth. But I remember my father once saying: 'A Battle may go a long way down the wrong road, but he'll always pull up in time to turn.'"

Her beautiful eyes shone in the firelight, and her placid mouth formed a round hole above her dimpled chin, giving her large face an expression almost infantile. She took up the key basket, which she had placed on the mantel-piece, cast a glance at the pile of logs to see if it had been replenished, felt the cover on the bed, after inquiring if it sufficed, and, with a cheerful "good-night," pa.s.sed out, closing the door behind her.

Eugenia did not turn as the door closed. She stood motionless upon the hearth rug, looking down into the fire. Something in the huge old fireplace, with its bent andirons supporting the blazing logs, in the increasing bed of embers upon the bricks, in the sharp odour of the knot of resinous pine she had thrown on with the hickory, brought before her the winter evenings in Delphy's little cabin, when they sat upon three-legged stools and roasted early winesaps. She saw the negro faces in the glow of the hearth, and she saw Nicholas and herself sitting side by side in the shadow. His childish face, with its look of ancient care, came back to her with the knotted boyish hands that had carried and fetched at her bidding. The whole wistful little figure was imaged in the flames, melting rapidly into the boy, eager to act, ardent to achieve, who had bidden her good-bye on that November afternoon, and, dissolving again, to reappear as the strong man who had come upon her in Uncle Ish's little shanty, bearing the old negro's bag upon his shoulder.

She had loved him for his strength, his vigour, his gentleness--and she still loved him.

Of the men that she had known, who was there so ready to a.s.sist, so forgetful of services which he had rendered? There was none so powerful and yet so kind--so generous or so gentle. An impulse stirred her to cross the fields to his door and fling herself into the breach that divided them; but again the phantom in the flames grew dim and then sent out the face that she had seen that afternoon--convulsed and quivering, with its flitting sinister likeness to Amos Burr. A voice that seemed to be the voice of old dead Aunt Griselda--of her whole dead race that had decayed and been forgotten, and come to life again in her--spoke suddenly from the silence:

"When all's said and done, a Battle's a Battle."

The resinous pine blazed up, the pungent odour filled the large room, and from the lightwood sticks tiny streams of resin oozed out and dripped into the embers, turning the red to gray.

Mingling with the crackling of the flames there was a noise as of the soughing of the wind in the pine forests.

The hearth grew suddenly blurred before her eyes; and a pa.s.sion of grief rose to her throat and clutched her with the grip of claws. For an instant longer she stood motionless; then, turning from the fire, she threw herself upon the floor to weep until the daybreak.

VII

When Nicholas left Eugenia it was to stride blindly towards his father's gate. The rage which had stunned him into silence before the girl now leaped and crackled like flame in his blood. His throat was parched and he saw red like a man who kills.

Pa.s.sing his home, he kept on to Kingsborough, and once within the shadow of the wood, he broke into a run, flying from himself and from the goad of his wrath. As he ran, he felt with a kind of alien horror that to meet Bernard Battle face to face in this hour would be to do murder--murder too mild for the man who had lied away his friend's honour for the sake of the whiteness of his own skin. It was the injustice that he resented with a holy rage--the hideous fact that a clean man should be spotted to save an unclean one the splashing he merited.

And Eugenia also--he hated Eugenia that he had kept her image untarnished in his thoughts; that he had allowed the desire for no other woman to shadow it. He had held himself as a temple for the worship of her; he had permitted no breath of defilement to blow upon the altar--and this was his reward. This--that the woman he loved had hurled the first stone at the mere lifting of a Pharisaical finger--that she had loved him and had turned from him when the first word was uttered--as she would not have turned from the brother of her blood had he been d.a.m.ned in Holy Writ. It was for this that he hated her.

The light of the sunset shining through the wood fell dull gold on his pathway. A strong wind was blowing among the trees, and the dried leaves were torn from the boughs and hurled roughly to the earth, when they sped onward to rest against the drifts by the roadside. The sound of the wind was deep and hoa.r.s.e like the baying of distant hounds, and beneath it, in plaintive minor, ran the sighing of the leaves before his footsteps. Through the wood came the vague smells of autumn--a reminiscent waft of decay, the reek of mould on rotting logs, the effluvium of overblown flowers, the healthful smack of the pines. By dawn frost would grip the vegetation and the wind would lull; but now it blew, strong and clear, scattering before it withered growths and subtle scents of death.

Out of the wood, Nicholas came on the highway again, and turned to where the afterglow burnished the windows of Kingsborough. He followed the road instinctively--as he had followed it daily from his childhood up, beating out the impression of his own footsteps in the dust, obliterating his old, even tracks by the reckless tramp of his delirium.

When he reached the college grounds he paused from the same dazed impulse and looked back upon the west through the quiet archway of the long brick building. The place was desolate with the desolation of autumn. Through the funereal arch he saw the sunset barred by a network of naked branches, while about him the darkening lawn was veiled with the melancholy drift of the leaves. The only sound of life came from a brood of turkeys settling to roost in a shivering aspen.

He turned and walked rapidly up the main street, where a cloud of dust hung suspended. Past the court-house, across the green, past the little whitewashed gaol, where in a happier season roses bloomed--out into the open country where the battlefields were grim with headless corn rows--he walked until he could walk no further, and then wheeled about to retrace heavily his way. His rage was spent; his pulses faltered from fatigue, and the red flashes faded from before his eyes.

When he reached home supper was over, and Nannie sat sewing in the little room adjoining the kitchen.