The Voice of the People Part 42

The strange little woman faced them proudly. "My husband, Silas, got religion in de night time," she said, "an' he bruck clean thoo de slats.

De bed ain't helt stiddy sence."

Eugenia emerged from the dusk of the doorway, where she had lingered, and Delphy rose to take the dripping clothes.

"Des' look at her!" exclaimed Aunt Verbeny at the girl's entrance.

"Ain't she a sight ter mek a blin' man see?" Then she added to the strange little woman, "Dar ain' no lack er beaux roun' yer, needer."

Uncle Ish grunted.

"I ain' seen 'em swum es dey swum roun' Miss Meely," he muttered, while Aunt Verbeny shook her fist at him behind the stranger's back. "De a'r wuz right thick wid 'em."

"I reckon dis chile'll be mah'r'd soon es she sets her min' on it,"

returned Delphy indignantly. "She ain' gwineter have ter do much cuttin' er de eyelashes, needer. De beaux come natch'ul."

"Dar's Ma.r.s.e Dudley, now," said Aunt Verbeny. "I ain' so ole but my palate hit kin taste a gent'mun a mile off. Ma.r.s.e Dudley ain' furgit de times I'se done roas' him roas'in' years when he warn' mo'n er chile.

Hit's 'how's yo' health, Aunt Verbeny?' des' de same es 'twuz den."

Eugenia laughed and flung the heap of garments into Delphy's arms. "The rain's over," she said; "but, Uncle Ish, you'd better get Congo to fix you up for the night. It is too wet for your rheumatism," and she ran singing upstairs to where the general was dozing in the sitting-room.

"Wake up, dad! it's going to clear!"

The general started heavily from his sleep. There was a dazed look in his eyes.

"Clear?" he asked doubtfully, "has it been raining?"

Eugenia shook him into consciousness.

"Raining for three whole days, and I believe you've slept through it.

Now the clouds are breaking."

"What is it the Bible says about 'the winter of our discontent'?--that's what it is."

"Not the Bible, dear--Shakespeare."

"It's the same thing," retorted the general testily. His speech came thickly as if he held a pebble in his mouth, and the swollen veins in his face were livid.

Eugenia bent over him in sudden uneasiness. "Aren't you well, papa?" she asked. "Is anything the matter?"

The general laughed and pinched her cheek.

"Never better in my life," he declared, "but I'll have to be getting new gla.s.ses. These things aren't worth a cent. Find them, Eugie."

Eugenia picked them up, wiped them on his silk handkerchief, and put them on his nose.

"You've slept too long," she said. "Come and take a walk in the hall."

She dragged him from his chair, and he yielded under protest.

"You forget that two hundred pounds can't skip about like fifty," he complained.

But he followed her to the long hall, and they paced slowly up and down in the afternoon shadows. At the end of ten minutes the general declared that he felt so well he would go back to his chair.

"I'll get the 'Southern Planter' and read to you," said Eugenia. "Don't go to sleep."

She ran lightly upstairs and, coming down in a moment, called him. He did not answer and she called again.

The sitting-room was in dusk, and, as she entered, the firelight showed the huge body of the general lying upon the hearth rug. A sound of heavy snoring filled the room.

She flung herself beside him, lifting the great head upon her lap; but before she had cried out Miss Chris was at her elbow.

"Hush, Eugie," she said quickly, though the girl had not spoken. "Send Sampson for Dr. Bright, and tell Delphy to bring pillows. Give him to me."

Her voice was firm, and there was no tremor in her large, helpful hands.

When Eugenia returned, the general was still lying upon the hearth rug, his head supported by pillows. Miss Chris had opened one of the western windows, and a cool, damp air filled the room. The rain had begun again, descending with a soft, purring sound. Above it she heard the laboured breathing from the hearth rug, and in the firelight she saw the regular inflation of the swollen cheeks. The distended pupils stared back at her, void of light.

As she stood motionless, her hands clenched before her, she followed the soft, weighty tread of Miss Chris, pa.s.sing to and fro with improvised applications. The light fall of the rain irritated her; she longed for the relentless downpour of the night.

At the end of an hour the roll of wheels broke the stillness, and she went out to meet the doctor, pa.s.sing, with a shiver, the unconscious ma.s.s on the floor.

They carried him to his bed in the chamber next the parlour, and through the night and day he lay an inert bulk beneath the bedclothes. Miss Chris and Eugenia and the servants pa.s.sed in and out of his room. One of the dogs came and sat upon the threshold until Eugenia put her arms about his neck and drew him away. She had not wept; she was white and drawn and silent, as if the shock had dulled her to insensibility.

During the afternoon of the next day she persuaded Miss Chris to rest, and, softly closing the door, sat down in a chair beside her father's bed. It was the high white bed that had known the marriage, birth, and death of a century of Battles. In it her father was born; beside it, kneeling at prayer, her mother had died. The stately tester frame had seen generations come and go, and had remained unchanged. Now its stiff white curtains made a ghastly drapery above the purple face.

Eugenia sat motionless, her thoughts vaguely circling about the still figure before her. It was not her father--this she felt profoundly--it was some strange shape that had taken his place, or she was held by some farcical nightmare from which she should awake presently with a start.

The half-used gla.s.ses on the little table beside her; the candle burned down in the socket, and overlooked; the tightly corked phials of useless drugs; the strong odour of mustard from the saucer in which a plaster had been mixed--these things struck upon her faltering consciousness with a shock of horrible reality. The odour of the mustard was more real than the breathing of the body on the bed.

As she sat there, she thought of her mother--the pale, still woman who had lain beautiful and dead where her father was dying now. She came to her as from a faded miniature, wistful, holy, at rest--blessed and above reproach. Her heart went out to her as to one standing near, hidden by the long white curtains--nearer than Aunt Chris asleep upstairs, nearer than Bernard, who was coming to her, nearer than the great form on the bed. Closer than all other things was that spiritual presence. Then she thought of her old negro mammy, who had died when she was but a baby--her mother's nurse and hers. She recalled the beloved black face beneath the snowy handkerchief, the restful bosom in blue homespun, the tireless arms that had rocked her into slumber. Then of Jim, the dog, true friend and faithful playmate. All the lives that she had loved and had been bereft of gathered closer, closer in the gray shadows.

Her gaze pa.s.sed to the window, seeking in the sad landscape the little graveyard where they were lying. The rain came between her and the clouded hill--descending softly and insistently between her eyes and the end of her search. Against the panes the dripping branches of the shivering mimosa tree beat themselves and moaned. A chill seized her and, rising, she went to the hearth, noiselessly piling wood upon the charred and waning logs, which crumbled and sent up a thin flame. She hurried to the bed and sat down again, her eyes on the blanket that rose and fell with the difficult breath. As she looked at the large, familiar face, tracing its puffed outline and gross colouring, it resolved itself into her earliest remembrance--throughout her childhood he had been her slave and she his tyrant. What wish of hers had he ever ignored? With what demand had he ever failed to comply? At the end of the long life what had remained to him except herself--the single compensation--the one reward? The pity of it smote her as with a lash. He had lived with such fine bravery, and he had had so little--so little, and yet more than myriads of the men that live and die. That live and die! About her and beyond her she seemed to hear the rushing of great mult.i.tudes--the pa.s.sing of the countless souls through the gates of death.

With a cry she threw herself upon her knees, beseeching the dull ears.

Six hours later he died, and when the rain ceased and the sun came out they buried him beside his wife in the little graveyard. For days after the funeral Eugenia wandered like a shadow through the still rooms.

Bernard had come and gone, carrying with him his short, sharp grief.

Miss Chris had put aside her own sorrow and gone back to the management of the house; only the girl, worn, idle, tragic, haunted the reminders of her loss. Coming upon the general's old slouch hat on the rack, she had grasped it in sudden pa.s.sionate longing; at the sight of his half-filled pipe she had rushed from the room and from the house. The faint scent of tobacco about the furniture was a continual torture to her. In the great chamber next the parlour she would sit for hours, staring at the cold white bed, shivering before the fireless hearth. The place chilled her like a vault; but she would linger wretchedly until led away by Miss Chris, when she would sob upon that broad, unselfish bosom.

December pa.s.sed; the unsunned earth turned itself for a winter rest.

January came, swift and changeful. With February a snowstorm swept from the north, driving southward. At first they felt it in the air; then the swollen clouds chased overhead; at last the white flakes arrived, falling, falling, falling. Through the night the storm made a glistening mantle for the darkness; through the day it hid sombre sky and sombre earth in a spotless veil. It covered the far country to the distant forests; it weighted the ancient cedars until their green branches bent to earth; it wrapped the gravelled walk in a winding sheet; it filled the hollows of the box bushes until they hardened into hills of ice. The snow was followed by cold winds. The ground froze in the night. Long icicles formed on the naked trees, the window panes bore a lacework of frost.

One afternoon, when the landscape was white and hard, Eugenia went out into the deserted sheep pasture where the dead oak stood. A winter sunset was burning like a bonfire in the west, and as far as the red horizon swept an unbroken waste of snow. The rail fences shone silver in their coat of frost, and from the blackened tree above her pendants of ice were shot with light. Across the field a flock of gaunt crows flew, casting purple shadows.

Eugenia leaned against the oak and stared vacantly at the landscape--at the sunset, and at the waste of snow, across which flitted the demoniac shadows of the crows. Her eyes saw only the desolation and the death; they were sealed to the grandeur.

A sense of her own loneliness swept over her with the loneliness of nature. Her own isolation--the isolation of a strong soul in pain--walled her apart as with a wall of ice. That a.s.surance of human companionship on which she had based her future seemed suddenly annihilated. She was alone and life was before her.

Then, as she turned her gaze, a man's figure broke upon the field of snow, coming towards her. It was Dudley Webb, and in the resolute swing of his carriage, in the resistless ardour of his eyes, he seemed to reach her from east and west, from north and south, surrounding her with a warmth of summer.