True and Other Stories Part 6

But Jessie put all this to flight, when she slipped into the room fresh as the morning sunbeams. She was quick to notice the white packet on the table.

"Oh, how lovely of you, pa," she exclaimed as she opened it, "to take so much trouble! Why, they're exquisite!"

She held the case up admiringly.

The colonel glanced over at their guest, a slight smile wrinkling his bronzed cheeks with fine lines like those in old engravings; and there was a trace of guiltiness in his look, as if he and Lance had been fellow conspirators.

"Don't thank me, my dear," he said. "It's Mr. Lance who was lovely."

"Oh!" cried Jessie. She fastened her eyes on Lance, with a sort of reproach; and his heart sank.

"They're beautiful, though," she continued. "Thank you _so_ much, Mr.

Lance. Then you didn't get anything for me, pa? Well, I shall have a kiss, anyway." And she ran toward him.

The old man's gray mustache appeared to revive, as he received the salute and gave one in return. "Look under your plate, child," he said, "and you'll find something, will do to give you a treat when we go up to the races at Newbern."

Jessie trotted back to her place, and the treasure under the plate proved to be a gold eagle. Another demonstration of filial fondness ensued, and they all sat down in a good humor; albeit Lance suffered a feeling of unenviable exclusion.

But in a moment or two Jessie jumped up again, and, with the earrings in her hand, went to the gla.s.s to put them on. She faced around brightly from her reflected image there, to thank Lance again. "I never _dreamed_ of getting anything so nice," she said, frankly.

And Lance told himself that he, on the contrary, had many times dreamed of some creature as captivating as she was, but had never quite expected to find the realization. He wondered how, in this solitude and with no one to set her the example, she could have grown up into such charming womanliness.

The doors of Fairleigh Manor, excepting in the most inclement weather, stood always open--a symbol of the owner's frank and hospitable heart.

And now when the breakfast was over and Jessie had betaken herself with the two gentlemen to the little morning-room across the hall, a train of darkies--men and women--presented itself at the entrance, bringing good wishes and simple gifts to their young mistress. First of all came old Sally, who folded the fair maiden in her faithful arms and covered her forehead and neck with kisses. Lance, with his abstract theories of equality and his concrete prejudices, which made equality impossible, was rather amazed at this proceeding. He did not relish the spectacle of the black face in such close proximity to the white one. Involuntarily he turned toward the colonel, expecting to find in him some support for his own displeasure; but there was a kindly light in the colonel's eye, and he looked on with approval as the servants approached, one after another, to give greeting in their several ways--the women with less effusion than was permitted to Sally, and the men with awkward bows or friendly grins that attested their speechless affection. Those who shared in this demonstration were elderly servants who had once been slaves, though they were accompanied by a few younger ones--their children, born in freedom. They all brought flowers and leaves; the fragrant yellow jessamine being a favorite form of tribute, alternating with festoons of the trailing vines found in Elbow Crook Swamp, baskets adorned with gray moss, and little ornaments of woven straw.

The colonel's face grew radiant and tender as he watched them. "Faithful creatures!" he said, in undertone to Lance. "Most of my people stayed by me when the fight was over. I told them they were free to go where they liked, that they didn't belong to me any more, and I couldn't tell whether I could give them work--much less support them. But they wouldn't go. They clung round me; and little by little we all got on our feet again. They said: 'You's been a good ma.s.sa to us, and we ain't gwine to leave you now yore in trouble, Ma.s.sa Cunnel.' And so we built up, together, what small prosperity there is here now. I had fed and clothed them, Lance, and spent many thousand dollars in buying them, but they did not forget everything, as many white people do. I little thought it would be my old slaves who would help me out in the hour of need--I to whom _they_ had always looked for help. But so it was. My G.o.d, it has been worth all the cost and the suffering! We are more human than we were."

The veteran planter was deeply affected; and, as he spoke, a mist seemed to clear away from the young man's mind, and he beheld the simple ceremony that was taking place, in a transfigured light.

Here, close to his eyes, was an act in the endless changes and developments through which humanity is forever pa.s.sing: the lifting up, the pulling down, the growth of new types and phases, the subsidence of old forms of life, accompanied by the survival of certain among their features.

One of the negroes, bolder than the rest, after wishing Jessie happiness all her days, said he knew it wasn't right to ask her for anything now, but if she "would only give him a little book to read in." ... The book was instantly forthcoming. Jessie went to her secretary, and took one from the slender row of volumes on its upper shelf. But at this Sally came forward again.

"Why, missy," she said softly, in Jessie's ear, where Lance's pearl was trembling, "ole Scip ain't no 'count. He war on'y coachman, you know, befo'. He didn't nevah b'long to _you_ and the missus. But I come from _yo'_ side de house, yo' know I does; and now yo' dun gone give him suffin', why I'd kin' o' like dat ar pink frock what you mos' got fru wearin'. 'Tain't good nuff for yo', nohow, missy, and ole Sally she'd be mighty glad on't, ef you don' want it no mo'."

So Jessie laughed, and sent Sally up-stairs to get the garment of her desire; and from that moment on the reception was metamorphosed into an exchange of gifts.

The darkies brought in their vines and cl.u.s.ters, and laid them on the table or draped them with primitive art about the room, until it became a sort of bower, verdant and perfumed with their offerings; and Jessie sat there like an unaffected little queen, distributing tokens to this and that adherent. She knew their humble demands were not prompted by greed, but that they simply loved the old custom of receiving something from their mistress, and could not give it up even though times were so greatly changed.

Lance had now fully entered into the spirit of the scene, and the fancy struck him that it was a repet.i.tion of the old story of savages on the New World sh.o.r.es worshipping the first white person who came among them.

What if these negroes had been the aborigines, and his Jessie--or Miss Jessie, rather--had been that Gertrude Wylde whom tradition told of, receiving their homage? The idle query of imagination, thus propounded, brought up to him with renewed force the vision, still unexplained, which had crossed his path on the sea-sh.o.r.e.

CHAPTER VI.

A NEW LESSON IN BOTANY.

In the cool of the afternoon the Floyds and their guest took a drive, rattling gayly on, in the old carry-all, which was the colonel's chariot of state, over many miles of light-earthed road screened for the most part by groves of pine.

The old gentleman discoursed to Lance a good deal about the country and the people, and gave vent to his natural regret that the cla.s.s once dominant had yielded more and more to a hard, pushing set, who were no doubt doing much to increase the general welfare, but lacked the graces and the repose of the whilom aristocracy. The young Northerner's own conviction was that the old aristocracy had succ.u.mbed to a relentless law of nature, for which he entertained the admiration that he believed all natural laws were ent.i.tled to; but he could not help regretting somewhat the fate that had overcome his friends and their kind; and it was borne in upon him strongly that so fine a flower of heredity as Jessie appeared to be--however defective the structure of the species to which she belonged--ought not to be involved in this decadence.

You will observe that I am giving you his thoughts in the formal and strictly rational phraseology which it pleased him to adopt. Plainly speaking, he was very much in love with Jessie, and did not care a rap about natural laws or anything else, if they conflicted with her happiness or his chances of winning her.

Meanwhile, as they pa.s.sed Elbow Crook Swamp, which the road skirted for a considerable distance, he reverted, with every appearance of absorbed interest, to his scheme for reclaiming that tract and converting it into a source of wealth and the means of building up a prosperous, highly intelligent community. The swamp covered a territory of many hundreds of acres. It was rank with cypress, evergreen, oak, and laurel, from which parasitic gray mosses depended in endless garlands, locked in the embrace of luxuriant vines, that hung or crept down to the edge of that slow brown stream, the angular turnings of which gave the place its name. The rich, alluvial soil in which all this greenery rooted held a promise of unlimited fertility; but the only profit which men derived from the splendid waste was found in the cane-brakes, that yielded succulent fodder for hogs or cattle. Lance imagined in this wild expanse a possibility of great results, which might play in well with his humanitarian schemes. He had brooded over the matter ever since first seeing the spot; but the commercial and educational interest attaching thereto was not the only one that kept him thinking about it. Its mysteriousness, its lone solemnity; the frowning ma.s.ses of dense and forbidding trees; its impenetrability in parts; the danger and savageness of its hidden depths--all these had wrought upon and excited him, until it became impossible for him to get the swamp out of his mind, and he felt that it was somehow connected with his destiny.

In answer to his exposition of his schemes, the colonel, who was fond of a cla.s.sical allusion, said: "That's all very fine, Lance; but you propose a labor beside which Hercules slaying the Lernean Hydra would be insignificant. You know, that myth is supposed to refer to the draining of a mora.s.s. Hercules was the first man who discovered the still mythical disease of malaria, and tried to kill it."

But Lance was not to be discouraged by banter. When they got back to the mansion the colonel judiciously disappeared, and the two young people were left alone on the veranda. Lance began to talk over his theories anew with Jessie, as they sat there just outside the window of the morning-room whence the scent of the pine-boughs, the jessamine, and flowering vines drifted toward them in occasional puffs of fragrant air.

"The people here need so much help, so much enlightening," he said. "I can't give up the idea that something might be done in the way of elevating them."

"Oh, that's only because you're so restless," said Jessie. "You come from the North, and you find it so dull here that you have to think of something to keep you busy."

Her lips pretended that they were smiling with indolent mockery; but she looked so charming, and the contrast between her gray eyes and the Spanish jauntiness of her dark hair was so attractive, that the young man began to think opposition was the pleasantest form of encouragement.

"No," he said, quite earnestly; "I don't think it's mere restlessness. I mean what I say, and I can't help it. And certainly it isn't dull here for me."

He fixed his eyes for a moment on the boards of the veranda-floor, as if meditating. Jessie, in her turn, considered him. In his loose blue flannel suit, with a soft straw hat perched upon his thoughtful head, but throwing no shadow on his features, to which a small brown mustache gave additional emphasis, he certainly was handsome; she had never denied to herself that he was handsome, but she was just now especially impressed with the fact.

"I am going to tell you something curious," he said, lifting his eyes unexpectedly, so that she turned hers quickly toward the garden. He had evidently arrived at the result of his meditation. "It has several times occurred to me," he continued, "that my interest in this locality may have a queer, remote sort of origin that no one would ever suspect."

"Why, what's that?" asked Jessie, in a dreamy tone, feeling sure now that he could not be going to speak of her, since she was neither "queer" nor "remote."

Thereupon Lance went on to relate to her the legend of Gertrude Wylde and Guy Wharton, as well as he could from the stories which he remembered to have heard half jestingly repeated in his father's household. "I am directly descended from Guy Wharton," he stated, in conclusion, "but my name is different, because the male line died out and my father belonged to the posterity of one of the daughters. It's true, all that romance happened a hundred miles or more from here, way up by Roanoke, and I didn't think of it in the least when I started to make this visit; but, some way or other, the thing has come back into my mind, and I begin to fancy that by an occult law of thought it may account for my interest in this place--at least, partly."

Jessie was absorbed by his narration, as her attentiveness and her eager interruptions had shown; but what she said was: "It must be a very occult law indeed." She also emitted a little impertinent laugh, which she did not mean to be impertinent.

Lance was somewhat taken aback. "I dare say it's all foolishness," he admitted; "and there are other elements of interest which are much more obvious."

She was sorry to have brought such confusion upon him, and hastened to revive the conversation.

They got to talking about the negroes; and Lance, alluding to the scene that morning, proceeded to speculate on the problem of the colored race.

"There is something very fine in their relation to you," he said, "but it belongs to a phase that has pa.s.sed away. They ought to be educated, too."

"I'm sure," Jessie answered, "we educate them as much as we can. Didn't you see me give Scip a book? And I've helped to cultivate Aunt Sally's aesthetic tastes by letting her have my pink frock. What more can you ask?"

"You insist upon making fun of me," said Lance, forcing a smile, though a trifle mortified by her lack of enthusiasm. "But you know I'm right."

"Indeed I don't know it!" exclaimed Miss Jessie, vigorously. "You want to change everything, but you can't tell what you would get by the change. You would like to cut down those splendid old trees in the swamp, and turn it into fresh vegetables and berries for New York. But the trees are much n.o.bler than the berries, or even wild-flowers."

"Oh no, I beg your pardon; they're not!" said Lance. "Most of the trees around here are simply monsters. They represent rude, primitive types of vegetation; they are the earliest specimens of Nature's effort to produce flowering plants. Why, the common ox-eye daisy is a far more refined product than they."

"Oh, dear me," cried Jessie, "I never heard that. How much you know! But I like daisies, too; I don't want any of these things destroyed."