"Bucketfuls "til we drap," answered Tobe with a sympathy equal to and a courage as great as that of his superior officer.
"Is the blue myrtle sprig often the graves holding up its leaves, Amandy?" asked Miss Lavinia in a softened tone of voice.
"Yes, it"s doing fine," answered Miss Amandy, bending over to the last of the row of cans.
"Then come on and get out the burying things and let"s get that job over," Miss Lavinia continued to insist. "Don"t get our things mixed!
Remember that my grave shift has got nothing but a seemly st.i.tched band on it while you would have linen lace on yours. And don"t let anything get wrinkled. I don"t want to rise on Judgment Day looking like I needed the pressing of a hot iron. Now pull out the trunk, boys, lift out the tray so as I can--"
But at this juncture Rose Mary appeared at the door with a tray on which stood a bowl of soup, and Miss Lavinia lay back on her pillows weakly, with the fire all gone out of her eyes and exhaustion written on every line of her determined old face.
"Go get dinner, everybody, so we can get back to work," she directed weakly as she raised the spoon to her lips and then rested a moment before she could take another sip. And with the last spoonful she looked up and whispered to Rose Mary, "You"ll have to do the rest child, I can"t drive any farther with a broke heart. I"ve got to lay myself in the arms of prayer and go to sleep." And so rested, Rose Mary left her.
Then finding the motive powers which had been driving her removed, little Miss Amandy stole away to the cedar grove behind the garden fence, the boys scampered with the greatest glee across the Road to the scene of mop and broom action behind the store, and Uncle Tucker stiffly mounted old Gray to drive the cows away to their separate homes. The thrifty neighbors had been glad to buy and pay him cash for the sleek animals, and their price had been the small capital which had been available for Uncle Tucker to embark on the commercial seas in partnership with Mr. Crabtree.
Thus left to herself in the old house, Rose Mary wandered from room to room trying to put things in shape for the morrow"s moving and breasting her deep waters with what strength she could summon. Up to this last day some strange hope had buoyed her up, and it was only at this moment when the inevitable was so plainly closing down upon her and her helpless old people that the bitterness of despair rose in her heart. Against the uprooting of their feebleness her whole nature cried out, and the sacrifice that had been offered her in the milk-house days before, seemed but a small price to pay to avert the tragedy. Doubt of herself and her motives a.s.sailed her, and she quivered in every nerve when she thought that thus she had failed them. What! Was she to save herself and let the sorrow fall on their bent shoulders? Was it too late? Her heart answered her that it was, for her confession of horror of her purchaser to Uncle Tucker had cut off any hope of deceiving him and she knew he would be burned at the stake before he would let her make the sacrifice. She was helpless, helpless to safeguard them from this sorrow, as helpless as they themselves!
For a long hour she stood at the end of the porch, looking across at Providence n.o.b, behind whose benevolent head the storm clouds of the day were at last sinking, lit by the glow of the fast-setting sun. The wind had died down and a deep peace was settling over the Valley, like a benediction from the coming night. Just for strength to go on, Rose Mary prayed out to the dim, blue old ridge and then turned to her ministrations to her a.s.sembling household.
Uncle Tucker was so tired that he hardly ate the supper set before him, and before the last soft rays of the sun had entirely left the Valley he had smoked his pipe and gone to bed.
And soon in his wake retired the General, with two of the small dogs to bear him company in his white cot. But the settling of Miss Lavinia for the night had been long, and had brought Rose Mary almost to the point of exhaustion. Tired out by her afternoon over in the little graveyard, Miss Amanda had not the strength to read the usual chapters of retiring service that Miss Lavinia always required of her, and so Rose Mary drew the candle close beside the bed and attempted to go on with her rubbing and read at the same time. And though, if read she must, the very soul of Rose Mary panted for the comfort of some of the lines of the Sweet Singer, Aunt Viney held her strictly to the words of her favorite thunderer, Jeremiah, and little Aunt Amandy bunched up under the cover across the bed fairly shook with terror as she buried her head in her pillow to keep out the rolling words of invective that began with an awful "_Harken_" and ended with "_Woe is me now, for my soul is wearied_!"
"Now," concluded Miss Lavinia, "you can put out the light. Rose Mary, and if me and Amandy was to open our eyes on the other side of the river it would be but a good thing for us. Lay the Bible in that newspaper on top of that pile of _Christian Advocates_, with a string to tie "em all up after morning lesson, to be carried away. The Lord bless and keep you, child, and don"t forget to latch the front door on us all for the last time!"
Softly Rose Mary drew the door partly closed and left them in the quiet of the fast-deepening purple dusk. She peeped into Uncle Tucker"s room and a.s.sured herself by his sonorous breathing that rest at last was comforting him, and for a moment in her own room she bent over the little cot where the General and his two spotted servitors lay curled up in a tangle and fast in the depths of sleep. Then she opened wide the old hall door that had for more than a century swung over the sill marked off by the length of the intrepid English foremother who had tramped the wilderness trail to possess what she, herself, was giving up.
And as she stood desperate, at bay, with her nest storm tossed and threatened, suddenly the impossibility of it all came down upon her, and stern with a very rigidity of resolve she went into the house, lighted a candle by the old desk in the hall, and wrote swiftly a few words of desperate summons to the Senator. She knew that Friday night always found him over the fields at Boliver, and she told him briefly the situation and asked him to come over in the early morning to the rescue--and sacrifice.
When she had first come out on the porch she had seen young Bob ride up to the store on one of his colts, and she ran fleetly down to the front gate and called to him. He consented instantly to ride over and deliver the note for her, but he shot an uneasy glance at her from beneath his wide hat as he put the letter in his pocket.
"Is anything wrong, Miss Rose Mary?" he asked anxiously but respectfully.
"No, Bob, dear, nothing that--that I can"t make--right," she answered in a soft, tearless voice, and as he got on his horse and rode away she came slowly up the long front walk that was moonflecked from the leaves of the tall trees. Then once more she stood on the old door sill--at bay.
And as she looked at the old Ridge across the sweet, blooming clover-fields, with the darkened house behind her, again the waters of despair rose breast-high and heart-high, beat against her aching throat and were just about to dash over her head as she stretched out one arm to the hills and with a broken cry bent her white forehead in the curve of the other, but suddenly bent head, tear-blinded eyes, quivering breast and supplicating arms were folded tight in a strong embrace and warm, thirsty lips pressed against the tears on her cheeks as Everett"s voice with a choke and a gulp made its way into her consciousness.
"I feel like shaking the very life out of you, Rose Mary Alloway," was his tender form of greeting.
"You"re squeezing it out," came in all the voice that Rose Mary could command for an answer. And the broad-shouldered, burden-bearing, independent woman that was the Rose of Old Harpeth melted into just a tender girl who crushed her heart against her lover"s and clung as meekly as any slip of vine to her young lord oak. "But I don"t care,"
she finished up under his chin. And Everett"s laugh that greeted and accepted her unexpected meekness rang through the hall and brought a commotion in answer.
The wee dogs, keen both of ear and scent, shot like small electric volts from Stonie"s couch, hurled themselves through the hall and sprang almost waist-high against Everett"s side in a perfect ecstasy of welcome. They yelped and barked and whined and nosed in a tumbling heap of palpitating joy until he was obliged to hold Rose Mary in one arm while he made an attempt to respond to and abate their enthusiasm with the other.
"Now, now, that"s all right! Nice dogs, nice dogs!" he was answering and persuading, when a stern call from the depths of Miss Lavinia"s room, the door of which Rose Mary had left ajar, abstracted her from Everett"s arm on the instant and sent her hurrying to answer the summons.
"Is that young man come back? and light the candle," Miss Lavinia demanded and commanded in the same breath. And just as Rose Mary flared up the dim light on the table by the bed Everett himself stood in the doorway. With one glance his keen eyes took in the situation in the dim room in which the two old wayfarers lay prepared for the morning journey, and what Miss Lavinia"s stately and proper greeting would have been to him none of them ever knew, for with a couple of strides he was over by the bed at Rose Mary"s side and had taken the stern old lady into his strong arms and landed a kiss on the ruffle of white nightcap just over her left ear.
"No leaving the Briars this season, Miss Lavinia," he said in a laughing, choking voice as he bent across and extracted one of little Miss Amandy"s hands from the tight bunch she had curled herself into under the edge of her pillow and bestowed a squeeze thereon. "It"s all fixed up over at Boliver this afternoon. There"s worse than oil on the place--and it"s all yours now for keeps." With Rose Mary in his arms Everett had entirely forgotten to announce to her such a minor fact as the saving of her lands and estate, but to the two little old ladies his sympathy had made him give the words of reprieve with his first free breath. The bundles on the floor and the old trunk had smote his heart with a fierce pain that the impulsive warmth of his greeting and the telling of his rescue could only partly ease.
"The news only reached me day before--" he was going on to explain when, candle in hand, Uncle Tucker appeared in the doorway. His long-tailed night-shirt flapped around his bare, thin old legs, and every separate gray lock stood by itself and rampant, while his eyes seemed deeper and more mystic than ever.
"Well, what"s all this ruckus?" he demanded as he peered at them across the light of his candle. "Have any kind of cyclone blowed you from New York clean across here to Harpeth Valley, boy?"
"He has come back with the mercy of our Lord in his hands to save our home; and you go put on your pants before your pipes get chilled, Tucker Alloway," answered Aunt Viney in her most militant tone of voice. "And, Rose Mary, you can take that young man on out of here now so Amandy can take that shame-faced head of hers out of that feather pillow. It"s all on account of that tored place in her night-cap I told her to mend. You needn"t neither of you come back no more, because we must get to sleep, so as to be ready to unpack before sun-up and get settled back for the day. And don"t you go to bed, neither one of you, without reading Jeremiah twelfth, first to last verse, and me and Amandy will do the same." With which Everett found himself dismissed with a seeming curtness which he could plainly see was an heroic control of emotion in the feeble old stoic who was trembling with exhaustion.
Uncle Tucker, called to account for the lack of warmth and also propriety in his attire, had hastened back to his own apartment and Everett found him sitting up in his bed, lighting the old cob with trembling fingers but with his excitement well under control. He listened intently to Everett"s hurried but succinct account of the situation and crisis in his own and the Alloway business affairs, as he puffed away, and his old eyes lighted with excitement at the rush of the tale of high finance.
And when at last Everett paused for lack of breath, after his dramatic climax, the old philosopher lay back on his high-piled feather pillows and blinked out into the candle-light, puffed in silence for a few minutes, then made answer in his own quizzical way with a radiant smile from out under his beetling white brows:
"Well," he said between puffs, "looks like fortune is, after all, a curious bird without even tail feathers to steer by nor for a man to ketch by putting salt on. Gid failed both with a knife in the back and a salt shaker to ketch it, but you were depending on nothing but a ringdove coo, as far as I can see, when it hopped in your hand. I reckon you"ll get your answer."
"Are you willing--to have me ask for it, Mr. Alloway?" asked Everett with a radiant though slightly embarra.s.sed smile.
"Yes," answered Uncle Tucker as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the table and looked straight into Everett"s eyes. "After a man has plowed a honest, straight-furrowed field in life it"s no more"n fair for Providence to send a-loving, trusting woman to meet him at the bars. Good night, and don"t forget to latch the front door when you have finally torn yourself away from that moonlight!"
And the call of the young moon that came with the warm garden-scented gusts of winds that were sweeping across Harpeth Valley was a riot in Everett"s veins as he made his way through the silent hall toward the moonlit porch on the top step of which he could see Rose Mary sitting in the soft light, but a l.u.s.ty young snore from a dark room on the left made him remember that there was one greeting he had missed. He bent over the General"s little cot, across which lay a long shaft of the white light from the hilltops, and was about to press his lips on the warm, breath-stirred ones of the small boy, but he restrained himself in time from offering to the General in his defenseless sleep what would have been an insult to him awake, and contented himself with a most cautious and manly clasp of the chubby little hand.
"Ketch it, Tobe, ketch it--don"t let Aunt Viney"s vase be broked,"
murmured Stonie as he turned on his side and buried his head still deeper in the pillow.
"No, General, Aunt Viney"s vase--is--not going to be broken, thank G.o.d," answered Everett under his breath as he turned away and left the General, who, even in sleep, carried his responsibilities st.u.r.dily.
"Rose Mary," he said a little later as he stood on the bottom step below her, so that his eyes were just on a level with hers as she sat and smiled down upon him, "for a woman, you have very little curiosity. Don"t you want to ask me where I"ve been, why I went and what I"ve been doing every minute since I left you? Can it be indifference that makes you thus ignore your feminine prerogative of the inquisition?"
"I"m beginning at being glad you are here. Joy"s just the white foam at the top of the cup, and it ought not to be blown away, no matter--how thirsty one is, ought it? Now tell me what brought you back--to save me," and Rose Mary held out her hand, with one of her lovely, entreating gestures, while her eyes were full of tender tears.
And it was with difficulty that Everett held himself to a condition to tell her what he wanted her to know without any further delay.
"Well," he answered as he raised his lips from a joy draft at the cup of her pink palms, "the immediate cause was a telegram that came Tuesday night. It said "_Gid sells out Mr. Tucker and wants your girl_," and it was signed "_Bob_." All these weeks a bunch of hard old goldbugs had been sitting in conclave, weighing my evidence and reports and making one inadequate syndicating offer after another.
They were teetering here and balancing there, but at eleven o"clock Wednesday morning the cyclone that blew me down here across Old Harpeth originated in the directors" rooms of the firm, and I guess the old genties are gasping yet.
"I had that telegram in my pocket, tickets for the three-o"clock Southern express folded beside "em, and I put enough daylight into my proposition to dazzle the whole conclave into setting signatures to papers they"d been moling over for weeks. I don"t know what did it, but they signed up and certified checks in one large hurry.
"Then I beat it and never drew breath until I made the Farmers" and Traders" Bank in Boliver this afternoon, covered those notes of Mr.
Alloways, killed that mortgage and hit Providence Road for Sweetbriar.
I met Bob out about a mile from town, and he put me next to the whole situation and gave _me_ your note. I don"t know which I came nearest to, swearing or crying, but the Plunkett-Crabtree news made me raise a shout instead of either. But if I did what I truly ought, Rose Mary Alloway, I _would_ shake the life out of you for not writing me about it all. I may do it yet."
"Please don"t!" answered Rose Mary with a little smile that still held its hint of the suffering she had gone through. "I thought you were out of work yourself and couldn"t help us, and I didn"t want to trouble you. It would have hurt you so to know if you couldn"t help me, and I didn"t--"
"G.o.d, that"s it! Fool that I was to go away and risk leaving you without an understanding!" exclaimed Everett in a bitterly reproachful tone of voice. "But I was afraid to let you know what I had discovered until I could get the money to settle that mortgage. I was afraid that you or Mr. Alloway would unconsciously let him get a hint of the find, and I knew he could and would foreclose any minute. He was suspicious of me and my prospecting, anyway, and as he was an old, and as you both thought, tested friend, what way did I have of proving him the slob I knew him to be? I thought it best to go and get the company formed, the option money paid to cover the mortgage and all of it out of his hands before he could have any chance to get into the game at all. And that was really the best way to manage it--only I hadn"t counted on his swooping down on--you. Again, G.o.d, what I risked!"
"Yes," answered Rose Mary in a voice that barely controlled the cold horror of the thought that rose between them, "it almost happened. I thought I ought to--to save them, even if Uncle Tucker wouldn"t let me, and I gave Bob that note--to--to him. It almost happened--to-morrow. Quick, hold me close--don"t let me think about it--ever!" and Rose Mary shuddered in the crush of Everett"s arms.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "You won"t ever leave me any more?"]
"Out in the world, Rose Mary," said Everett as he lifted his lips from hers, "it would have happened--the tragedy, and you would have been the loot; but down here in Harpeth Valley they grow men like your Uncle Tucker, and they turn, by a strange motive power, wheels that do not crush, but--lift. I left you in danger because I had schemed it out in my world"s way, fool, fool that I--"
"Please, please don"t say things about yourself like that to me,"
pleaded Rose Mary, quickly raising her head and smiling through her tears at him. "Go on and tell me what you did find out there in the pasture; don"t blow off any more of my foam!"