"You needn"t mention it to your Aunt Chris--"
At that instant a little barefooted negro came running across the lawn from the spring-house, a large tin pail in his hand.
"Here, boy!" called the general. "Where"re you off to? What have you got in that pail?"
"It"s Jake," said Eugenia in a whisper, while Jim barked frantically from the shelter of her arms. "He"s Delphy"s Jake."
The small negro stood grinning in the walk, his white eyeb.a.l.l.s circling in their sockets. "Hit"s Miss Chris, suh," he said at last.
"Miss Chris, you rascal!" shouted the general. "Do you expect me to believe you"ve got Miss Chris in that pail? Open it, sir; open it!"
Jake showed a shining row of ivory teeth and stood shaking the pail from side to side.
"Miss Chris, she gun hit ter me, suh," he explained. "Hit"s Miss Chris herse"f dat"s done sont me ter tote dish yer b.u.t.termilk ter Unk Mose."
"Bless my soul!" cried the general wrathfully. "Get away with you! The whole place is bent on ruining me. I"ll be in the poorhouse before the week"s up." And he strode indoors in a rage.
VII
Twice a year, on fine days in spring and fall, Aunt Griselda"s bombazine dresses were taken from the whitewashed closet and hung out to air upon the clothesline at the back of the house, while pungent odours of tar and camphor were exhaled from the full black folds. On these days Aunt Griselda would remain in her room, sorting faded relics which she took from a cedar chest and spread beside her on the floor. The door was kept locked at such times, but once Eugenia, who had gone with Congo to carry Aunt Griselda her toast and tea, had caught a glimpse of a yellowed swiss muslin frock and the leather case of a daguerreotype containing the picture of a round-eyed girl with rosy cheeks. Aunt Griselda had hidden them hastily away at the child"s entrance--hidden them with that nervous, awkward haste which dreads a dawning jest of itself; but Eugenia had seen that her old eyes were red and her voice more rasping than usual.
Sixty years ago Aunt Griselda had had her romance, and she still kept her love-letters tied up with discoloured ribbons and laid away in the cedar chest. It was but the skeleton of a love story--the adolescent ardours of a high-spirited country girl and the high-spirited son of a neighbouring farmer. When the quarrel came the letters were overlooked when the ring went back. Griselda Grigsby had tossed them carelessly into the cedar chest and gone out to forget them. Her heart had not been deeply touched and it soon mended. No other lovers came, and she lived her quiet life in her father"s house, gathering garden flowers for the great, blue bowls in the parlour, teaching the catechism to small black slaves, and making stiff, old-fashioned samplers in crewels. The high-spirited lover had loved elsewhere and died of a fever, and, beyond a pa.s.sing regret, she thought little of him. There were nearer interests, and she was still the petted daughter of her father"s house--the eldest and the best beloved. Then the crash came. The old people pa.s.sed away, the house changed hands, Aunt Griselda was stranded upon the high tide of hospitality--and crewel work went out of fashion.
In her sister"s home she became a constant guest--one to be offered the favoured share and to be treated with tender, increasing tolerance--not to be loved. Since the death of her parents none had loved her, though many had borne gently with her spoiled fancies. But her coming in had brought no light, and her going out had left nothing dark. She was old and ill-tempered and bitter of speech, and, though all doors opened hospitably at her approach, all closed quickly when she was gone. Her spoiled youth had left her sensitive to trivial stings, unforgivable to fancied wrongs. In a childish oversight she detected hidden malice and implacable hate in a thoughtless jest. Her bitterness and her years waxed greater together, and she lost alike her youth and her self-control. When she had yearned for pa.s.sionate affection she had found kindly tolerance, and the longings of her hidden nature, which none knew, were expressed in rasping words and acrid tears. Once, some years after Bernard"s birth, she had called him into her room as she sat among her relics, and had shown him the daguerreotype.
"It"s pitty lady," the child had lisped, and she had caught him suddenly to her lean old breast, but he had broken into peevish cries and struggled free, tearing with his foot the ruffle of the swiss muslin gown.
"Oo ain"t pitty lady," he had said, and Aunt Griselda had risen and pushed him into the hall with sharp, scolding words, and had sat down to darn the muslin ruffle with delicate, old-fashioned st.i.tches.
It was only when all living love had failed her that she returned to the dead. She had gathered the letters of nearly sixty years ago from the bottom of the cedar chest, reading them through her spectacles with bleared, watery eyes. Those subtle sentimentalities which linger like aromas in a heart too aged for pa.s.sion were liberated by the bundle of yellow scrawls written by hands that were dust. As she sat in her stiff bombazine skirts beside the opened chest, peering with worry-ravaged face at the old letters, she forgot that she was no longer one with the girl in the muslin frock, and that the inciter of this exuberant emotion was as dead as the emotion itself.
When the dresses were brought up to her she would put them on again and go down to flinch before kindly eyes and to make embittered speeches in her high, shrill voice. Outwardly she grew more soured and more eccentric. On mild summer evenings she would come down stairs with her head wrapped in a pink knitted "nubia," and stroll back and forth along the gravelled walk, her gaunt figure pa.s.sing into the dusk of the cedar avenue and emerging like the erratic shadow of one of the sombre trees.
Sometimes Eugenia joined her, but Bernard, her favourite, held shyly aloof. In her exercise she seldom spoke, and her words were peevish ones, but there was grim pathos in her carriage as she moved slowly back and forth between the straight rows of box.
After supper the family a.s.sembled on the porch and talked in a desultory way until ten o"clock, when the lights were put out and the house retired to rest. Eugenia slept in a great, four-post bedstead with Aunt Chris, and the bed was so large and soft and billowy that she seemed to lose herself suddenly at night in its lavender-scented midst, and to be as suddenly discovered in the morning by Rindy, the house-girl, when she came with her huge pails of warm water.
Those fresh summer dawns of Eugenia"s childhood became among her dearest memories in after years. There were hours when, awaking, wide-eyed, before the house was astir, she would rise on her elbow and look out across the dripping lawn, where each dewdrop was charged with opalescent tints, to the western horizon, where the day broke in a cloud of gold.
The song of a mocking-bird in the poplars of the little graveyard came to her with unsuspected melody--a melody drawn from the freshness, the loneliness, the half-awakened calls from hidden nests and the lyric ecstasy of dawn.
Then, with the rising of the sun, Aunt Chris would turn upon her pillow and open her soft, brown eyes.
"It is not good for little folks to be awake so early," she would say, and there would rush upon the child a sense of warmth and tenderness and comfort, and she would nestle closer to her sweet, white pillow. With the beginning of day began also the demands upon the time of Miss Chris.
First the new overseer, knocking at her door, would call through the crack that a cow had calved, or that one of the sheep was too ill to go to pasture. Then Rindy, entering with her pails, would shake a pessimistic head.
"Lawd, Miss Chris, one er dem ole c.o.o.ns done eat up er hull pa"cel er yo" chickens." And Miss Chris, at once the prop and the mainstay of the Battle fortunes, would rise with anxious exclamations and put on her full black skirt and linen sacque.
When breakfast was over Miss Chris went into the storeroom each morning and came out with a basin of corn-meal dough, followed by Sampson bearing an axe and Aunt Verbeny jingling the hen-house keys. The slow procession then filed out to the s.p.a.ce before the hen-house, the door of which was flung back, while Aunt Verbeny clucked at a little distance.
Miss Chris scattered her dough upon the ground and, while her unsuspecting beneficiaries made their morning meal, she pointed out to Sampson, the executioner, the members of the feathered community destined to be sacrificed to the carnivorous habits of their fellow mortals.
"Feel that one with the black spots, Sampson," she said with the indifference of an abstract deity. "Is it fat? And the domineca pullet, and the two roosters we bought from Delphy."
And when Sampson had seized upon the victims of the fiat she turned to inspect the bunches of fowls offered by neighbouring breeders.
To-day it was Nicholas Burr who stood patiently in the background, three drooping chickens in each hand, their legs tied together with strips of a purple calico which Marthy was making into a dress for Sairy Jane.
Seeing that Miss Chris had delivered her judgments, he came forward and proffered his captives with an abashed demeanour.
"How much are they worth?" asked Miss Chris in her cheerful tones, while Aunt Verbeny gave a suspicious poke beneath one of the flapping wings, followed by a grunt of disparagement.
Nicholas stammered confusedly:
"Ma says the biggest ought to bring a quarter," he returned, blushing as Aunt Verbeny grunted again, "and the four smallest can go for twenty cents."
But when the bargain was concluded he lingered and added shamefacedly: "Won"t you please let that red-and-black rooster live as long as you can? I raised it."
"Why, bless my heart!" exclaimed Miss Chris, "I believe the child is fond of the chicken."
Eugenia, who was hovering by, burst into tears and declared that the rooster should not die.
"Twenty cents is s-o ch-ea-p for a li-fe," she sobbed. "It shan"t be killed, Aunt Chris. It shall go in my hen-h-ou-se." And she rushed off to get her little tin bank from the top bureau drawer.
When the arrangements were concluded Nicholas started empty-handed down the box walk, the money jingling in his pocket. At the end of the long avenue of cedars there was a wide, unploughed common which extended for a quarter of a mile along the roadside. In spring and summer the ground was white with daisies and in the autumn it donned gorgeous vestments of golden-rod and sumach. In the centre of the waste, standing alike grim and majestic at all seasons, there was the charred skeleton of a gigantic tree, which had been stripped naked by a bolt of lightning long years ago. At its foot a p.r.i.c.kly clump of briars surrounded the blackened trunk in a decoration of green or red, and from this futile screen the spectral limbs rose boldly and were silhouetted against the far-off horizon like the masts of a wrecked and deserted ship. A rail fence, where a trumpet-vine hung heavily, divided the field from the road, and several straggling sheep that had strayed from the distant flock stood looking shyly over the ma.s.sive crimson cl.u.s.ters.
When Nicholas came out from the funereal dusk of the cedars the field was almost blinding in the morning glare, the yellow-centred daisies rolling in the breeze like white-capped billows on a sunlit sea. From the avenue to his father"s land the road was unbroken by a single shadow--only to the right, amid the young corn, there was a solitary persimmon tree, and on the left the gigantic wreck stranded amid the tossing daisies.
The sun was hot, and dust rose like smoke from the white streak of the road, which blazed beneath a cloudless sky.
The boy was tired and thirsty, and as he tramped along the perspiration rose to his forehead and dropped, upon his shoulder. With a sigh of satisfaction he came upon the little cottage of his father and saw his stepmother taking the clothes in from the bushes where they had been spread to dry. It was Sat.u.r.day, and ironing day, and he hoped for a chance at his lessons before night came, when he was so tired that the facts would not stick in his brain. He thought that it must be very easy to study in the mornings when you were fresh and eager and before that leaden weight centred behind your eyeb.a.l.l.s.
When Marthy Burr saw him she called irritably:
"I say, Nick, did they take the chickens?"
Nicholas nodded, and, crossing the weeds in the garden, gave her the money from his pocket.
"They didn"t say nothing "bout wantin" more, I "spose? Did you tell "em I was fattenin" them four pairs of ducks?"
Nicholas shook his head. No, he hadn"t told them.
"Well, your pa wants you down in the peanut field. You"d better get a drink of water first. You look powerful red."
An hour later, when work was over, he carried his book to the orchard and flung himself down beneath the trees. The judge had given him a biography of Jefferson, and he had learned his hero"s life with lips and heart. The day that it was finished he put the volume under his arm and went to the rector"s house.