Chapter VI

Barget had a shrew of a wife, and a daughter, a slim girl of eighteen, not beautiful, but with a kind, freckled face and bright blue eyes. Ten years ago this overseer had been an indentured servant like the many others around. His own man at last, he then worked for wages, and saved and bought a little and sold a little and saved again until he had saved enough to bring over from England his wife and child. Now he was overseer under Williams at Amory Hall, living in a decent log house two hundred yards from Old Mill quarter cabins. With him lived a young fellow, his assistant, whom he was training for his successor when Williams should have retired and he himself have stepped into Williams’ shoes. For his successor and his son-in-law.

My eyes began to seek this girl. It was three years since I had walked with Mysie Johnston in the glen. I was twenty-five and unhappy. Nelly Barget! She had not been at Old Mill at first.

All this time in Virginia I had seen young white women afar, at church, on the road to the landing or at the landing itself, or in boats that passed, or in coaches that came a-visiting to Amory Hall. I had seen young Mistress Maria Amory, seated at the spinet, playing “The Four Maries.” I had seen, nay, I had touched hands with six young slips of the ruling order.

And how on earth did that come about? I will tell about that.

It was the day before the ball at the great house. Not even Old Mill quarter was without talk of that ball and the fine folk who would be there. They would come by boat, they would come by coach, they would come on horseback, arriving from other great houses up and down the river and from Williamsburg. A dozen fine young men and women, Amory kindred and intimates, were already at Amory Hall. Colonel Amory had three daughters. The ball was for the birthday of the oldest, my young Mistress Maria of the spinet.

This day before came Barget to David Scott. Did I know Scots reels and strathspeys and maybe the Sword Dance? Without taking thought, I said I did. Then I was to make myself clean and go at once to the house. Dances of surprise were being arranged for the coming ball and instruction in the Scotch was wanted.

I said I would not go. Barget whistled. “What d’ye think the Colonel will say to that?” I did not care what the Colonel said for I was in a rage. Then all of a sudden that changed and a great wave came over me of I know not what, save that it might be just youth and longing and “Mak’ what ye can of it!” and I said I would go.

We had two suits of clothes each, we white servants. Work clothes and church clothes. So I put on my church clothes--shoes and stockings and a coarse white shirt, and breeches and coat of indifferent cloth. It was a tingling, gray, winter day, and Dick Merry and I had been cutting an oak nine feet in girth. When I came to the great house fires glowed through the windows and out of an opened door poured laughter. I entered the hall, and when a mulatto boy appeared, told him to say that the Scot was here. He grinned and I followed him. They were dancing in the great parlor, and large enough was the room and all polished the floor. They had two Negro fiddlers and everything was in practise for a great affair with masks and dressings-up. They lived, these Virginia planters, with no little jollity.

Well, here I was, regarding as from an enormous distance a dozen or more young men and women and two or three elders. The Colonel saw me and exclaiming, “Ha, Scott, are you there?” signed me to a place by the fiddlers. So at last they came to the reel and called on me to state if this were right or that was wrong.

They were good-natured and flushed and free with the dance. They wanted one step and then another. David Scott was there to answer them, and he answered.

In the auld historic movement upon which we were engaged, there is a good deal of handling and clasping and flying together. And of all there there wasn’t any who danced with the spirit that showed the Colonel’s second daughter, who was named Judith. She had dark, ringlets and dark flashing eyes, and a rosebud cheek and a laughing mouth. “Is this the way--what’s your name--David Scott?” She gave me her hand. I showed her and swung her, and presently in the wheel she came to me again. Up and down and around and across went the auld Scots dance, and I was dancing both in the glen at home and here in Virginia, with the cold and the hot alike in my heart and my head. I danced like the deil.

A girl they named Catherine--we were dancing so fast, the feet were so twinkling--came plump into my arms, screamed and laughed and skimmed away. Judith again took my hand. “It’s right now, isn’t it? We’re doing finely!” Up and down and around and across, and the great room and the fiddles and the blazing fire, and we were all one being and that in a mad dance.

The fiddlers ceased for a moment. We stood panting a little, at rest before the final and intricate square and wheel. Across, from the group of elders by the fire, pointed and keen as a poniard, came the thin voice of a yellow and wrinkled woman in a satin gown. “Well, for a bought servant, I must say he has his boldness with him!”

Instantly the fiddlers were fiddling again and we were all dancing. But “Catherine!” called a voice from the fireside and called twice, and Catherine, so imperiously bidden, left our company. The next step brought me facing Mr. Warwick Beaufort, who had, I had already observed, an interest in Mistress Judith. I divine that lightning and thunder had been gathering there for some minutes. At any rate his brows now were as black as Erebus. We danced, and down the line came Judith again, and she laughed at him and laughed at me, and her eyes sent their own dazzling lightnings. Her slim white hand was in mine that the ax had hardened. We danced, and every Scott and Stuart and all Jacobite Scotland, and David Scott himself and all his wrongs, and men and women everywhere, just their essential selves, were dancing on an oaken floor to the music of eternity.--Then it all broke, the figure was confused. Mr. Warwick Beaufort had said something offensive, and I struck him.

Well, the end of all that was that I went back to the tree-cutting and never entered that house again.

Nelly Barget!

When first we talked together the blackbirds were chattering in the March trees and the bloodroot whitening the forest floor. I was hewing by myself, Dick Merry having cut his foot and gone away to quarter. She had been on an errand to parsonage a mile up river, and instead of using the high road for her return chose the forest path. The spring, I reckon, was in her blood, and a maid as well as a man may like wild flowering. Now Dick’s foot had bled beside the pine tree we had been chopping. She saw it and turned aside and came to me--just showing I must have been, through the trees, and my ax not ringing at the moment.

“Yours?” She knew my name. “Have you hurt yourself, David Scott?”

“No. It was Dick Merry. He cut his foot badly, but we bandaged it up and he’s gone to quarter.”

“Well, I’m glad nobody’s killed!” A patch of little purple and white flowers growing beside her own foot she stooped and plucked them. “It’s a lovely day.”

“Aye. ’Tis spring.”

“Don’t you get tired chopping? Chopping trees and tending tobacco?”

“No, of course not.”

“That’s a lie!” said Nelly Barget. She moved to gather violets from a sunny place. “How do you like Virginia?”

“If I were not a slave I might like it well enough.”

“You aren’t a slave. Not like Pickaninny. Not like Eboe Sam.”

“There are differences. But still I am a slave.”

With that I began to cut the tree, and having gathered the violets, she moved away.

Two days afterwards she came again this way, and still Dick Merry was crippled and could not work.

“Tell me about Scotland. When I was a little girl I lived in England. I remember mountains and a city ten times as big as Williamsburg.”

I rested my ax and sat upon a log and told of Edinburgh and that glen and loch I best knew. She sat near me with her hands over her knee, but all the time she kept a sharp watch. “There’s somebody coming!” she said at last, and starting up walked sedately away upon the wood path that wound between Barget’s house and the parsonage and one or two other small dwellings. That morning as I worked I constantly saw her face among the branches--kind and freckled with wide mouth and bright blue eyes.

Sunday I saw her at church. She sat between her father and mother and looked straight through the window behind the parson, and sang in a lilting, sweet voice:

“_I was glad when they said unto me,
Let us go into the House of the Lord_----”

On Wednesday I saw her again on the path. But Dick was with me, and she went by without a sign or look.

But now I meant to see her and talk to her. By this time Dick Merry followed me in what I did or said, and had the staunchness of a good dog. I told him, “I want to talk to Barget’s daughter. She will talk with me, but not when you are by. They don’t care how we cut, so that we get this tract done. To-morrow about this time you take those trees in the hollow.”

“All right!” answered Dick. “I’ve seen her look at you in church, when she thought everybody else was marking the other way. Lord! If there happens a snatched kiss, who’s the worse for it?”

And nothing ever happened more than the snatched kiss--the snatched kiss and the pressed hands, and the arm around her one day when it was all so sunny gold and fine, the small flowers blooming around and one rich bird singing, singing, in the beech tree overhead. And that was the last, as it was the best, for a child, going through the wood, told her mother.

Barget stormed at me. “She’s gone to Williamsburg to my sister. And either the Colonel will sell you from this place, or he and Williams may find another helper than me!”

“I did her no harm, man!” I said. “She’s nothing but frank and young and kind, and it’s the springtime--even in Virginia! I kissed her, yes. It’s a fearful crime!”

But still he shook his stick. “You’re going from here or I go!”

“Shall I weep and howl if I go?” I answered. “I think not!”

For that and other things. I was sold at the courthouse, and Eboe Sam, who likewise was unruly and a runaway, was sold at the same time.

The Colonel on Cherry parted with us that morning before Old Mill quarter. “Scott, you’ve piled up trouble for yourself steadily since you’ve been here. I’m not a hard master--I’ve got a name for just the other thing. You might have accepted the lot you brought on yourself and made something of it, and in the end been a happy enough man. But you didn’t choose that way, and now I’m thinking you’ll fall into hands less easy than mine!”

He told the truth there.--Well, I look back over years and see that he was a spirit caught in his own toils, as I was caught in mine, and Eboe Sam in his, and Barget in his.

Gervase Morrison also came down to Old Mill quarter. “I told the Colonel I wished to say good-by to you.”

“Yes. Well, good-by!”

“David Scott, you could do more with yourself than you’re doing.”

I laughed. “Likely enough I might become a saint like old Walter who smiles and talks with the Universe while he makes shoes for the Colonel’s servants!”

“You’ve arrived at the man named Bitter. After that comes Vengeful and then Cruel.”

“Well?”

“I don’t mean to preach,” said Morrison. “I can’t. I’m no preacher. I’m a wastrel. I don’t like preachers, either. But don’t go running and sliding and leaping down Perdition’s slope! There’s something in you--I saw it on the _King William_--that looked like a soul.”

“It’s hard for souls to flourish in slavery,” I said, and bade him good-by with an aridity that I like not now to remember.

In the morning at dawn we went to the courthouse. Before noon I had been bought by Mr. Daniel Askew, a man of little education and less feeling, living twenty miles nearer to nowhere than the Amory plantation, and in bad odor with all the better kind of Virginians.