Chapter VIII: Book III: When Fields Lie Fallow (3)

Her beautiful eyes shone in the firelight, and her placid mouth formed a round hole above her dimpled chin, giving her large face an expression almost infantile. She took up the key basket, which she had placed on the mantel-piece, cast a glance at the pile of logs to see if it had been replenished, felt the cover on the bed, after inquiring if it sufficed, and, with a cheerful "good-night," passed out, closing the door behind her.

Eugenia did not turn as the door closed. She stood motionless upon the hearth rug, looking down into the fire. Something in the huge old fireplace, with its bent andirons supporting the blazing logs, in the increasing bed of embers upon the bricks, in the sharp odour of the knot of resinous pine she had thrown on with the hickory, brought before her the winter evenings in Delphy's little cabin, when they sat upon three-legged stools and roasted early winesaps. She saw the negro faces in the glow of the hearth, and she saw Nicholas and herself sitting side by side in the shadow. His childish face, with its look of ancient care, came back to her with the knotted boyish hands that had carried and fetched at her bidding. The whole wistful little figure was imaged in the flames, melting rapidly into the boy, eager to act, ardent to achieve, who had bidden her good-bye on that November afternoon, and, dissolving again, to reappear as the strong man who had come upon her in Uncle Ish's little shanty, bearing the old negro's bag upon his shoulder.

She had loved him for his strength, his vigour, his gentleness--and she still loved him.

Of the men that she had known, who was there so ready to assist, so forgetful of services which he had rendered? There was none so powerful and yet so kind--so generous or so gentle. An impulse stirred her to cross the fields to his door and fling herself into the breach that divided them; but again the phantom in the flames grew dim and then sent out the face that she had seen that afternoon--convulsed and quivering, with its flitting sinister likeness to Amos Burr. A voice that seemed to be the voice of old dead Aunt Griselda--of her whole dead race that had decayed and been forgotten, and come to life again in her--spoke suddenly from the silence:

"When all's said and done, a Battle's a Battle."

The resinous pine blazed up, the pungent odour filled the large room, and from the lightwood sticks tiny streams of resin oozed out and dripped into the embers, turning the red to gray.

Mingling with the crackling of the flames there was a noise as of the soughing of the wind in the pine forests.

The hearth grew suddenly blurred before her eyes; and a passion of grief rose to her throat and clutched her with the grip of claws. For an instant longer she stood motionless; then, turning from the fire, she threw herself upon the floor to weep until the daybreak.

VII

When Nicholas left Eugenia it was to stride blindly towards his father's gate. The rage which had stunned him into silence before the girl now leaped and crackled like flame in his blood. His throat was parched and he saw red like a man who kills.

Passing his home, he kept on to Kingsborough, and once within the shadow of the wood, he broke into a run, flying from himself and from the goad of his wrath. As he ran, he felt with a kind of alien horror that to meet Bernard Battle face to face in this hour would be to do murder--murder too mild for the man who had lied away his friend's honour for the sake of the whiteness of his own skin. It was the injustice that he resented with a holy rage--the hideous fact that a clean man should be spotted to save an unclean one the splashing he merited.

And Eugenia also--he hated Eugenia that he had kept her image untarnished in his thoughts; that he had allowed the desire for no other woman to shadow it. He had held himself as a temple for the worship of her; he had permitted no breath of defilement to blow upon the altar--and this was his reward. This--that the woman he loved had hurled the first stone at the mere lifting of a Pharisaical finger--that she had loved him and had turned from him when the first word was uttered--as she would not have turned from the brother of her blood had he been damned in Holy Writ. It was for this that he hated her.

The light of the sunset shining through the wood fell dull gold on his pathway. A strong wind was blowing among the trees, and the dried leaves were torn from the boughs and hurled roughly to the earth, when they sped onward to rest against the drifts by the roadside. The sound of the wind was deep and hoarse like the baying of distant hounds, and beneath it, in plaintive minor, ran the sighing of the leaves before his footsteps. Through the wood came the vague smells of autumn--a reminiscent waft of decay, the reek of mould on rotting logs, the effluvium of overblown flowers, the healthful smack of the pines. By dawn frost would grip the vegetation and the wind would lull; but now it blew, strong and clear, scattering before it withered growths and subtle scents of death.

Out of the wood, Nicholas came on the highway again, and turned to where the afterglow burnished the windows of Kingsborough. He followed the road instinctively--as he had followed it daily from his childhood up, beating out the impression of his own footsteps in the dust, obliterating his old, even tracks by the reckless tramp of his delirium.

When he reached the college grounds he paused from the same dazed impulse and looked back upon the west through the quiet archway of the long brick building. The place was desolate with the desolation of autumn. Through the funereal arch he saw the sunset barred by a network of naked branches, while about him the darkening lawn was veiled with the melancholy drift of the leaves. The only sound of life came from a brood of turkeys settling to roost in a shivering aspen.

He turned and walked rapidly up the main street, where a cloud of dust hung suspended. Past the court-house, across the green, past the little whitewashed gaol, where in a happier season roses bloomed--out into the open country where the battlefields were grim with headless corn rows--he walked until he could walk no further, and then wheeled about to retrace heavily his way. His rage was spent; his pulses faltered from fatigue, and the red flashes faded from before his eyes.

When he reached home supper was over, and Nannie sat sewing in the little room adjoining the kitchen.

"You're late for supper," she said idly as he entered. "Sairy Jane's gone to bed with a headache and ma's in a temper. I'll get you something as soon as I've done this seam."

"I've had supper," he answered shortly, adding from force of habit, "where's ma?"

Nannie motioned towards the kitchen and drew a little nearer the lamp, while Nicholas left the room in search of his stepmother.

Marthy Burr, a pile of newly dug potatoes on the floor beside her, was carefully sorting them before storing them for winter use. The sound ones she laid in a basket at her right hand, those that were of imperfect growth or showed signs of decay she threw into a hamper that was kept in the kitchen closet.

"You ought to make Jubal do this," said Nicholas as he entered.

"I wouldn't trust the thickest skinned potato in the field in his hands," returned Marthy sharply. "He an' yo' pa made out to store 'em last year, an' when I went to look in the first barrel, the last one of 'em had rotted."

"Let them rot," said Nicholas harshly. "I be damned if I'd care. You don't eat them, anyway."

"I reckon if I was a man I might consarn myself 'bout the things that tickle my own palate--an' 'taters ain't one of 'em," was his stepmother's retort. "But, being a woman, it seems I've got to spend my life slavin' for other folks' stomachs. But you're yo' Uncle Nick Sales all over again; 'Don't you get up befo' day to set that dough, Marthy,' he'd say, but when the bread came on flat as a pancake, he'd look sourer than all the rest."

"What was my Uncle Nick Sales like?" asked Nicholas indifferently. He knew the name, but he had never heard the man's story.

"All book larnin' an' mighty little sense--just like you," replied his stepmother with repressed pride in her voice. "Could read the Bible in an outlandish tongue an' was too big a fool to come in out of the rain. He used to sit up all night at his books--an' fall asleep the next day at the plough. He was the wisest fool I ever see."

"Poor fool!" said Nicholas softly. It was the epitaph over the unmarked grave of that other member of his race who had blazed the thorny path before him. A strange, pathetic figure rose suddenly in his vision--a man with a great brow and a twisted back, with brawny, knotted hands--an unlearned student driving the plough, an ignorant philosopher dragging the mire.

"Poor fool!" he said again. "What did his learning do for him?"

"It killed him," returned his stepmother shortly.

She stood before him wiping her gnarled hands on her soiled apron. His gaze fell upon her, and he wondered angrily whence sprung her indomitable energy--the energy that could expend itself upon potatoes. Her face was sharpened until it seemed to become all feature--there were hollows in the narrow temples, and where the pale, thin hair was drawn tightly over the head he could trace the prominent bones of the skull.

As he looked at her his own petty suffering was overshadowed by the visible tragedy of her life--the sordid tragedy where unconsciousness was pathos. He reached out quickly and took a corner of her apron in his hand. It was the strongest demonstration of affection he had ever made to her.

"I'll sort them, ma," he said lightly. "There's not a speck in the lot of them too fine for my eyes." And he knelt down beside the earthy heap.

But when he went up to his room an hour later and lighted his kerosene lamp, it was not of his stepmother that he was thinking--nor was it of Eugenia. His stiffened muscles contracted in physical pain, and his brain was deadened by the sense of unutterable defeat. The delirium of his anger had passed away; the fever of his skin had chilled beneath the cold sweat that broke over him--in the reaction from the madness that had gripped him he was conscious of a sanity almost sublime. The habitual balance of his nature had swung back into place.

He got out his books and arranged them as usual beside the lamp. Then he took up the volume he had been reading and held it unopened in his hands. He stared straight before him at the whitewashed wall of the little room, at the rough pine bedstead, at the crude washstand, at the coloured calendar above.

On the unearthly whiteness of the wall he beheld the pictured vision of that other student of his race--the kinsman who had lived toiling and had died learning. He came to him a tragic figure in mire-clotted garments--a youth with aspiring eyes and muck-stained feet. He wondered what had been his history--that unknown labourer who had sought knowledge--that philosopher of the plough who had died in ignorance.

"Poor fools!" he said bitterly, "poor fools!" for in his vision that other student walked not alone.

The next morning he went into Kingsborough at his usual hour, and, passing his own small office, kept on to where Tom Bassett's name was hung.

It was county court day, and the sheriff and the clerk of the court were sitting peaceably in armchairs on the little porch of the court-house. As Nicholas passed with a greeting, they turned from a languid discussion of the points of a brindle cow in the street to follow mentally his powerful figure.

"I reckon he's got more muscle than any man in town," remarked the sheriff in a reflective drawl. "Unless Phil Bates, the butcher, could knock him out. Like to see 'em at each other, wouldn't you?" he added with a laugh.

The clerk carefully tilted his chair back against the wall and surveyed his outstretched feet. "Like to live to see him stumping this State for Congress," he replied. "There goes the brainiest man these parts have produced since before the war--the people want their own men, and it's time they had 'em."

Nicholas passed on to Tom's office, and, finding it empty, turned back to the judge's house, where he found father and son breakfasting opposite each other at a table bright with silver and chrysanthemums.

They hospitably implored him to join them, but he shook his head, motioning away the plate which old Cæsar would have laid before him.

"I wanted to ask Tom if he had heard this--this lie about me," he said quickly.

Tom looked up, flushing warmly.

"Why, who's been such a blamed fool as to tell you?" he demanded.

"You have heard it?"

"It isn't worth hearing. I called Jerry Pollard up at once, and he swore he was all wrong--the girl herself exonerates you. Nobody believed it."

Nicholas crushed the brim of his hat in a sudden grip.

"Some believe it," he returned slowly. He sat down at the table, smiling gratefully at the judge's protestations.

"They aren't all like you, sir," he declared. "I wish they were. This world would be a little nearer heaven--a little less like hell."

There was a trail of lingering bitterness in his voice, and in a moment he added quickly: "Do you know, I'd like to get away for a time. I've changed my mind about caring to live here. If they'd send me up to the legislature next year, I'd make a new beginning."

The judge shook his head.

"I doubt the wisdom of it, my boy," he said. But Tom caught at the suggestion.

"Send you," he repeated. "Of course; they'll send you from here to Jericho, if you say so. Why, there's no end to your popularity among men. Where the ladies are concerned, I modestly admit that I have the advantage of you; but they can't vote, God bless them!"

"You're welcome to all the good they may bring you, old boy," was Nicholas's unchivalrous retort.

"Oh, you're jealous, Nick!" twitted Tom gaily. "They don't take kindly to your carrot locks. Now, I've inherited a way with them, eh, dad?"

The judge complacently buttered his buckwheats. There was a twinkle in his eyes and a quiver at the corner of his classic mouth.

"It was the only inheritance I wasn't able to squander in my wild oats days," he returned. "May you cherish it, my boy, as carefully as your father has done. It would be a dull world without the women."

"And a peaceable one," added Nicholas viciously.

"We owe them much," said the judge, pouring maple syrup from the old silver jug. "If Helen of Troy set the world at war, she made men heroes."

"You can't get the pater to acknowledge that the fair things are ever wrong," put in Tom protestingly. "He would have proved Eve's innocence to the Almighty. If a woman murdered ten men before his eyes he'd lay the charge on the devil and acquit her."

The judge shook his head with a laugh.

"I might merely argue that the queen can do no wrong," he suggested.

When Tom had finished his breakfast, Nicholas walked with him to his office, and, seeing Bessie Pollard, red-eyed and drooping in her father's door, he lingered an instant and held out his hand. There was defiant sympathy in his act--disdain of the judgment of Kingsborough--and of General Battle, who was passing--and pity for a bruised common thing that looked at him with beautiful, mindless eyes.

"You aren't looking bright to-day," he said kindly, "but things will pull through, never fear--they always do, if you give them time."

Then he responded coolly to the general's cool nod, and, rejoining Tom, they went on arm in arm. In his large-minded manhood it had not occurred to him to connect the girl with the wrong done upon him--he knew her to be more weak than wicked, and, in her soft, pretty sadness, she reminded him of a half-drowned kitten.

During the next few months he frequently passed Eugenia in the road. Sometimes he did not look at her, and again he met her wistful gaze and spoke without a smile. Once he checked an eager movement towards her because he had met Bernard just ahead--and he hated him; once he had seen the carriage in the distance and had waited in a passionate rush of remorse and love to hear her laughter as she talked with Dudley Webb. They had faced each other at last with resolute eyes and unswerving wills. On his side was the pride of an innocent man accused, the bitterness of a proud man on an inferior plane; on hers, the recollection of that wild evening in the road, and the belated recognition of the debt she owed her race.

In the winter she went up to Richmond and he slowly forced himself to renounce her. He began to see his old dream as it was--an emotional chimera; a mental madness. As the year grew on he watched his long hope wither root and branch, until, with the resurrection of the spring, it lay still because there was no life left that might put forth. And when his hope was dead he told himself that his unhappiness died with it, that he might throw himself single-hearted into the work of his life.

VIII

The year passed and was done with--leaves budded, expanded, fell again. Eugenia watched their growth, fulfilment, and decay as she had watched them other seasons, though with eyes a thought widened by experience, a shade darkened by tears. At first she had suffered wildly, then passively, at last resignedly. The colour rebloomed in her cheek, the gaiety rang back to her voice, for she was young, and youth is ever buoyant.

There was work for her to do on the place, and she did it cheerfully. She studied farming with her father and overhauled the methods of the overseer, to the man's annoyance and the general's delight. "She tells me Varly isn't scientific," roared the general with rapturous enjoyment. "A scientific overseer! She'll be asking for an honest politician next."

"I'm sure Varly is a very respectable man," protested Miss Chris in her usual position of defence. "The servants were always devoted to him before the war--that says a good deal."

"There's not a better man in the county," admitted the general, "or a worse farmer. Here I've let him go down hill at his own gait for more than thirty years, to be pulled up in the end by a chit of a girl. I wouldn't, if I were you, Eugie. He's old and he's slow."

"Oh! I'll promise not to hurt him," returned Eugenia. "I save him a lot of hard work, and he likes it."

She drew on her loose dogskin gloves and went out to overlook the shucking of the corn.

With the exercise in the open air she had gained in suppleness and brilliancy. It was the outdoor work that saved her spirit and her beauty--that gave her endurance for the indoor monotony and magnified the splendid optimism of her saddest hour. She was a woman born for happiness; when the Fates failed to accord it she defied them and found her own.

In the autumn news came that Nicholas was elected to the General Assembly. The judge brought it, riding out on a bright afternoon to chat with the general before the blazing logs.

"The lad has a future," said the judge with a touch of pride. "Brains don't grow on blackberry vines;" then he laughed softly. "Cæsar voted for him," he added.

The general slapped his knee.

"Cæsar is a gentleman," he exclaimed. "He was the first darkey in Kingsborough to vote the Democratic ticket. I walked up to the polls with him and the boys cheered him. You weren't there, George."

The judge shook his head.

"They called it undue influence," he said; "but, on my honour, Tom, I never spoke a political word to Cæsar in my life. Of course he'd heard me talk with Tom at dinner. He'd heard me say that the man of his race who would dare to vote with white men would be head and shoulders above his people, a man of mind, a man that any gentleman in the county would be proud to shake by the hand--but seek to influence Cæsar! Never, sir!"

"Now, there's that Ishmael of mine," said the general aggrievedly. "He no sooner got his vote than he cast it just to spite me. I told the fool he didn't know any more about voting than the old mule Sairy did, and he said he didn't have to know 'nothin' cep'n his name.' He forgot that when they challenged him at the polls, but he voted all the same--voted in my face, sir."

They lighted their pipes and sang the praises of that idyllic period which they called "before the war," while Eugenia crept away into the shadows.

She was glad that Nicholas would go; glad, glad, glad--so glad that she wept a little in the cold of a dark corner.

A week later Dudley came down, and she met him with a friendliness that dismayed and disarmed him. Could a woman be so frankly cordial with a man she loved? Could she face a passion that inspired her with such serene self-poise? He questioned these things, but he did not hesitate. He was of a Virginian line of lovers, and he charged in courtship as courageously as his father had charged in battle. He was magnificent in his youthful ardour, and so fitted for success that it seemed already to cast a prophetic halo about his head.

"You are superb," Eugenia had said, half insolently, looking up at him as he stood in the firelight. "How odd that I never noticed it before."

"You are looking at yourself in my eyes," he returned gallantly.

She shook her head.

"There are so many women who like handsome men, it's a pity you can't fall in love with one," she said coldly.

"Am I to infer that you prefer ugly men?" he questioned.

"I--oh! I am too good-looking to care," she replied.

She sprang up suddenly and stood beside him. "We do look well together," she said with grave audacity.

He laughed. "I am flattered. It may weigh with you in your future plans. Come, Eugie, let me love you!"

But her mood changed and she dragged him with her out into the autumn fields.

In the last days of November a long rain came--a ruinous autumnal rain that beat the white roads into livid streams of mud and sent the sad dead leaves in shapeless tatters to the earth. The glory of the fall had brought back the glory of her love; its death revived the agony of the long decay.

At night the rain throbbed upon the tin roof above her. Sometimes she would turn upon her pillow, stuffing the blankets about her ears; but, muffled by the bedclothes, she heard always the incessant melancholy sound. She heard it beating on the naked roof, rushing tumultuously to the overflowing pipes, dripping upon the wet stones of the gutter below, sweeping from the earth dead leaves, dead blossoms, dead desires.

In the day she watched it from the windows. The flower beds, desolated, formed muddy fountains, the gravel walk was a shining rivulet, the sycamore held three yellow leaves that clung vainly to a sheltered bough, the aspen faced her, naked--only the impenetrable gloom of the cedars was secure--sombre and inviolate.

On the third day she went out into the rain; splashing miles through the heavy roads and returning with a glow in her cheeks and the savour of the dampness in her mouth.

Taking off her wet garments she carried them to the kitchen to be dried. With the needed exercise, her cheerful animation had returned.

In the brick kitchen a gloomy group of negroes surrounded the stove.

"Dar's gwine ter be a flood an' de ea'th hit's gwine ter pass away," lamented Aunt Verbeny, lifting the ladle from a huge pot, the contents of which she was energetically stirring. "Hit's gwine ter pass away wid de men en de cattle en de crops, en de black folks dey's gwine ter pass des' de same es dey wuz white."

"I'se monst'ous glad I'se got religion," remarked a strange little negro woman who had come over to sell a string of hares her husband had shot. "De Lawd He begun ter git mighty pressin' las' mont', so I let 'im have His way. Blessed be de name er de Lawd! Is you a church member, Sis Delphy?"

"Yes, Lawd, a full-breasted member," responded Delphy, clamping the declivity of her bosom.

"I ain' got much use fur dis yer gittin' en ungittin' er salvation," put in Uncle Ish from the table where he was eating a late dinner of Aunt Verbeny's providing. "Dar's too much monkeyin' mixed up wid it fur me. Hit's too much de work er yo' j'ints ter make me b'lieve hit's gwine ter salivate yo' soul. When my wife, Mandy, wuz 'live, I tuck 'n cyar'ed her long up ter one er dese yer revivals, en' ole Sis Saphiry Baker come 'long gittin' happy, en fo' de Lawd she rid 'er clean roun' de chu'ch. Naw, suh, de religion I wanter lay holt on is de religion uv rest."

"I ain' never sarved my Lawd wid laziness," put in Aunt Verbeny reprovingly. "When He come arter me I ain' never let de ease er my limbs stan' in de way. Ef you can't do a little shoutin' on de ea'th, you're gwineter have er po' sho' ter keep de Lawd f'om overlookin' you at Kingdom Come."

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 Marse Dudley, now," said Aunt Verbeny. "I ain' so ole but my palate hit kin taste a gent'mun a mile off. Marse 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 glasses. 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, passing 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, passing, with a shiver, the unconscious mass 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 passed 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 glasses 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 passed 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 multitudes--the passing 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 passionate 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 passed; 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 assurance 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.

As he looked at her he held out his arms.

"Eugie--poor girl! dear girl!"

In the desolation of her life he stood to her as the hearth of home to a wanderer in the frozen North.

For an instant she held back, and then, with a sob, she yielded.

"I must be loved," she said. "I must be loved or I shall die."

Around them the winter landscape reddened as the sunset broke, and above their heads the crows flew, cawing, across the snow.