Part 77 (2/2)
CHAPTER LVII.
ALMOST IN SIGHT.
In St. Tammany Parish, on the northern border of Lake Ponchartrain, about thirty miles from New Orleans, in a straight line across the waters of the lake, stood in time of the war, and may stand yet, an old house, of the Creole colonial fas.h.i.+on, all of cypress from sills to s.h.i.+ngles, standing on brick pillars ten feet from the ground, a wide veranda in front, and a double flight of front steps running up to it sidewise and meeting in a bal.u.s.traded landing at its edge. Scarcely anything short of a steamer's roof or a light-house window could have offered a finer stand-point from which to sweep a gla.s.s round the southern semi-circle of water and sky than did this stair-landing; and here, a long s.h.i.+p's-gla.s.s in her hands, and the accustomed look of care on her face, faintly frowning against the glare of noonday, stood Mary Richling. She still had on the pine-straw hat, and the skirt--stirring softly in a breeze that had to come around from the north side of the house before it reached her--was the brown and olive homespun.
”No use,” said an old, fat, and sun-tanned man from his willow chair on the veranda behind her. There was a slight palsied oscillation in his head. He leaned forward somewhat on a staff, and as he spoke his entire shapeless and nearly helpless form quaked with the effort. But Mary, for all his advice, raised the gla.s.s and swung it slowly from east to west.
The house was near the edge of a slightly rising ground, close to the margin of a bayou that glided around toward the left from the woods at its back, and ran, deep and silent, under the shadows of a few huge, wide-spreading, moss-hung live-oaks that stood along its. .h.i.ther sh.o.r.e, laving their roots in its waters, and throwing their vast green images upon its gla.s.sy surface. As the dark stream slipped away from these it flashed a little while in the bright open s.p.a.ce of a marsh, and, just entering the shade of a spectral cypress wood, turned as if to avoid it, swung more than half about, and shone sky-blue, silver, and green as it swept out into the unbroken suns.h.i.+ne of the prairie.
It was over this flowery savanna, broadening out on either hand, and spreading far away until its bright green margin joined, with the perfection of a mosaic, the distant blue of the lake, that Mary, dallying a moment with hope, pa.s.sed her long gla.s.s. She spoke with it still raised and her gaze bent through it:--
”There's a big alligator crossing the bayou down in the bend.”
”Yes,” said the aged man, moving his flat, carpet-slippered feet a laborious inch; ”alligator. Alligator not goin' take you 'cross lake. No use lookin'. 'Ow Peter goin' come when win' dead ahead? Can't do it.”
Yet Mary lifted the gla.s.s a little higher, beyond the green, beyond the crimpling wavelets of the nearer distance that seemed drawn by the magical lens almost into her hand, out to the fine, straight line that cut the cool blue below from the boundless blue above. Round swung the gla.s.s, slowly, waveringly, in her unpractised hand, from the low cypress forests of Manchac on the west, to the skies that glittered over the unseen marshes of the Rigolets on the farthest east.
”You see sail yondeh?” came the slow inquiry from behind.
”No,” said Mary, letting the instrument down, and resting it on the bal.u.s.trade.
”Humph! No! Dawn't I tell you is no use look?”
”He was to have got here three days ago,” said Mary, shutting the gla.s.s and gazing in anxious abstraction across the prairie.
The Spanish Creole grunted.
”When win' change, he goin' start. He dawn't start till win' change.
Win' keep ligue dat, he dawn't start 't all.” He moved his orange-wood staff an inch, to suit the previous movement of his feet, and Mary came and laid the gla.s.s on its brackets in the veranda, near the open door of a hall that ran through the dwelling to another veranda in the rear.
In the middle of the hall a small woman, as dry as the peppers that hung in strings on the wall behind her, sat in a rush-bottomed rocking-chair plaiting a palmetto hat, and with her elbow swinging a tattered manilla hammock, in whose bulging middle lay Alice, taking her compulsory noonday nap. Mary came, expressed her thanks in sprightly whispers, lifted the child out, and carried her to a room. How had Mary got here?
The morning after that on which she had missed the cars at Canton she had taken a south-bound train for Camp Moore, the camp of the forces that had evacuated New Orleans, situated near the railway station of Tangipahoa, some eighty miles north of the captured city. Thence, after a day or two of unavoidable delay, and of careful effort to know the wisest step, she had taken stage,--a crazy ambulance,--with some others, two women, three children, and an old man, and for two days had travelled through a beautiful country of red and yellow clays and sands below and murmuring pines above,--vast colonnades of towering, branchless brown columns holding high their green, translucent roof, and opening up their wide, bright, sunshot vistas of gentle, gra.s.sy hills that undulated far away under the balsamic forest, and melted at length into luminous green unity and deer-haunted solitudes. Now she went down into richer bottom-lands, where the cotton and corn were growing tall and pretty to look upon, like suddenly grown girls, and the sun was beginning to s.h.i.+ne hot. Now she pa.s.sed over rustic bridges, under posted warnings to drive slow or pay a fine, or through sandy fords across purling streams, hearing the monotone of some unseen mill-dam, or scaring the tall gray crane from his fis.h.i.+ng, or the otter from his pranks. Again she went up into leagues of clear pine forest, with stems as straight as lances; meeting now a farmer, and now a school-girl or two, and once a squad of scouts, ill-mounted, worse clad, and yet more sorrily armed; bivouacking with the jolly, tattered fellows, Mary and one of the other women singing for them, and the ”boys” singing for Mary, and each applauding each about the pine-knot fire, and the women and children by and by lying down to slumber, in soldier fas.h.i.+on, with their feet to the brands, under the pines and the stars, while the gray-coats stood guard in the wavering fire-light; but Mary lying broad awake staring at the great constellation of the Scorpion, and thinking now of him she sought, and now remorsefully of that other scout, that poor boy whom the spy had shot far away yonder to the north and eastward. Now she rose and journeyed again. Rare hours were those for Alice. They came at length into a low, barren land, of dwarfed and scrawny pines, with here and there a marshy flat; thence through a narrow strip of hickories, oaks, cypresses, and dwarf palmetto, and so on into beds of white sand and oyster-sh.e.l.ls, and then into one of the villages on the north sh.o.r.e of Lake Pontchartrain.
Her many little adventures by the way, the sayings and doings and seeings of Alice, and all those little adroitnesses by which Mary from time to time succeeded in avoiding or turning aside the suspicions that hovered about her, and the hundred times in which Alice was her strongest and most perfect protection, we cannot pause to tell. But we give a few lines to one matter.
Mary had not yet descended from the ambulance at her journey's end; she and Alice only were in it; its tired mules were dragging it slowly through the sandy street of the village, and the driver was praising the milk, eggs, chickens, and genteel seclusion of Mrs. ----'s ”hotel,” at that end of the village toward which he was driving, when a man on horseback met them, and, in pa.s.sing, raised his hat to Mary. The act was only the usual courtesy of the highway; yet Mary was startled, disconcerted, and had to ask the un.o.bservant, loquacious driver to repeat what he had said. Two days afterward Mary was walking at the twilight hour, in a narrow, sandy road, that ran from the village out into the country to the eastward. Alice walked beside her, plying her with questions. At a turn of the path, without warning, she confronted this horseman again. He reined up and lifted his hat. An elated look brightened his face.
”It's all fixed,” he said. But Mary looked distressed, even alarmed.
”You shouldn't have done this,” she replied.
The man waved his hand downward repressively, but with a countenance full of humor.
”Hold on. It's _still_ my deal. This is the last time, and then I'm done. Make a spoon or spoil a horn, you know. When you commence to do a thing, do it. Them's the words that's inscribed on my banner, as the felleh says; only I, Sam, aint got much banner. And if I sort o' use about this low country a little while for my health, as it were, and nibble around sort o' _pro bono p[=u]blico_ takin' notes, why you aint a-carin', is you? For wherefore shouldest thou?” He put on a yet more ludicrous look, and spread his hand off at one side, working his outstretched fingers.
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