Part 21 (1/2)
Out of the house the sunlight beat and blinded. Houses of red brick, houses of white wood; the long, wide, dusty Duke of Gloucester Street; gnarled mulberry-trees broad-leafed against a September sky, deeply, pa.s.sionately blue; glimpses of wood and field,--all seemed remote without distance, still without stillness, the semblance of a dream, and yet keen and near to oppression. It was a town of stores, of ordinaries and public places; from open door and window all along Duke of Gloucester Street came laughter, round oaths, now and then a sc.r.a.p of drinking song. To Haward, giddy, ill at ease, sickening of a fever, the sounds were now as a cry in his ear, now as the noise of a distant sea. The minister of James City parish and the minister of Ware Creek were walking before him, arm in arm, set full sail for dinner after a stormy morning. ”For lo! the wicked prospereth!” said one, and ”Fair View parish bound over to the devil again!” plained the other. ”He's firm in the saddle; he'll ride easy to the day he drinks himself to death, thanks to this sudden complaisance of Governor and Commissary!”
”Thanks to”--cried the other sourly, and gave the thanks where they were due.
Haward heard the words, but even in the act of quickening his pace to lay a heavy hand upon the speaker's shoulder a listlessness came upon him, and he forbore. The memory of the slurring speech went from him; his thoughts were thistledown blown hither and yon by every vagrant air. Coming to Marot's ordinary he called for wine; then went up the stair to his room, and sitting down at the table presently fell asleep, with his head upon his arms.
After a while the sounds from the public room below, where men were carousing, disturbed his slumber. He stirred, and awoke refreshed. It was afternoon, but he felt no hunger, only thirst, which he quenched with the wine at hand. His windows gave upon the Capitol and a green wood beyond; the waving trees enticed, while the room was dull and the noises of the house distasteful. He said to himself that he would walk abroad, would go out under the beckoning trees and be rid of the town. He remembered that the Council was to meet that afternoon. Well, it might sit without him! He was for the woods, where dwelt the cool winds and the shadows deep and silent.
A few yards, and he was quit of Duke of Gloucester Street; behind him, porticoed Capitol, gaol, and tiny vineclad debtor's prison. In the gaol yard the pirates sat upon a bench in the suns.h.i.+ne, and one smoked a long pipe, and one brooded upon his irons. Gold rings were in their ears, and their black hair fell from beneath colored handkerchiefs twisted turbanwise around their brows. The gaoler watched them, standing in his doorway, and his children, at play beneath a tree, built with sticks a mimic scaffold, and hanged thereon a broken puppet. There was a shady road leading through a wood to Queen's Creek and the Capitol Landing, and down this road went Haward. His step was light; the dullness, the throbbing pulses, the oppression of the morning, had given way to a restlessness and a strange exaltation of spirit. Fancy was quickened, imagination heightened; to himself he seemed to see the heart of all things. Across his mind flitted fragments of verse,--now a broken line just hinting beauty, now the pure pa.s.sion of a lovely stanza. His thoughts went to and fro, mobile as the waves of the sea; but firm as the reefs beneath them stood his knowledge that presently he was going back to Fair View.
To-morrow, when the Governor's ball was over, when he could decently get away, he would leave the town; he would go to his house in the country.
Late flowers bloomed in his garden; the terrace was fair above the river; beneath the red brick wall, on the narrow little creek s.h.i.+ning like a silver highway, lay a winged boat; and the highway ran past a glebe house; and in the glebe house dwelt a dryad whose tree had closed against her.
Audrey!--a fair name. Audrey, Audrey!--the birds were singing it; out of the deep, Arcadian shadows any moment it might come, clearly cried by satyr, Pan, or shepherd. Hark! there was song--
It was but a negro on the road behind, singing to himself as he went about his master's business. The voice was the voice of the race, mellow, deep, and plaintive; perhaps the song was of love in a burning land. He pa.s.sed the white man, and the arching trees hid him, but the wake of music was long in fading. The road leading through a cool and shady dell, Haward left it, and took possession of the mossy earth beneath a holly-tree.
Here, lying on the ground, he could see the road through the intervening foliage; else the place had seemed the heart of an ancient wood.
It was merry lying where were glimpses of blue sky, where the leaves quivered and a squirrel chattered and a robin sang a madrigal. Youth the divine, half way down the stair of misty yesterdays, turned upon his heel and came back to him. He pillowed his head upon his arm, and was content.
It was well to be so filled with fancies, so iron of will, so headstrong and gay; to be friends once more with a younger Haward, with the Haward of a mountain pa.s.s, of mocking comrades and an irate Excellency.
From the road came a rumble of oaths. Sailors, sweating and straining, were rolling a very great cask of tobacco from a neighboring warehouse down to the landing and some expectant sloop. Haward, lying at ease, smiled at their weary task, their grunting and swearing; when they were gone, smiled at the blankness of the road. All things pleased. There was food for mirth in the call of a partridge, in the inquisitive gaze of a squirrel, in the web of a spider gaoler to a gilded fly. There was food for greater mirth in the appearance on the road of a solitary figure in a wine-colored coat and bushy black peruke.
Haward sat up. ”Ha, Monacan!” he cried, with a laugh, and threw a stick to attract the man's attention.
Hugon turned, stood astare, then left the road and came down into the dell.
”What fortune, trader?” smiled Haward. ”Did your traps hold in the great forest? Were your people easy to fool, giving twelve deerskins for an old match-coat? There is charm in a woodsman life. Come, tell me of your journeys, dangers, and escapes.”
The half-breed looked down upon him with a twitching face. ”What hinders me from killing you now?” he demanded, with a backward look at the road.
”None may pa.s.s for many minutes.”
Haward lay back upon the moss, with his hands locked beneath his head.
”What indeed?” he answered calmly. ”Come, here is a velvet log, fit seat for an emperor--or a sachem; sit and tell me of your life in the woods.
For peace pipe let me offer my snuffbox.” In his mad humor he sat up again, drew from his pocket, and presented with the most approved flourish, his box of chased gold. ”Monsieur, c'est le tabac pour le nez d'un inonarque,” he said lazily.
Hugon sat down upon the log, helped himself to the mixture with a grand air, and shook the yellow dust from his ruffles. The action, meant to be airy, only achieved fierceness. From some hidden sheath he drew a knife, and began to strip from the log a piece of bark. ”Tell me, you,” he said.
”Have you been to France? What manner of land is it?”
”A gay country,” answered Haward; ”a land where the men are all white, and where at present, periwigs are worn much shorter than the one monsieur affects.”
”He is a great brave, a French gentleman? Always he kills the man he hates?”
”Not always,” said the other. ”Sometimes the man he hates kills him.”
By now one end of the piece of bark in the trader's hands was shredded to tinder. He drew from his pocket his flint and steel, and struck a spark into the frayed ma.s.s. It flared up, and he held first the tips of his fingers, then the palm of his hand, then his bared forearm, in the flame that licked and scorched the flesh. His face was perfectly unmoved, his eyes unchanged in their expression of hatred. ”Can he do this?” he asked.
”Perhaps not,” said Haward lightly. ”It is a very foolish thing to do.”
The flame died out, and the trader tossed aside the charred bit of bark.