Part 13 (1/2)
”What is it, son?” Judge March asked, and rising, saw the lady draw near the girl with a look of pitying uncertainty. The tattered form stood trembling, with tears starting down her cheeks.
”Miss Rose--Oh, Miss Rose, it's me!”
”Why, Johanna, my poor child!” Two kind arms opened and the ma.s.s of rags and mud dashed into them. The girl showered her kisses upon the pure garments, and the lady silently, tenderly, held her fast. Then she took the black forehead between her hands.
”Child, what does this mean?”
”Oh, it means nothin' but C'nelius, Miss Rose--same old C'nelius! I hadn't nowhere to run but to you, an' no chance to come but night.”
”Can you go upstairs and wait a moment for me in my room? No, poor child, I don't think you can!” But Johanna went, half laughing, half crying, and beckoning to Barbara in the old-time wheedling way.
”Go, Barbara.”
The child followed, while John and his father stood with captive hearts before her whom the youths of the college loved to call in valedictory addresses the Rose of Rosemont. She spent a few moments with them, holding John's more than willing hand, and then called in the princ.i.p.al's first a.s.sistant, Mr. Dinwiddie Pettigrew, a smallish man of forty, in piratical white duck trousers, kid slippers, nankeen sack, and ruffled s.h.i.+rt. Irritability confessed itself in this gentleman's face, which was of a clay color, with white spots. Mr. Pettigrew presently declared himself a Virginian, adding, with the dignity of a fallen king, that he--or his father, at least--had lost over a hundred slaves by the war. It was their all. But the boy could not shut his ear to the sweet voice of Mrs. Garnet as, at one side, she talked to his father.
”Sir?” he responded to the first a.s.sistant, who was telling him he ought to spell March with a final e, it being always so spelled--in Virginia.
The Judge turned for a lengthy good-by, and at its close John went with his preceptor to the school-room, trying, quite in vain, to conceive how Mr. Pettigrew had looked when he was a boy.
XVI.
A GROUP OF NEW INFLUENCES
All Rosemonters were required to sit together at Sunday morning service, in a solid ma.s.s of cadet gray. After this there was ordinary freedom.
Thus, when good weather and roads and Mrs. March's strength permitted, John had the joy of seeing his father and mother come into church; for Rosemont was always ahead of time, and the Marches behind. Then followed the delight of going home with them in their antique and precarious buggy, and of a day-break ride back to Rosemont with his father--sweetest of all accessible company. Accessible, for his mother had forbidden him to visit Fannie Halliday, her father being a traitor.
He could only pa.s.s by her gate--she was keeping house now--and sometimes have the ecstasy of lingeringly greeting her there.
”Oh, my deah, she's his teacheh, you know. But now, suppose that next Sunday----”
”Please call it the sabbath, Powhatan.”
”Yes, deah, the sabbath. If it should chance to rain----”
”Oh, Judge March, do you believe rain comes by chance?”
”Oh, no, Daphne, dear. But--if it should be raining hard----”
”It will still be the Lord's day. Your son can read and meditate.”
”But if it should be fair, and something else should keep us fum church, and he couldn't come up here, and should feel his loneliness----”
”Can't he visit some of our Suez friends--Mary and Martha Salter, Doctor Coffin, or Parson Tombs, the s.e.xtons, or Clay Mattox? I'm not puritanical, nor are they. He's sure of a welcome from either Cousin Hamlet Graves or his brother Lazarus. Heaven has spared us a few friends still.”
”Oh, yes, indeed. Dead loads of them; if son would only take to them.
And, Daphne, deah,”--the husband brightened--”I hope, yet, he will.”