Part 46 (1/2)
CHAPTER XXIV
Its alliterative jingle had probably commended Dairy Dingle to Marcia Maurice when she selected a name for the new home of the overseer, Robert Mitch.e.l.l. Here he brought his bride from Nutwood, where she had lived since her father's death on the battle-field. A Federal cavalry raid, intended specially for the looting of Y---- and the destruction of its factories, had loitered too long at Willow Bend plantation, and finding Confederate squadrons in hot pursuit, the Union troopers were forced to retreat, after burning every building in sight except the cabins of the negroes. General Maurice loved the rambling, airy, old-fas.h.i.+oned country house where he was born, and here he usually brought his family to spend Christmas, and make genuine holiday for his numerous slaves. After the raid only rock chimneys stood as commemorative pillars, and not a vestige of gin-house, cotton sheds, or stables was visible. At a hard gallop the fleeing troopers pa.s.sed an adjacent grist-mill which supplied several plantations with meal, and paused long enough to kindle a blaze in a pile of corn sacks. The miller, a lame negro, extinguished the flames, and preserved a structure where several generations had brought their contributions to the hopper.
Near this old red mill Mrs. Maurice built a house for her overseer, and after Eliza's marriage gave it and the adjoining fifty acres of cleared land to the young wife. It was a small, square box of a house, with four rooms, broad, low-pitched piazzas, and wide hall running through the middle. Where the rear gallery ended, a covered way, brick paved, led to the kitchen and servants' room. On the left, at a sudden dip of the land, and several hundred yards distant, stood the spring house, or stone dairy, a low structure built over a small stream running from the bold spring that gushed out of the hillside a few feet away--and falling into the creek just above the mill-dam.
A shallow ca.n.a.l dug through the centre of the dairy had been paved with rock, and here, winter and summer, the milk bowls and b.u.t.ter jars stood in water rippling against their sides.
While General Maurice lived, he kept only his Jersey herd at Nutwood, but at Willow Bend his famous Short-horns, red, and red roan, roamed over pasturage extending hundreds of acres. The ”cow pen” and milking shed were not visible, hidden on the edge of a plateau running far away to a stretch of primeval, lonely pine woods crossed only by cattle paths. In a green cup encircled by wimpling hills the overseer's home nestled like a white bird hovering to drink. The sharply curving creek that divided it from the plantation was bridged a half mile below the mill, and a dense growth of trees and vines clothed the banks. In an opposite direction, beyond the house, and mantling the upland slopes, lay fields of grain, glistening as the wind crinkled the yellowing folds.
Locust and china trees, overrun by English honeysuckle, coral, and buff woodbine, shaded the cottage, and all about the spring house cl.u.s.tered azaleas--white, pink, orange, scarlet--filling the quiet hollow with waves of incomparable perfume. Hanging on the bluff above the bubbling spring a thicket of t.i.ti swung exquisite opal plumes, over which bees drowsed; and crowding to the front for dress parade clung a line of mountain laurel or ”ivy” faintly flushed with pale-rose cl.u.s.ters waiting to burst into bloom and with their crimped sh.e.l.l-pink cups rival fluted and tinted treasures from Sevres and Murano.
Into this green, shadowy dingle had come its long absent mistress, and, closing Nutwood, Eglah shared her foster-mother's secluded home in the heart of the pine woods.
For many months after her father's death she seemed a mute, breathing statue rather than a suffering woman, so deep lay the pain no words could fathom. Close and tender as were the ties linking the two, Eliza dared not probe the wound, and when Eglah closed the door of her own room, the loving little mother would have broken into a sealed tomb as soon as violate her solitude.
Two miles beyond the plantation, across the creek, a new railway line had established a station called Maurice, and about this nucleus a village grew with surprising rapidity. The site selected on Eglah's land by the railway company chanced to be that of the neighborhood school-house, where, on the fourth Sunday of each month, a Methodist minister of many mission chapels preached. Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l had organized a Sabbath school, and Eglah had given a cabinet organ, but the figure shrouded in mourning was seen only when driving in her trap, or more frequently alone on horseback. These long rides through rolling pine forests and silent sunny glades, where she met none but her own velvet-eyed, browsing red cattle, and shy, happy rabbits, were hours of immeasurable relief; yet, at intervals, proved battle-ground on which she fought the crowding spectres of a sombre, brooding future. Political and social ambitions were shut forever in her father's grave; domestic duties ended when the doors and gates of Nutwood had been locked; and business affairs were in far wiser hands than hers. What should she do with her empty life?
One afternoon, goaded by sad thoughts, she had ridden farther than usual, and, returning, reined her horse in at the brink of a meadow to tighten her coil of hair, shaken by a rapid gallop. Before her a group of young, red, dappled calves lay in the thick gra.s.s, their soft eyes wonderingly alert, and all Pan's orchestra seemed rehearsing. A wood-lark in a crab-apple bush set the pitch, a red-bird followed; two crows answered from the top of an ancient pine, and among beech boughs a velvet-throated thrush trilled, while under sedge shadows frogs croaked a hoa.r.s.e ba.s.soon. From the edge of a pool dimpling the turf white herons rose, flitting slowly across an orange sky, where cloud fringes burned in the similitude of scarlet tulips. If she could cease to be a woman with an aching heart and an immortal soul, what a peaceful home was here among the sinless forest children vast mother earth had called to sing and play in her pine-roofed, gra.s.sy nursery. If the sylvan quietude of this Theocritan retreat had power to witch her surging pulses to unbroken calm, she might hide for ever in her own green aisles, secure from stinging shafts of gossip and derision. She lifted the reins and the horse sprang forward.
A year ago Mr. Herriott had sailed. No tidings reached her; no allusion to the ”Ahvungah” had appeared in any of the newspapers she searched daily. She knew the vessel would not stop at an American port--would return directly to Europe from the Arctic circle--but the American press would chronicle the close of the expedition. If disaster had overtaken it, how soon could she know?
Was Mr. Herriott frozen fast in the awful desolation of Whale Sound, or sledging in a race with death across that vast, level, white ice desert of compacted snow in central Greenland, eight thousand feet above the sea, swept by Polar winds that never sleep? Wherever Arctic fetters held him, the moon shone constantly two weeks for him, and after the long night a returning sun was now gilding the minarets of icebergs and unlocking the bars of floes.
If he never came back she could indulge the love that so unexpectedly stirred her heart, that had grown swiftly since he left her; if he survived and returned she must hide her affection and herself far from the biting, branding scorn that would always glow in his eyes. How could she bear the dreary coming years of a possibly long life? There were hours in which she tried to hope he would not come back; but recalling that one moment when he held her so tight to his breast, she seemed to feel again the furious beating of his heart which had never belonged to any woman but herself, and, as the memory thrilled her, into her wan face crept a joyful flush. At last, too late, her heart was his, but he no longer desired or valued it. He had cast her out of his life. Riding slowly homeward in the star-powdered, silvery-grey gloaming, she locked her torturing thoughts behind the mask of silence that was becoming habitual, and near the mill met Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l's tender eyes on watch for her.
A few mornings later, Eglah stood in the dairy door, looking up beyond a sentry line of tall pear trees uniformed in vivid green, to the hillside, where lay the peach orchard a month before in full flower, billowing gently like a wide coverlet of pink silk shaken in sunlight.
Followed by Delilah, who knew the haunts of water-rats in the velvet moss low on the banks, she walked toward the creek. Over one corner of the deserted red mill a dewberry vine feathered with blossoms rambled almost to the sagging roof, and along the ruined line of the old race ferns held up their lace fronds to shade the lilac spikes of water-hyacinths. It was a cool, lonely place, sweet with the breath of wild flowers, silent save the endless adagio in minors played by crystal fingers of the stream stealing down the broken, crumbling stone dam. In that quiet nook all outside noises seemed intrusive, and Eglah listened to the beat of a horse's hoofs cantering across the bridge below the mill. Very soon Mr. Boynton appeared and dismounted.
”Good morning, Miss Eglah. A telegram was forwarded from Y----, and as I happened to be at Maurice when it came, I brought it at once.”
”Thank you very much.”
She took the message and walked away a few steps, struggling for strength to face the worst.
”Mrs. Noel Herriott:
”Amos Lea has been ill for months. To-day I am called to Chicago to my sick son. Della will not stay here without me.
Some woman ought to come.
”AMANDA ORR.”
”I hope it is good news about your husband?”
”Mr. Boynton, it might be worse. Sickness in Mr. Herriott's household seems to require that I should go to his home for a few days. Please wait here until I can go to the house and find out what must be done. I may trouble you to attend to some matters for me.”
Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l sat on the steps at the rear of the cottage, stemming a bowl of strawberries and warily watching the elusive feints of a white turkey hen picking her way to a nest hidden in a tangle of blackberry vines. Eglah held the open telegram before her eyes and waited.
”I suppose you want me to go?”