Audrey. Mary Johnston

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СКАЧАТЬ Haward's eyes narrowed. "I own Colonel Spotswood for Governor of Virginia," he said, speaking slowly, as was his wont when he was angry. "His office does not, I think, extend farther than that. As for these pleasant-minded gentlemen who are not protected by their rank I beg to inform them that in my fall my sword arm suffered no whit."

      Turning, he beckoned to a negro who had worked his way from the servants in the rear, along the line of rangers, to the outskirts of the group of gentlemen gathered around the Governor and the injured man. "Juba," he ordered, "draw your horse and mine to one side. Your Excellency, may I again remind you that it draws toward nightfall, and that this road will be no pleasant one to travel in the dark?"

      What he said was true; moreover, upon the setting out of the expedition it had been laughingly agreed that any gentleman who might find his spirits dashed by the dangers and difficulties of the way should be at liberty at any time to turn his back upon the mountains, and his face toward safety and the settlements. The Governor frowned, bit his lips, but finally burst into unwilling laughter.

      "You are a very young gentleman, Mr. Marmaduke Haward!" he cried. "Were you a little younger, I know what ointment I should prescribe for your hurt. Go your ways with your broken ankle; but if, when I come again to the cabin in the valley, I find that your own injury has not contented you, look to it that I do not make you build a bridge across the bay itself! Gentlemen, Mr. Haward is bent upon intrusting his cure to other and softer hands than Dr. Robinson's, and the expedition must go forward without him. We sorrow to lose him from our number, but we know better than to reason with—ahem!—a twisted ankle. En avant, gentlemen! Mr. Haward, pray have a care of yourself. I would advise that the ankle be well bandaged, and that you stir not from the chimney corner"—

      "I thank your Excellency for your advice," said Mr. Haward imperturbably, "and will consider of taking it. I wish your Excellency and these merry gentlemen a most complete victory over the mountains, from which conquest I will no longer detain you."

      He bowed as he spoke, and began to move, slowly and haltingly, across the width of the rocky way to where his negro stood with the two horses.

      "Mr. Haward!" called the Governor.

      The recreant turned his head. "Your Excellency?"

      "It was the right foot, was it not?" queried his sometime leader. "Ah, I thought so! Then it were best not to limp with the left."

      Homeric laughter shook the air; but while Mr. Haward laughed not, neither did he frown or blush. "I will remember, sir," he said simply, and at once began to limp with the proper foot. When he reached the bank he turned, and, standing with his arm around his horse's neck, watched the company which he had so summarily deserted, as it put itself into motion and went slowly past him up its dusky road. The laughter and bantering farewells moved him not; he could at will draw a line around himself across which few things could step. Not far away the bed of the stream turned, and a hillside, dark with hemlock, closed the view. He watched the train pass him, reach this bend, and disappear. The axemen and the four Meherrins, the Governor and the gentlemen of the Horseshoe, the rangers, the negroes—all were gone at last. With that passing, and with the ceasing of the laughter and the trampling, came the twilight. A whippoorwill began to call, and the wind sighed in the trees. Juba, the negro, moved closer to his master; then upon an impulse stooped, and lifting above his head a great rock, threw it with might into one of the shallow pools. The crashing sound broke the spell of the loneliness and quiet that had fallen upon the place. The white man drew his breath, shrugged his shoulders, and turned his horse's head down the way up which he had so lately come.

      The cabin in the valley was not three miles away. Down this ravine to a level place of pines, through the pines to a strip of sassafras and a poisoned field, past these into a dark, rich wood of mighty trees linked together with the ripening grape, then three low hills, then the valley and the cabin and a pair of starry eyes. It was full moon. Once out from under the stifling walls of the ravine, and the silver would tremble through the leaves, and show the path beneath. The trees, too, that they had blazed—with white wood pointing to white wood, the backward way should be easy.

      The earth, rising sheer in darkness on either hand, shut in the bed of the stream. In the warm, scented dusk the locusts shrilled in the trees, and far up the gorge the whippoorwill called and called. The air was filled with the gold of fireflies, a maze of spangles, now darkening, now brightening, restless and bewildering. The small, round pools caught the light from the yet faintly colored sky, and gleamed among the rocks; a star shone out, and a hot wind, heavy with the smell of the forest, moved the hemlock boughs and rustled in the laurels.

      The white man and the negro, each leading his horse, picked their way with caution among the pitfalls of the rocky and uneven road. With the passing of the Governor and his train a sudden cure had been wrought, for now Haward's step was as firm and light as it had been before his fall. The negro looked at him once or twice with a puzzled face, but made no comment and received no enlightenment. Indeed, so difficult was their way that they were left but scant leisure for speech. Moment by moment the darkness deepened, and once Haward's horse came to its knees, crashing down among the rocks and awakening every echo.

      The way, if hard, was short. The hills fell farther apart, the banks became low and broad, and fair in front, between two slender pines, shone out the great round moon. Leaving the bed of the stream, the two men entered a pine wood, dim and fragrant and easy to thread. The moon rose higher, and the light fell in wide shafts between trees that stood well apart, with no vines to grapple one to another or undergrowth to press about their knees.

      There needed no watchfulness: the ground was smooth, the light was fair; no motion save the pale flicker of the fireflies, no sound save the sigh of the night wind in the boughs that were so high overhead. Master and man, riding slowly and steadily onward through a wood that seemed interminably the same, came at last to think of other things than the road which they were traveling. Their hands lost grasp upon the reins, and their eyes, ceasing to glance now here, now there, gazed steadfastly down the gray and dreamlike vista before them, and saw no longer hole and branch, moonlight and the white scars that the axe had made for guidance. The vision of the slave was of supper at the quarters, of the scraping of the fiddle in the red firelight, of the dancing and the singing. The white man saw, at first, only a girl's face, shy and innocent—the face of the woodland maid who had fired his fancy, who was drawing him through the wilderness back to the cabin in the valley. But after a while, in the gray stillness, he lost the face, and suddenly thought, instead, of the stone that was to cover his father's grave. The ship that was to bring the great, dark, carven slab should be in by now; the day after his return to Williamsburgh the stone must be put in place, covering in the green sod and that which lay below. Here, lieth in the hope of a joyful resurrection—

      His mind left the grave in the churchyard at Williamsburgh, and visited the great plantation of which he was now sole master. There was the house, foursquare, high-roofed, many-windowed, built of dark red brick that glowed behind the veil of the walnuts and the oaks. There, too, were the quarters—the home quarter, that at the creek, that on the ridge. Fifty white servants, three hundred slaves—and he was the master. The honeysuckles in the garden that had been his father's pride, the shining expanse of the river, the ship—his ship, the Golden Rose—that was to take him home to England—he forgot the night and the forest, and saw these things quite plainly. Then he fell to thinking of London and the sweets that he meant to taste, the heady wine of youth and life that he meant to drain to the lees. He was young; he could spare the years. One day he would come back to Virginia, to the dim old garden and quiet house. His factor would give account, and he would settle down in the red brick house, with the tobacco to the north and east, the corn to the west, and to the south the mighty river—the river silvered by the moon, the river that lay just beyond him, gleaming through the trees—

      Startled by the sudden tightening of the reins, or by the tearing СКАЧАТЬ