Audrey

X.²

HAWARD AND EVELYN.

MACLEAN put aside with much gentleness the hands of his surgeon, and, rising to his feet, answered the question in Haward’s eyes by producing a slip of paper and gravely proffering it to the man whom he served. Haward took it, read it, and handed it back ; then turned to the Quaker maiden. “ Mistress Truelove Taberer,” he said courteously. “ Are you staying in town ? If you will tell me where you lodge, I will myself conduct you thither.”

Truelove shook her head, and slipped her hand into that of her brother Ephraim. “ I thank thee, friend,” she said, with gentle dignity, “ and thee, too, Angus MacLean, though I grieve that thee sees not that it is not given us to meet evil with evil, nor to withstand force with force. Ephraim and I can now go in peace. I thank thee again, friend, and thee.” She gave her hand first to Haward, then to MacLean. The former, knowing the fashion of the Quakers, held the small fingers a moment, then let them drop ; the latter, knowing it too, raised them to his lips and imprinted upon them an impassioned kiss. Truelove blushed, then frowned, last of all drew her hand away.

With the final glimpse of her gray skirt the Highlander came back to the present. “ Singly I could have answered for them all, one after the other,” he said stiffly. “ Together they had the advantage. I pay my debt and give you thanks, sir.”

“ That is an ugly cut across your forehead,” replied Haward. “Mr. Ker had best bring you a basin of water. Or stay ! I am going to my lodging. Come with me, and Juba shall dress the wound properly.”

MacLean turned his keen blue eyes upon him. “Am I to understand that you give me a command, or that you extend to me an invitation ? In the latter case, I should prefer ” —

“ Then take it as a command,” said Haward imperturbably. “ I wish your company. Mr. Ker, good-day ; and set me aside the plate of which we talked yesterday.”

The two moved down the room together, but at the door MacLean, with his face set like a flint, stood aside, and Haward passed out first, then waited for the other to come up with him.

“ When I drink a cup I drain it to the dregs,” said the Scot. “ I walk behind the man who commands me. The way, you see, is not broad enough for you and me and hatred.”

“ Then let hatred lag behind,” answered Haward coolly. “ I have negroes to walk at my heels when I go abroad. I take you for a gentleman, accept your enmity an it please you, but protest against standing here in the hot sunshine.”

With a shrug MacLean joined him. “As you please,” he said. “I have in spirit moved with you through London streets. I never thought to walk with you in the flesh.”

It was yet warm and bright in the street, the dust thick, the air heavy with the odors of the May. Haward and MacLean walked in silence, each as to the other, one as to the world at large. Now and again the Virginian must stop to bow profoundly to curtsying ladies, or to take snuff with some portly Councilor or less stately Burgess, who, coming from the Capitol, chanced to overtake them. When he paused his storekeeper paused also, but, having no notice taken of him beyond a glance to discern his quality, needed neither a supple back nor a ready smile.

Haward lodged upon Palace Street, in a square brick house, lived in by an ancient couple who could remember Puritan rule in Virginia, who had served Sir William Berkeley, and had witnessed the burning of Jamestown by Bacon. There was a grassy yard to the house, and the path to the door lay through an alley of lilacs, purple and white. The door was open, and Haward and MacLean, entering, crossed the hall, and going into a large, low room, into which the late sunshine was streaming, found the negro Juba setting cakes and wine upon the table.

“This gentleman hath a broken head, Juba,” said the master. “Bring water and linen, and bind it up for him.”

As he spoke he laid aside hat and rapier, and motioned MacLean to a seat by the window. The latter obeyed the gesture in silence, and in silence submitted to the ministrations of the negro. Haward, sitting at the table, waited until the wound had been dressed; then with a wave of the hand dismissed the black.

“ You would take nothing at my hands the other day,” he said to the grim figure at the window. “ Change your mind, my friend, — or my foe, — and come sit and drink with me.”

MacLean reared himself from his seat, and went stiffly over to the table. “ I have eaten and drunken with an enemy before to-day,” he said. “ Once I met Ewin Mor Mackinnon upon a mountain side. He had oatcake in his sporran, and I a flask of usquebaugh. We couched in the heather, and ate and drank together, and then we rose and fought. I should have slain him but that a dozen Mackinnons came up the glen, and he turned and fled to them for cover. Here I am in an alien land; a thousand fiery crosses would not bring one clansman to my side ; I cannot fight my foe. Wherefore, then, should I take favors at his hands ? ”

“ Why should you be my foe ? ” demanded Haward. “ Look you, now ! There was a time, I suppose, when I was an insolent youngster like any one of those who lately set upon you ; but now I call myself a philosopher and man of a world for whose opinions I care not overmuch. My coat is of fine cloth, and my shirt of holland; your shirt is lockram, and you wear no coat at all: ergo, saith a world of pretty fellows, we are beings of separate planets. ‘ As the cloth is, the man is,’ — to which doctrine I am at times heretic. I have some store of yellow metal, and spend my days in ridding myself of it, — a feat which you have accomplished. A goodly number of acres is also counted unto me, but in the end my holding and your holding will measure the same. I walk a level road; you have met with your precipice, and, bruised by the fall, you move along stony ways ; but through the same gateway we go at last. Fate, not I, put you here. Wliy should you hate me who am of your order ? ”

MacLean left the table, and twice walked the length of the room, slowly and with knitted brows. “ If you mean the world-wide order, — the order of gentlemen,” — he said, coming to a pause with the breadth of the table between him and Haward, “ we may have that ground in common. The rest is debatable land. I do not take you for a sentimentalist or a redresser of wrongs. I am your storekeeper, purchased with that same yellow metal of which you so busily rid yourself; and your storekeeper I shall remain until the natural death of my term, two years hence. We are not countrymen ; we own different kings ; I may once have walked your level road, but you have never moved in the stony ways ; my eyes are blue, while yours are gray; you love your melting Southern music, and I take no joy save in the pipes ; I dare swear you like the smell of lilies which I cannot abide, and prefer fair hair in women where I would choose the dark. There is no likeness between us. Why, then ” —

Haward smiled, and drawing two glasses toward him slowly filled them with wine. “ It is true,” lie said, “that it is not my intention to become a petitioner for the pardon of a rebel to his serene and German Majesty the King ; true also that I like the fragrance of the lily. I have my fancies. Say that I am a man of whim, and that, living in a lonely house set in a Sahara of tobacco fields, it is my whim to desire the acquaintance of the only gentleman within some miles of me. Say that my fancy hath been caught by a picture drawn for me a week agone ; that, being a philosopher, I play with the idea that your spirit, knife in hand, walked at my elbow for ten years, and I knew it not. Say that the idea has for me a curious fascination. Say, finally, that I plume myself that, given the chance, I might break down this airy hatred.”

He set down the bottle, and pushed one of the brimming glasses across the table. " I should like to make trial of my strength,” he said, with a laugh. “ Come ! I did you a service to-day ; in your turn do me a pleasure.”

MacLean dragged a chair to the table, and sat down. “ I will drink with you,” he said, “ and forget for an hour. A man grows tired. It is Burgundy, is it not? Old Borlum and I emptied a bottle between us, the day he went as hostage to Wills; since then I have not tasted wine. It is a pretty color.”

Haward lifted his glass. " I drink to your future. Freedom, better days, a stake in a virgin land, friendship with a sometime foe.” He bowed to his guest and drank.

“ In my country,” answered MacLean, " where we would do most honor, we drink not to life, but to death. Crioch onarach! Like a gentleman may you die.” He drank, and sighed with pleasure.

“ The King,” said Haward. There was a china bowl, filled with red anemones, upon the table. MacLean drew it toward him, and, pressing aside the mass of bloom, passed his glass over the water in the howl. ‘£ The King, with all my heart,” he said imperturbably.

Haward poured more wine. “ I have toasted at the Kit-Kat many a piece of brocade and lace less fair than yon bit of Quaker gray that cost you a broken head. Shall we drink to Mistress Truelove Taberer ? ”

By now the Burgundy had warmed the heart and loosened the tongue of the man who had not tasted wine since the surrender of Preston. “ It is but a mile from the store to her father’s house,” he said. “ Sometimes on Sundays I go up the creek upon the Fair View side, and when I am over against the house I hollo. Ephraim comes in his boat and rows me across, and I stay for an hour. They are a strange folk, the Quakers. In her sight and in that of her people I am as good a man as you. £ Friend Angus MacLean,’ ' Friend Marmaduke Haward,’ — world’s wealth and world’s rank quite beside the question.”

He drank, and commended the wine. Haward struck a silver bell, and nade Juba bring another bottle.

“ When do you come again to the house at Fair View ? ” asked the storekeeper.

“ Very shortly. It is a lonely place, where ghosts bear me company. I hope that now and then, when I ask it, and when the duties of your day are ended, you will come help me exorcise them. You shall find welcome and good wine.” He spoke very courteously, and if he saw the humor of the situation his smile betrayed him not.

MacLean took a flower from the bowl, and plucked at its petals with nervous fingers. “ Do you mean that ? ” he asked at last.

Haward leaned across the table, and their eyes met. “ On my word I do,” said the Virginian.

The knocker on the house door sounded loudly, and a moment later a woman’s clear voice, followed by a man’s deeper tones, was heard in the hall.

“ More guests,” said Haward lightly. “ You are a Jacobite ; I drink my chocolate at St. James’ Coffee House; the gentleman approaching — despite his friendship for Orrery and for the Bishop of Rochester — is but a Hanover Tory; but the lady, — the lady wears only white roses, and every 10th of June makes a birthday feast.”

The storekeeper rose hastily to take his leave, but was prevented both by Haward’s restraining gesture and by the entrance of the two visitors who were now ushered in by the grinning Juba. Haward stepped forward. “You are very welcome, Colonel. Evelyn, this is kind. Your woman told me this morning that you were not well, else ” —

“ A migraine,” she answered, in her clear, low voice. “ I am better now, and my father desired me to take the air with him.”

“ We return to Westover to-morrow,” said that sprightly gentleman. “ Evelyn is like David of old, and pines for water from the spring at home. It also appears that the many houses and thronged streets of this town weary her, who, poor child, is used to an Arcady called London ! When will you come to us at Westover, Marmaduke ? ”

“ I cannot tell,” Haward answered. “I must first put my own house in order, so that I may in my turn entertain my friends.”

As he spoke he moved aside, so as to include in the company MacLean, who stood beside the table. “ Evelyn,” he said, “ let me make known to you — and to you, Colonel — a Scots gentleman who hath broken his spear in his tilt with fortune, as hath been the luck of many a gallant man before him. Mistress Evelyn Byrd, Colonel Byrd — Mr. MacLean, who was an officer in the Highland force taken at Preston, and who has been for some years a prisoner of war in Virginia.”

The lady’s curtsy was low ; the Colonel bowed as to his friend’s friend. If his eyebrows went up, and if a smile twitched the corners of his lips, the falling curls of his periwig hid from view these tokens of amused wonder. MacLean bowed somewhat stiffly, as one grown rusty in such matters. “ I am in addition Mr. Marmaduke Haward’s storekeeper,” he said succinctly, then turned to the master of Fair View. “ It grows late,” he announced, “ and I must be back at the store to-night. Have you any message for Saunderson ? ”

“ None,” answered Haward. “ I go myself to Fair View to-morrow, and then I shall ask you to drink with me again.”

As he spoke he held out his hand. MacLean looked at it, sighed, then touched it with his own. A gleam as of wintry laughter came into his blue eyes. “ I doubt that I shall have to get me a new foe,” he said, with regret in his voice.

When he had bowed to the lady and to her father, and had gone out of the room and down the lilac-bordered path and through the gate, and when the three at the window had watched him turn into Duke of Gloucester Street, the master of Westover looked at the master of Fair View and burst out laughing. “ Ludwell hath for an overseer the scapegrace younger son of a baronet; and there are three brothers of an excellent name under indentures to Robert Cartel-. I have at Westover a gardener who annually makes the motto of his house to spring in pease and asparagus. I have not had him to drink with me yet, and t’ other day I heard Ludwell give to the baronet’s son a hound’s rating.”

“I do not drink with the name,” said Haward coolly. “ I drink with the man. The churl or coward may pass me by, but the gentleman, though his hands be empty, I stop.”

The other laughed again; then dismissed the question with a wave of his hand, and pulled out a great gold watch with cornelian seals. “ Carter swears that Dr. Contesse hath a specific that is as sovereign for the gout as is St. Andrew’s cross for a rattlesnake bite. I ’ve had twinges lately, and the doctor lives hard by. Evelyn, will you rest here while I go petition Æsculapius ? Haward, when I have the recipe I will return, and impart it to you against the time when you need it. No, no, child, stay where you are ! I will be back anon.”

Having waved aside his daughter’s faint protest, the Colonel departed, — a gallant figure of a man, with a pretty wit and a heart that was benevolently gay. As he went down the path he paused to gather a sprig of lilac. “ “Westover — Fair View,” he said to himself, and smiled, and smelled the lilac; then — though his ills were somewhat apocryphal — walked off at a gouty pace across the buttercup-sprinkled green toward the house of Dr. Contesse.

Haward and Evelyn, left alone, kept silence for a time in the quiet room that was filled with late sunshine and the fragrance of flowers. He stood by the window, and she sat in a great chair, with her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes upon them. , When silence had become more loud than speech, she turned in her seat and addressed herself to him.

“ I have known you do many good deeds,” she said slowly. “That gentleman that was here is your servant, is he not, and an exile, and unhappy ? And you sent him away comforted. It was a generous thing.”

Haward moved restlessly. “ A generous thing,” he answered. “ Ay, it was generous. I can do such things at times, and why I do them who can tell ? Not I! Do you think that I care for that grim Highlander, who drinks my death in place of my health, who is of a nation that I dislike, and a party that is not mine ? ”

She shook her head. “ I do not know. And yet you helped him.”

Haward left the window, and came and sat beside her. “ Yes, I helped him. I am not sure, but I think I did it because, when first we met, he told me that he hated me, and meant the thing he said. It is my humor to fix my own position in men’s minds ; to lose the thing I have that I may gain the thing I have not; to overcome, and never prize the victory ; to hunt down a quarry, and feel no ardor in the chase ; to strain after a goal, and yet care not if I never reach it.”

He took her fan in his hand, and fell to counting the slender ivory sticks. “ I tread the stage as a fine gentleman,” he said. “ It is the part for which I was cast, and I play it well with proper mien and gait. I was not asked if I would like the part, but I think that I do like it, as much as I like anything. Seeing that I must play it, and that there is that within me which cries out against slovenliness, I play it as an artist should. Magnanimity goes with it, does it not, and generosity, courtesy, care for the thing which is, and not for that which seems ? Why, then, with these and other qualities I strive to endow the character.”

He closed the fan, and, leaning back in his chair, shaded his eyes with his hand. “ When the lights are out,” he said ; “ when forever and a night the actor bids the stage farewell; when, stripped of mask and tinsel, he goes home to that Auditor who set him his part, then perhaps he will be told what manner of man he is. The glass that now he dresses before tells him not; but he thinks a truer glass would show a shrunken figure.”

He sat in silence for a moment; then laughed, and gave her back her fan. “ Am I to come to Westover, Evelyn? ” he asked. “ Your father presses, and I have not known what answer to make him.”

“ You will give us pleasure by your coming,” she said gently and at once. “ My father wishes your advice as to the ordering of his library ; and you know that my pretty stepmother likes you well.”

“ Will it please you to have me come ? ” he asked, with his eyes upon her face.

She met his gaze very quietly. “ Why not ? ” she answered simply. “ You will help me in my flower garden, and sing with me in the evening, as of old.”

“ Evelyn,” he said, “ if what I am about to say to you distresses you, lift your hand, and I will cease to speak. Since a day and an hour in the woods yonder, I have been thinking much. I wish to wipe that hour from your memory as I wipe it from mine, and to begin afresh. You are the fairest woman that I know, and the best. I beg you to accept my reverence, homage, love ; not the boy’s love, perhaps, perhaps not the love that some men have to squander, but my love. A quiet love, a lasting trust, deep pride and pleasure ” —

At her gesture he broke off, sat in silence for a moment, then rising went to the window, and with slightly contracted brows stood looking out at the sunshine that was slipping away. Presently he was aware that she stood beside him.

She was holding out her hand. “ It is that of a friend,” she said. “No, do not kiss it, for that is the act of a lover. And you are not my lover, — oh, not yet, not yet! ” A soft, exquisite blush stole over her face and neck, but she did not lower her lovely candid eyes. “ Perhaps some day, some summer day at Westover, it will all be different,” she breathed, and turned away.

Haward caught her hand, and bending pressed his lips upon it. “ It is different now ! ” he cried. “ Next week I shall come to Westover ! ”

He led her back to the great chair, and presently she asked some question as to the house at Fair View. He plunged into an account of the cases of goods which had followed him from England by the Falcon, and which now lay in the rooms that were yet to be swept and garnished ; then spoke lightly and whimsically of the solitary state in which he must live, and of the entertainments which, to be in the Virginia fashion, he must give. While he talked she sat and watched him, with the faint smile upon her lips. The sunshine left the floor and the wall, and a dankness from the long grass and the closing flowers and the heavy trees in the adjacent churchyard stole into the room. With the coming of the dusk conversation languished, and the two sat in silence until the return of the Colonel.

If that gentleman did not light the darkness like a star, at least his entrance into a room invariably produced the effect of a sudden accession of wax lights, very fine and clear and bright. He broke a jest or two, bade laughing farewell to the master of Fair View, and carried off his daughter upon his arm. Haward walked with them to the gate, and came back alone, stepping thoughtfully between the lilac bushes.

It was not until Juba had brought candles, and he had taken his seat at table before the half-emptied bottle of wine, that it came to Haward that he had wished to tell Evelyn of the brown girl who had run for the guinea, but had forgotten to do so.

XI.

AUDREY OF THE GARDEN.

The creek that ran between Fair View and the glebe lands was narrow and deep ; rocking upon it was a crazy boat belonging to the minister, and moored to a stake driven into a bit of marshy ground below the orchard. To this boat, of an early, sunny morning, came Audrey, and, standing erect, pole in hand, pushed out from the reedy bank into the slow-moving stream. It moved so slowly and was so clear that its depth seemed the deep blue depth of the sky, with now and then a tranquil cloud to be glided over. The banks were low and of the greenest grass, save where they sank still lower and reeds abounded, or where some colored bush, heavy with bloom, bent to meet its reflected image. It was so fair that Audrey began to sing as she went down the stream ; and without knowing why she chose it, she sang a love song learned out of one of Darden’s ungodly books, a plaintive and passionate lay addressed by some cavalier to his mistress of an hour. She sang not loudly, but very sweetly ; carelessly, too, and as if to herself; now and then repeating a line twice or maybe thrice; pleased with the sweet melancholy of the notes, but not thinking overmuch of the meaning of the words. They died upon her lips when Hugon rose from a lair of reeds and called to her to stop. “ Come to the shore, ma’m’selle ! ” he cried. “ See, I have brought you a ribbon from the town. Behold ! ” and he fluttered a crimson streamer.

Audrey caught her breath ; then gazed, reassured, at the five yards of water between her and the bank. Had Hugon stood there in his hunting dress, she would have felt them no security; but he was wearing his coat and breeches of fine cloth, his ruffled shirt, and his great black periwig. A wetting would not be to his mind.

As she answered not, but went on her way, silent now, and with her slender figure bending with the motion of the pole, he frowned and shrugged ; then took up his pilgrimage, and with his light and swinging stride kept alongside of the boat. The ribbon lay across his arm, and he turned it in the sunshine. “ If you come not and get it,” he wheedled, “ I will throw it in the water.”

The angry tears sprang to Audrey’s eyes. “ Do so, and save me the trouble,” she answered, and then was sorry that she had spoken.

The red came into the swarthy cheeks of the man upon the bank. “ You love me not,” he said. “ Good ! You have told me so before. But here I am! ”

“ Then here is a coward ! ” said Audrey. “ I do not wish you to walk there. I do not wish you to speak to me. Go back! ”

Hngon’s teeth began to show. “ I go not,” he answered, with something between a snarl and a smirk. “ I love you, and I follow on your path, — like a lover.”

“Like an Indian!” cried the girl.

The arrow pierced the heel. The face which he turned upon her was the face of a savage, made grotesque and horrible, as war paint and feathers could not have made it, by the bushy black wig and the lace cravat.

“Audrey!” he called. “Morning Light! Sunshine in the Dark ! Dancing Water ! Audrey that will not be called ‘ mademoiselle ’ nor have the wooing of the son of a French chief ! Then shall she have the wooing of the son of a Monacan woman. I am a hunter. I will woo as they woo in the woods.”

Audrey bent to her pole, and made faster progress down the creek. Her heart was hot and angry, and yet she was afraid. All dreadful things, all things that oppressed with horror, all things that turned one white and cold, so cold and still that one could not run away, were summed up for her in the word “ Indian.” To her the eyes of Hugon were basilisk eyes, — they drew her and held her ; and when she looked into them, she saw flames rising and bodies of murdered kindred ; then the mountains loomed above her again, and it was night-time, and she was alone save for the dead, and mad with fear and with the quiet.

The green banks went by, and the creek began to widen. " Where are you going ? ” called the trader. “ Wheresoever you go, at the end of your path stand my village and my wigwam. You cannot stay all day in that boat. If you come not back at the bidden hour, Darden’s squaw will beat you. Come over, Morning Light, come over, and take me in your boat, and tie your hair with my gift. I will not hurt you. I will tell you the French love songs that my father sang to my mother. I will speak of land that I have bought (oh, I have prospered, ma’m’selle !), and of a house that I mean to build, and of a woman that I wish to put in the house, — a Sunshine in the Dark to greet me when I come from my hunting in the great forests beyond the falls, from my trading with the nation of the Tuscaroras, with the villages of the Monacans. Come over to me, Morning Light! ”

The creek widened and widened, then doubled a grassy cape all in the shadow of a towering sycamore. Beyond the point, crowning the low green slope of the bank, and topped with a shaggy fell of honeysuckle and ivy, began a red brick wall. Halfway down its length it broke, and six shallow steps led up to an iron gate, through whose bars one looked into a garden. Gazing on down the creek past the further stretch of the wall, the eye came upon the shining reaches of the river.

Audrey turned the boat’s head toward the steps and the gate in the wall. The man on the opposite shore let fall an oath.

“ So you go to Fair View house ! ” he called across the stream. “ There are only negroes there, unless ” — he came to a pause, and his face changed again, and out of his eyes looked the spirit of some hot, ancestral French lover, cynical, suspicious, and jealously watchful — “ unless their master is at home,” he ended, and laughed.

Audrey touched the wall, and over a great iron hook projecting therefrom threw a looped rope, and fastened her boat.

“ I stay here until you come forth ! " swore Hugon from across the creek. “ And then I follow you back to where you must moor the boat. And then I shall walk with you to the minister’s house. Until we meet again, ma’m’selle ! ”

Audrey answered not, but sped up the steps to the gate. A sick fear lest it should be locked possessed her ; but it opened at her touch, disclosing a long, sunny path, paved with brick, and shut between lines of tall, thick, and smoothly clipped box. The gate clanged to behind her ; ten steps, and the boat, the creek, and the farther shore were hidden from her sight. With this comparative bliss came a faintness and a trembling that presently made her slip down upon the warm and sunny floor, and lie there, with her face within her arm and the tears upon her cheeks. The odor of the box wrapped her like a mantle ; a lizard glided past her; somewhere in open spaces birds were singing; finally a greyhound came down the path, and put its nose into the hollow of her hand.

She rose to her knees, and curled her arm around the dog’s neck ; then, with a long sigh, stood up, and asked of herself if this were the way to the house. She had never seen the house at close range, had never been in this walled garden. It was from Williamsburgh that the minister had taken her to his home, eleven years before. Sometimes from the river, in those years, she had seen, rising above the trees, the steep roof and the upper windows ; sometimes upon the creek she had gone past the garden wall, and had smelled the flowers upon the other side.

In her lonely life, with the beauty of the earth about her to teach her that there might be greater beauty that she yet might see ; with a daily round of toil and sharp words to push her to that escape which lay in a world of dreams, she had entered that world, and thrived therein. It was a world that was as pure as a pearl, and more fantastic than an Arabian tale. She knew that when she died she could take nothing out of life with her to heaven. But with this other world it was different, and all that she had or dreamed of that was fair she carried through its portals. This house was there. Long closed, walled in, guarded by tall trees, seen at far intervals and from a distance, as through a glass darkly, it had become to her an enchanted spot, about which played her quick fancy, but where her feet might never stray.

But now the spell which had held the place in slumber was snapped, and her feet were set in its pleasant paths. She moved down the alley between the lines of box, and the greyhound went with her. The branches of a walnut tree drooped heavily across the way; when she had passed them she saw the house, square, dull red, bathed in sunshine. A moment, and the walk led her between squat pillars of living green into the garden out of the fairy tale.

Dim, fragrant, and old time ; walled in; here sunshiny spaces, there cool shadows of fruit trees ; broken by circles and squares of box ; green with the grass and the leaves, red and purple and gold and white with the flowers ; with birds singing, with the great silver river murmuring by without the wall at the foot of the terrace, with the voice of a man who sat beneath a cherry tree reading aloud to himself, — such was the garden that she came upon, a young girl, and heavy at heart.

She was so near that she could hear the words of the reader, and she knew the piece that he was reading; for you must remember that she was not untaught, and that Darden had books.

The greyhound ran from Audrey to the man who was reading these verses with taste and expression, and also with a smile half sad and half cynical. He glanced from his page, saw the girl where she stood against the dark pillar of the box, tossed aside the book, and went to her down the grassy path between rows of nodding tulips. “ Why, child ! ” he said. “ Did you come up like a flower? I am glad to see you in my garden, little maid. Are there Indians without ? ”

At least, to Audrey, there were none within. She had been angered, sick at heart and sore afraid, but she was no longer so. In this world that she had entered it was good to be alive; she knew that she was safe, and of a sudden she felt that the sunshine was very golden, the music very sweet. To Haward, looking at her with a smile, she gave a folded paper which she pulled from the bosom of her gown. “ The minister sent me with it,” she explained, and curtsied shyly.

Haward took the paper, opened it, and fell to poring over the crabbed characters with which it was adorned. “ Ay ? Gratulateth himself that this fortunate parish hath at last for vestryman Mr. Marmaduke Haward ; knoweth that, seeing I am what I am, my influence will be paramount with said vestry; commendeth himself to my favor ; beggeth that I listen not to charges made by a factious member anent a vastly magnified occurrence at the French ordinary ; prayeth that he may shortly present himself at Fair View, and explain away certain calumnies with which his enemies have poisoned the ears of the Commissary; hopeth that I am in good health; and is my very obedient servant to command. Humph ! ”

He let the paper flutter to the ground, and turned to Audrey with a kindly smile. “ I am much afraid that this man of the church, whom I gave thee for guardian, child, is but a rascal, after all, and a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But let him go hang while I show you my garden.”

Going closer, he glanced at her keenly ; then went nearer still, and touched her cheek with his forefinger. “You have been crying,” he said. “There were Indians, then. How many and how strong, Audrey? ”

The dark eyes that met his were the eyes of the child who, in the darkness, through the corn, had run from him, her helper. “There was one,” she whispered, and looked over her shoulder.

Haward drew her to the seat beneath the cherry tree, and there, while he sat beside her, elbow on knee and chin on hand, watching her, she told him of Hugon. It was so natural to tell him. When she had made an end of her halting, broken sentences, and he spoke to her gravely and kindly, she hung upon his words, and thought him wise and wonderful as a king. He told her that he would speak to Darden, and did not despair of persuading that worthy to forbid the trader his house. Also he told her that in this settled, pleasant, every-day Virginia, and in the eighteenth century, a maid, however poor and humble, might not be married against her will. If this half-breed bad threats to utter, there was always the law of the land. A few hours in the pillory or a taste of the sheriff’s whip might not be amiss. Finally, if the trader made his suit again, Audrey must let him know, and Monsieur Jean Hugon should be taught that he had another than a helpless, friendless girl to deal with.

Audrey listened and was comforted, but the shadow did not quite leave her eyes. “ He is waiting for me now,” she said fearfully to Haward, who had not missed the shadow. “ He followed me down the creek, and is waiting over against the gate in the wall. When I go back he will follow me again, and at last I will have to cross to his side. And then he will go home with me, and make me listen to him. His eyes burn me, and when his hand touches me I see — I see ” —

Her frame shook, and she raised to his gaze a countenance suddenly changed into Tragedy’s own. “I don’t know why,” she said, in a stricken voice, “ but of them all that I kissed good-by that night I now see only Molly. I suppose she was about as old as I am now when they killed her. We were always together. I can’t remember her face very clearly; only her eyes, and how red her lips were. And her hair : it came to her knees, and mine is just as long. For a long, long time after you went away, when I could not sleep because it was dark, or when I was frightened or Mistress Deborah beat me, I saw them all; but now I see only Molly, — Molly lying there dead.”

There was a silence in the garden, broken presently by Haward. “ Ay, Molly,” he said absently.

With his hand covering his lips and his eyes upon the ground, he fell into a brown study. Audrey sat very still for fear that she might disturb him, who was so kind to her. A passionate gratitude filled her young heart; she would have traveled round the world upon her knees to serve him. As for him, he was not thinking of the mountain girl, the oread who, in the days when he was younger and his heart beat high, had caught his light fancy, tempting him from his comrades back to the cabin in the valley, to look again into her eyes and touch the brown waves of her hair. She was ashes, and the memory of her stirred him not.

At last he looked up. “ I myself will take you home, child. This fellow shall not come near you. And cease to think of these gruesome things that happened long ago. You are young and fair; you should be happy. I will see to it that ” —

He broke off, and again looked thoughtfully at the ground. The book which he had tossed aside was lying upon the grass, open at the poem which he had been reading. He stooped and raised the volume, and, closing it, laid it upon the bench beside her. Presently he laughed. “Come, child!” he said. “You have youth. I begin to think my own not past recall. Come and let me show you my dial that I have just had put up.”

There was no load at Audrey’s heart: the vision of Molly had passed ; the fear of Hugon was a dwindling cloud. She was safe in this old sunny garden, with harm shut without. And as a flower opens to the sunshine, so because she was happy she grew more fair. Audrey every day, Audrey of the infrequent speech and the wide dark eyes, the startled air, the shy, fugitive smiles, — that was not Audrey of the garden. Audrey of the garden had shining eyes, a wild elusive grace, laughter as silvery as that which had rung from her sister’s lips, years agone, beneath the sugar tree in the faroff blue mountains, quick gestures, quaint fancies which she feared not to speak out, the charm of mingled humility and spirit; enough, in short, to make Audrey of the garden a name to conjure with.

They came to the sundial, and leaned thereon. Around its rim were graved two lines from Herrick, and Audrey traced the letters with her finger. “The philosophy is sound,” remarked Haward, “ and the advice worth the taking. Let us go see if there are any rosebuds to gather from the bushes yonder. Damask buds should look well against your hair, child.”

When they came to the rosebushes he broke for her a few scarce-opened buds, and himself fastened them in the coils of her hair. Innocent and glad as she was, — glad even that he thought her fair, — she trembled beneath his touch, and knew not why she trembled. When the rosebuds were in place they went to see the clove pinks, and when they had seen the clove pinks they walked slowly up another alley of box, and across a grass plot to a side door of the house ; for he had said that he must show her in what great, lonely rooms he lived.

Audrey measured the height and breadth of the house with her eyes. “ It is a large place for one to live in alone,” she said, and laughed. “ There’s a book at the Widow Constance’s ; Barbara once showed it to me. It is all about a pilgrim ; and there’s a picture of a great square house, quite like this, that was a giant’s castle, — Giant Despair. Good giant, eat me not! ”

Child, woman, spirit of the woodland, she passed before him into a dim, cool room, all littered with books. “ My library,” said Haward, with a wave of his hand. “ But the curtains and pictures are not hung, nor the books in place. Hast any schooling, little maid ? Canst read ? ”

Audrey flushed with pride that she could tell him that she was not ignorant; not like Barbara, who could not read the giant’s name in the pilgrim book.

“ The crossroads schoolmaster taught me,” she explained. “ He has a scar in each hand, and is a very wicked man, but he knows more than the Commissary himself. The minister, too, has a cupboard filled with books, and he buys the new ones as the ships bring them in. When I have time, and Mistress Deborah will not let me go to the woods, I read. And I remember what I read. I could ” —

A smile trembled upon her lips, and her eyes grew brighter. Fired by the desire that he should praise her learning, and in her very innocence bold as a Wortley or a Howe, she began to repeat the lines which he had been reading beneath the cherry tree : —

The rhythm of the words, the passion of the thought, the pleased surprise that she thought she read in his face, the gesture of his hand, all spurred her on from sentence to sentence, line to line. And now she was not herself, but that other woman, and she was giving voice to all her passion, all her woe. The room became a convent cell; her ragged dress the penitent’s trailing black. That Audrey, lithe of mind as of body ; who in the woods seemed the spirit of the woods, in the garden the spirit of the garden, on the water the spirit of the water, — that this Audrey, in using the speech of the poet, should embody and become the spirit of that speech was perhaps, considering all things, not so strange. At any rate, and however her power came about, at that moment, in Fair View house, a great actress was speaking.

The speaker lost a word, hesitated, became confused. Finally silence ; then the Audrey of a while before, standing with heaving bosom, shy as a fawn, fearful that she had not pleased him, after all. For if she had done so, surely he would have told her as much. As it was, he had said but one word, and that beneath his breath, “ Eloïsa ! ”

It would seem that her fear was unfounded ; for when he did speak, there were, God wot, sugarplums enough. And Audrey, who in her workaday world was always blamed, could not know that the praise that was so sweet was less wholesome than the blame.

Leaving the library they went into the hall, and from the hall looked into great, echoing, half - furnished rooms. All about lay packing cases, many of them open, with rich stuffs streaming from them. Ornaments were huddled on tables, mirrors and pictures leaned their faces to the walls ; everywhere was disorder.

“ The negroes are careless, and to-day I held their hands,” said Haward. “ I must get some proper person to see to this gear.”

Upstairs and down they went through the house, that seemed very large and very still, and finally they came out of the great front door, and down the stone steps on to the terrace. Below them, sparkling in the sunshine, lay the river, the opposite shore all in a haze of light. “ I must go home,” Audrey shyly reminded him, whereat he smiled assent, and they went, not through the box alley to the gate in the wall, but down the terrace, and out upon the hot brown boards of the landing. Haward, stepping into a boat, handed her to a seat in the stern, and himself took the oars. Leaving the landing, they came to the creek and entered it. Presently they were gliding beneath the red brick wall with the honeysuckle atop. On the opposite grassy shore, seated in a blaze of noon sunshine, was Hugon.

They in the boat took no notice. Haward, rowing, spoke evenly on, his theme himself and the gay and lonely life he had led these eleven years; and Audrey, though at first sight of the waiting figure she had paled and trembled, was too safe, too happy, to give to trouble any part of this magic morning. She kept her eyes on Haward’s face, and almost forgot the man who had risen from the grass and in silence was following them.

Now, had the trader, in his hunting shirt and leggings, his moccasins and fur cap, been walking in the great woods, this silence, even with others in company, would have been natural enough to his Indian blood ; but Monsieur Jean Hugon, in peruke and laced coat, walking in a civilized country, with words a-plenty and as hot as fire water in his heart, and none upon his tongue, was a figure strange and sinister. He watched the two in the boat with an impassive face, and he walked like an Indian on an enemy’s trail, so silently that he scarce seemed to breathe, so lightly that his heavy boots failed to crush the flowers or the tender grass.

Haward rowed on, telling Audrey stories of the town, of great men whose names she knew, and beautiful ladies of whom she had never heard ; and she sat before him with her slim brown hands folded in her lap and the rosebuds withering in her hair, while through the reeds and the grass and the bushes of the bank over against them strode Hugon in his Blenheim wig and his winecolored coat. Well-nigh together the three reached the stake driven in among the reeds, a hundred yards below the minister’s house. Haward fastened the boat, and, motioning to Audrey to stay for the moment where she was, stepped out upon the bank to confront the trader, who, walking steadily and silently as ever, was almost upon them.

But it was broad daylight, and Hugon, with his forest instincts, preferred, when he wished to speak to the point, to speak in the dark. He made no pause; only looked with his fierce black eyes at the quiet, insouciant, fine gentleman standing with folded arms between him and the boat; then passed on, going steadily up the creek toward the bend where the water left the open smiling fields and took to the forest. He never looked back, but went like a hunter with his prey before him. Presently the shadows of the forest touched him, and Audrey and Haward were left alone.

The latter laughed. “ If his courage is of the quality of his lace — What, cowering, child, and the tears in your eyes ! You were braver when you were not so tall, in those mountain days. Hay, no need to wet your shoe.”

He lifted her in his arms, and set her feet upon firm grass. “ How long since I carried you across a stream and up a dark hillside ! ” he said. “ And yet today it seems but yesternight! Now, little maid, the Indian has run away, and the path to the house is clear.”

In his smoke-filled, untidy best room Darden sat at table, his drink beside him, his pipe between his fingers, and open before him a book of jests, propped by a tome of divinity. His wife coming in from the kitchen, he burrowed in the litter upon the table until he found an open letter, which he flung toward her. “ The Commissary threatens again, damn him ! ” he said between smoke puffs. “It seems that t’ other night, when I was in my cups at the tavern, Le Neve and the fellow who has Ware Creek parish— I forget his name — must needs come riding by. I was dicing with Paris. Hugon held the stakes. I dare say we kept not mum. And out of pure brotherly love and charity, my good, kind gentlemen ride on to Williamsburgh on a tale - bearing errand ! Is that child never coming back, Deborah ? ”

“ She’s coming now,” answered his wife, with her eyes upon the letter. I was watching from the upper window. He rowed her up the creek himself.”

The door opened, and Audrey entered the room. Darden turned heavily in his chair, and took the long pipe from between his teeth. “ Well ? ” he said. “ You gave him my letter ? ”

Audrey nodded. Her eyes were dreamy ; the red of the buds in her hair had somehow stolen to her cheeks ; she could scarce keep her lips from smiling. “ He bade me tell you to come to supper with him on Monday,” she said. “ And the Falcon that we saw come in last week brought furnishing for the great house. Oh, Mistress Deborah, the most beautiful things ! The rooms are all to be made fine ; and the negro women do not the work aright, and he wants some one to oversee them. He says that he has learned that in England Mistress Deborah was own woman to my Lady Squander, and so should know about hangings and china and the placing of furniture. And he asks that she come to Fair View morning after morning until the house is in order. He wishes me to come, too. Mistress Deborah will much oblige him, he says, and he will not forget her kindness.”

Somewhat out of breath, but very happy, she looked with eager eyes from one guardian to the other. Darden emptied and refilled his pipe, scattering the ashes upon the book of jests. “ Very good,” he said briefly.

Into the thin visage of the ex-waiting-woman, who had been happier at my Lady Squander’s than in a Virginia parsonage, there crept a tightened smile. In her way, when she was not in a passion, she was fond of Audrey ; but, in temper or out of temper, she was fonder of the fine things which for a few days she might handle at Fair View house. And the gratitude of the master thereof might appear in coins, or in an order on his store for silk and lace. When, in her younger days, at Bath or in town, she had served fine mistresses, she had been given many a guinea for carrying a note or contriving an interview, and in changing her estate she had not changed her code of morals. “We must oblige Mr. Haward, of course,” she said complacently. “ I warrant you that I can give things an air! There’s not a parlor in this parish that does not set my teeth on edge ! Now at my Lady Squander’s ” — She embarked upon reminiscences of past splendor, checked only by her husband’s impatient demand for dinner.

Audrey, preparing to follow her into the kitchen, was stopped, as she would have passed the table, by the minister’s heavy hand. “ The roses at Fair View bloom early,” he said, turning her about that he might better see the red cluster in her hair. “ Look you, Audrey! I wish you no great harm, child. You mind me at times of one that I knew many years ago, before ever I was chaplain to my Lord Squander or husband to my Lady Squander’s waiting woman. A hunter may use a decoy, and he may also, on the whole, prefer to keep that decoy as good as when ’t was made. Buy not thy roses too dearly, Audrey.”

To Audrey he spoke in riddles. She took from her hair the loosened buds, and looked at them lying in her hand. “ I did not buy them,” she said. “ They grew in the sun on the south side of the great house, and Mr. Haward gave them to me.”

XII.

THE PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN.

June came to tide-water Virginia with long, warm days and with the odor of many roses. Day by day the cloudless sunshine visited the land ; night by night the large pale stars looked into its waters. It was a slumberous land, of many creeks and rivers that were wide, slow, and deep, of tobacco fields and lofty, solemn forests, of vague marshes, of white mists of a haze of heat far and near. The moon of blossoms was past, and the red men — few in number now — had returned from their hunting, and lay in the shade of the trees in the villages that the English had left them, while the women brought them fish from the weirs, and strawberries from the vines that carpeted evei’y poisoned field or neglected clearing. The black men toiled amidst the tobacco and the maize; at noontide it was as hot in the fields as in the middle passage, and the voices of those who sang over their work fell to a dull crooning. The white men who were bound served listlessly; they that were well were as lazy as the weather ; they that were newly come over and ill with the “ seasoning ” fever tossed upon their pallets, longing for the cooling waters of home. The white men who were free swore that the world, though fair, was warm, and none walked if he could ride. The sunny, dusty roads were left for shadowed bridle paths ; in a land where most places could be reached by boat, the water would have been the highway but that the languid air would not fill the sails. It was agreed that the heat was unnatural, and that, likely enough, there would be a deal of fever during the summer.

But there was thick shade in the Fair View garden, and when there was air at all it visited the terrace above the river. The rooms of the house were large and high-pitched ; draw to the shutters, and they became as cool as caverns. Around the place the heat lay in wait: heat of wide, shadowless fields, where Haward’s slaves toiled from morn to eve ; heat of the great river, unstirred by any wind, hot and sleeping beneath the blazing sun; heat of sluggish creeks and of the marshes, shadeless as the fields. Once reach the mighty trees drawn like a cordon around house and garden, and there was escape.

To and fro and up and down in the house went the erst waiting woman to my Lady Squander, carrying matters with a high hand. The negresses who worked under her eye found her a hard taskmistress. Was a room clean today, to-morrow it was found that there was dust upon the polished floor, finger marks on the paneled walls. The same furniture must be placed now in this room, now in that; china slowly washed and bestowed in one closet transferred to another ; an eternity spent upon the household linen, another on the sewing and resewing, the hanging and rehanging, of damask curtains. The slaves, silent when the greenish eyes and tight, vixenish face were by, chattered, laughed, and sung when they were left alone. If they fell idle, and little was done of a morning, they went unrebuked ; thoroughness, and not haste, appearing to be Mistress Deborah’s motto.

The master of Fair View found it too noisy in his house to sit therein, and too warm to ride abroad. There were left the seat built round the cherry tree in the garden, the long, cool box walk, and the terrace with a summer house at either end. It was pleasant to read out of doors, pacing the box walk, or sitting beneath the cherry tree, with the ripening fruit overhead. If the book was long in reading, if morning by morning Haward’s finger slipped easily in between the selfsame leaves, perhaps it was the fault of poet or philosopher. If Audrey’s was the fault, she knew it not.

How could she know it, who knew herself, that she was a poor, humble maid, whom, out of pure charity and knightly tenderness for weak and sorrowful things, he long ago had saved, since then had maintained, now was kind to ; and knew him, that he was learned and great and good, the very perfect gentle knight who, as he rode to win the princess, yet could stoop from his saddle to raise and help the herd girl ? She had found of late that she was often wakeful of nights ; when this happened, she lay and looked out of her window at the stars and wondered about the princess. She thought that the princess and the lady who had given her the guinea might be one.

In the great house she would have worked her fingers to the bone. Her strong young arms lifted heavy weights ; her quick feet ran up and down stairs for this or that before Mistress Deborah could turn around; she would have taken the waxed cloths from the negroes, and upon her knees and with willing hands have made to shine like mirrors the floors that were to be trodden by knight and princess. But almost every morning, before she had worked an hour, Haward would call to her from the box walk or the seat beneath the cherry tree ; and “Go, child,” would say Mistress Deborah, looking up from her task of the moment.

The garden continued to be the enchanted garden. To gather its flowers, red and white, to pace with him cool paved walks between walls of scented box, to sit beside him beneath the cherry tree or upon the grassy terrace, looking out upon the wide, idle river, — it was dreamy bliss, a happiness too rare to last. There was no harm; not that she ever dreamed there could be. The house overlooked garden and terrace; the slaves passed and repassed the open windows ; Juba came and went; now and then Mistress Deborah herself would sally forth to receive instructions concerning this or that from the master of the house. And every day, at noon, the slaves drew to all the shutters save those of the master’s room, and the minister’s wife and ward made their curtsies and went home. The latter, like a child, counted the hours upon the clock until the next morning; but then she was not used to happiness, and the wine of it made her slightly drunken.

The master of Fair View told himself that there was infection in this lotus air of Virginia. A fever ran in his veins that made him languid of will, somewhat sluggish of thought, willing to spend one day like another, and all in a long dream. Sometimes, in the afternoons, when he was alone in the garden or upon the terrace, with the house blank and silent behind him, the slaves gone to the quarters, he tossed aside his book, and, with his chin upon his hand and his eyes upon the sweep of the river, first asked himself whither he was going, and then, finding no satisfactory answer, fell to brooding. Once, going into the house, he chanced to come upon his full-length reflection in a mirror newly hung, and stopped short to gaze upon himself. The parlor of his lodgings at Williamsburgh and the last time that he had seen Evelyn came to him, conjured up by the memory of certain words of his own.

“ A truer glass might show a shrunken figure,” he repeated, and with a quick and impatient sigh he looked at the image in the mirror.

To the eye, at least, the figure was not shrunken. It was the figure of a man still young, and of a handsome face and much distinction of bearing. The dress was perfect in its quiet elegance; the air of the man composed, — a trifle sad, a trifle mocking. Haward snapped his fingers at the reflection. “ The portrait of a gentleman,” he said, and passed on.

That night, in his own room, he took from an escritoire a picture of Evelyn Byrd, done in miniature after a painting by a pupil of Kneller, and, carrying it over to the light of the myrtle candles upon the table, sat down and fell to studying it. After a while he let it drop from his hand, and leaned back in his chair, thinking.

The night air, rising slightly, bent back the flame of the candles, around which moths were fluttering, and caused strange shadows upon the walls. They were thick about the curtained bed whereon had died the elder Haward, — a proud man, choleric, and hard to turn from his purposes. Into the mind of his son, sitting staring at these shadows, came the fantastic notion that amongst them, angry and struggling vainly for speech, might be his father’s shade. The night was feverish, of a heat and lassitude to foster grotesque and idle fancies. Haward smiled, and spoke aloud to his imaginary ghost.

f£ You need not strive for speech,” he said. " I know what you would say. Was it for this I built this house, bought land and slaves ? . ..Fair View and Westover, Westover and Fair View. A lady that will not wed thee because she loves thee! Zoons, Marmaduke! thou puttest me beside my patience ! ... As for this other, set no nameless,barefoot wench where sat thy mother ! King Cophetua and the beggar maid, indeed! I warrant you Cophetua was something under three-and-thirty !”

Haward ceased to speak for his father, and sighed for himself. “ Moral: Three-and-thirty must be wiser in his day and generation.” He rose from his chair, and began to walk the room. “ If not Cophetua, what then, — what then ? ” Passing the table, he took up the miniature again. “ The villain of the piece, I suppose, Evelyn ? ” he asked.

The pure and pensive face seemed to answer him. He put the picture hastily down, and recommenced his pacing to and fro. From the garden below came the heavy odor of lilies, and the whisper of the river tried the nerves. Haward went to the window, and, leaning out, looked, as now each night he looked, up and across the creek toward the minister’s house. To-night there was no light to mark it; it was late, and all the world without his room was in darkness. He sat down in the window seat, looked out upon the stars and listened to the river. An hour had passed before he turned back to the room, where the candles had burned low. “I will go to Westover to-morrow,” he said. “ God knows, I should be a villain ” —

He locked the picture of Evelyn within his desk, drank his wine and water, and went to bed, strongly resolved upon retreat. In the morning he said, “ I will go to Westover this afternoon ; ” and in the afternoon he said, “I will go tomorrow.” When the morrow came, he found that the house lacked but one day of being finished, and that there was therefore no need for him to go at all.

Mistress Deborah was loath enough to take leave of damask and mirrors and ornaments of china, — the latter fine enough and curious enough to remind her of Lady Squander’s own drawingroom ; but the leaf of paper which Haward wrote upon, tore from his pocketbook, and gave her provided consolation. Her thanks were very glib, her curtsy was very deep. She was his most obliged, humble servant, and if she could serve him again he would make her proud. Would he not, now, some day, row up creek to their poor house, and taste of her perry and Shrewsbury cakes ? Audrey, standing by, raised her eyes, and made of the request a royal invitation.

For a week or more Haward abode upon his plantation, alone save for his servants and slaves. Each day he sent for the overseer, and listened gravely while that worthy expounded to him all the details of the condition and conduct of the estate ; in the early morning and the late afternoon he rode abroad through his fields and forests. Mill and ferry and rolling house were visited, and the quarters made his acquaintance. At the creek quarter and the distant ridge quarter were bestowed the newly bought, the sullen and the refractory of his chattels. When, after sunset, and the fields were silent, he rode past the cabins, coalblack figures, new from the slave deck, and still seamed at wrist and ankle, mowed and jabbered at him from over their bowls of steaming food; others, who had forgotten the jungle and the slaver, answered, when he spoke to them, in strange English ; others, born in Virginia, and remembering when he used to ride that way with his father, laughed, called him “ Marse Duke,” and agreed with him that the crop was looking mighty well. With the dark he reached the great house, and negroes from the home quarter took his horse, while Juba lighted him through the echoing hall into the lonely rooms.

From the white quarter he procured a facile lad who could read and write, and who, through too much quickness of wit, had failed to prosper in England. Him he installed as secretary, and forthwith began a correspondence with friends in England, as well as a long poem which was to serve the double purpose of giving Mr. Pope a rival and of occupying the mind of Mr. Marmaduke Haward. The letters were witty and graceful, the poem was the same ; but on the third day the secretary, pausing for the next word that should fall from his master’s lips, waited so long that he dropped asleep. When he awoke, Mr. Haward was slowly tearing into bits the work that had been done on the poem. “ It will have to wait upon my mood,” he said. " Seal up the letter to Lord Hervey, boy, and then begone to the fields. If I want you again, I will send for you.”

The next clay he proposed to himself to ride to Williamsburgh and see his acquaintances there. But even as he crossed the room to strike the bell for Juba a distaste for the town and its people came upon him. It occurred to him that instead he might take the barge and be rowed up the river to the Jaquelins’ or to Green Spring; but in a moment this plan also became repugnant. Finally he went out upon the terrace, and sat there the morning through, staring at the river. That afternoon he sent a negro to the store with a message for the storekeeper.

The Highlander, obeying the demand for his company, — the third or fourth since his day at Williamsburgh, —came shortly before twilight to the great house, and found the master thereof still upon the terrace, sitting beneath an oak, with a small table and a bottle of wine beside him.

“ Ha, Mr. MacLean! ” he cried, as the other approached. “ Some days have passed since last we laid the ghosts ! I had meant to sooner improve our acquaintance. But my house has been in disorder, and I myself, ”— he passed his hand across his face as if to wipe away the expression into which it had been set, — “I myself have been poor company. There is a witchery in the air of this place. I am become but a dreamer of dreams.”

As he spoke he motioned his guest to an empty chair, and began to pour wine for them both. His hand was not quite steady, and there was about him a restlessness of aspect most unnatural to the man. The storekeeper thought him looking worn, and as though he had passed sleepless nights.

MacLean sat down, and drew his wineglass toward him. “ It is the heat,” he said. “ Last night, in the store, I felt that I was stifling ; and I left it, and lay on the bare ground without. A star shot down the sky, and I wished that a wind as swift and strong would rise and sweep the land out to sea. When the day comes that I die, I wish to die a fierce death. It is best to die in battle, for then the mind is raised, and you taste all life in the moment before you go. If a man achieves not that, then struggle with earth or air or the waves of the sea is desirable. Driving sleet, armies of the snow, night and trackless mountains, the leap of the torrent, swollen lakes where kelpies lie in wait, wind on the sea with the black reef and the charging breakers, — it is well to dash one’s force against the force of these, and to die after fighting. But in this cursed land of warmth and ease a man dies like a dog that is old and hath lain winter and summer upon the hearthstone.” He drank his wine, and glanced again at Haward. “ I did not know that you were here,” he said. “ Saunderson told me that you were going to Westover.”

“ I was, — I am,” answered Haward briefly. Presently lie roused himself from the brown study into which he had fallen.

“ ’T is the heat, as you say. It enervates. For my part, I am willing that your wind should arise. But it will not blow to-night. There is not a breath ; the river is like glass.” He raised the wine to his lips, and drank deeply. “ Come,” he said, laughing. “ What did you at the store to-day ? And does Mistress Truelove despair of your conversion to thee and thou, and peace with all mankind? Hast procured an enemy to fill the place I have vacated ? I trust he’s no scurvy foe.”

“ I will take your questions in order,” answered the other sententiously. “ This morning I sold a deal of fine china to a parcel of fine ladies who came by water from Jamestown, and were mightily concerned to know whether your worship was gone to Westover, or had instead (as ’t was reported) shut yourself up in Fair View house. And this afternoon came over in a periagua, from the other side, a very young gentleman, with money in hand, to buy a silver-fringed glove. ‘They are sold in pairs,’ said I. ' Fellow, I require but one,’ said he. ' If Dick Allen, who hath slandered me to Mistress Betty Cocke, dareth to appear at the merrymaking at Colonel Harrison’s to-night, his cheek and this glove shall come together ! ’ ' Nathless, you must pay for both,’ I told him; and the upshot is that he leaves with me a gold button as earnest that he will bring the remainder of the price before the duel to-morrow. That Quaker maiden of whom you ask hath a soul like the soul of Colna-dona, of whom Murdoch, the harper of Coll, used to sing. She is fair as a flower after winter, and as tender as the rose flush in which swims yonder star. When I am with her, almost she persuades me to think ill of honest hatred, and to pine no longer that it was not I that had the killing of Ewin Mackinnon.” He gave a short laugh, and stooping picked up an oak twig from the ground, and with deliberation broke it into many small pieces. " Almost, but not quite,” he said. " There was in that feud nothing illusory or fantastic ; nothing of the quality that marked, mayhap, another feud of my own making. If I have found that in this latter case I took a wraith and dubbed it my enemy ; that, thinking I followed a foe, I followed a friend instead ” — He threw away the bits of bark, and straightened himself. " A friend ! ” he said, drawing his breath. " Save for this Quaker family, I have had no friend for many a year! And I cannot talk to them of honor and warfare and the wide world.” His speech was sombre, but in his eyes there was an eagerness not without pathos.

The mood of the Gael chimed with the present mood of the Saxon. As unlike in their natures as their histories, men would have called them ; and yet, far away, in dim recesses of the soul, at long distances from the flesh, each recognized the other. And it was an evening, too, in which to take care of other things than the ways and speech of every day. The heat, the hush, and the stillness appeared well-nigh preternatural. A sadness breathed over the earth ; all things seemed new and yet old ; across the spectral river the dim plains beneath the afterglow took the seeming of battlefields.

“ A friend ! ” said Haward. " There are many men who call themselves my friends. I am melancholy to-day, restless, and divided against myself. I do not know one of my acquaintance whom I would have called to be melancholy with me as I have called you.” He leaned across the table and touched MacLean’s hand that was somewhat hurriedly fingering the wineglass. " Come ! ” he said. " Loneliness may haunt the level fields as well as the ways that are rugged and steep. How many times have we held converse since that day I found you in charge of my store ? Often enough, I think, for each to know the other’s quality. Our lives have been very different, and yet I believe that we are akin. For myself, I should be glad to hold as my near friend so gallant though so unfortunate a gentleman.” He smiled and made a gesture of courtesy. " Of course Mr. MacLean may very justly not hold me in a like esteem, nor desire a closer relation.”

MacLean rose to his feet, and stood gazing across the river at the twilight shore and the clear skies. Presently he turned, and his eyes were wet. He drew his hand across them ; then looked curiously at the dew upon it. " I have not done this,” he said simply, " since a night at Preston when I wept with rage. In my country we love as we hate, with all the strength that God has given us. The brother of my spirit is to me even as the brother of my flesh. ... I used to dream that my hand was at your throat or my sword through your heart, and wake in anger that it was not so . . . and now I could love you well.”

Haward stood up, and the two men clasped hands. “ It is a pact, then,” said the Englishman. “ By my faith, the world looks not so melancholy gray as it did awhile ago. And here is Juba to say that supper waits. Lay the table for two, Juba. Mr. MacLean will bear me company.”

The storekeeper stayed late, the master of Fair View being an accomplished gentleman, a very good talker, and an adept at turning his house for the nonce into the house of his guest. Supper over they went into the library, where their wine was set, and where the Scot, who was no great reader, gazed respectfully at the wit and wisdom arow about him. “ Colonel Byrd hath more volumes at Westover,” quoth Haward, “ but mine are of the choicer quality.” Juba brought a card table, and lit more candles, while his master, unlocking a desk, took from it a number of gold pieces. These he divided into two equal portions : kept one beside him upon the polished table, and, with a fine smile, half humorous, half deprecating, pushed the other across to his guest. With an imperturbable face MacLean stacked the gold before him, and they fell to piquet, playing briskly, and with occasional application to the Madeira upon the larger table, until ten of the clock. The Highlander, then declaring that he must be no longer away from his post, swept his heap of coins across to swell his opponent’s store, and said good-night. Haward went with him to the great door, and watched him stride off through the darkness whistling The Battle of Harlaw.

That night Haward slept, and the next morning four negroes rowed him up the river to Jamestown. Mr. Jaquelin was gone to Norfolk upon business, but his beautiful wife and sprightly daughters found Mr. Marmaduke Haward altogether charming. “ ’T was as good as going to court,” they said to one another, when the gentleman, after a two hours’ visit, bowed himself out of their drawing-room. The object of their encomiums, going down river in his barge, felt his spirits lighter than they had been for some days. He spoke cheerfully to his negroes, and when the barge passed a couple of fishing boats he called to the slim brown lads that caught for the plantation to know their luck. At the landing he found the overseer, who walked to the great house with him. The night before Tyburn Will had stolen from the white quarters, and had met a couple of seamen from the Temperance at the crossroads tavern, which tavern was going to get into trouble for breaking the law which forbade the harboring of sailors ashore. The three had taken in full lading of kill-devil rum, and Tyburn Will, too drunk to run any farther, had been caught by Hide near Princess Creek, three hours agone. What were the master’s orders ? Should the rogue go to the court - house whipping post, or should Hide save the trouble of taking him there ? In either ease, thirty-nine lashes well laid on —

The master pursed his lips, dug into the ground with the ferrule of his cane, and finally proposed to the astonished overseer that the rascal be let off with a warning. “ ’T is too fair a day to poison with ugly sights and sounds,” he said, whimsically apologetic for his own weakness. “ ’T will do no great harm to be lenient, for once, Saunderson, and I am in the mood to-day to be friends with all men, including myself.”

The overseer went away grumbling, and Haward entered the house. The room where dwelt his books looked cool and inviting. He walked the length of the shelves, took out a volume here and there for his evening reading, and upon the binding of others laid an affectionate, lingering touch. “ I have had a fever, my friends,” he announced to the books, “ but I am about to find myself happily restored to reason and serenity; in short, to health.”

Some hours later he raised his eyes from the floor which he had been studying for a great while, covered them for a moment with his hand, then rose, and, with the air of a sleepwalker, went out of the lit room into a calm and fragrant night. There was no moon, but the stars were many, and it did not seem dark. When he came to the verge of the landing, and the river, sighing in its sleep, lay clear below him, mirroring the stars, it was as though he stood between two firmaments. He descended the steps, and drew toward him a small rowboat that was softly rubbing against the wet and glistening piles. The tide was out, and the night was very quiet.

Haward troubled not the midstream, but rowing in the shadow of the bank to the mouth of the creek that slept beside his garden, turned and went up this narrow water. Until he was free of the wall the odor of honeysuckle and box clung to the air, freighting it heavily ; when it was left behind the reeds began to murmur and sigh, though not loudly, for there was no wind. When he came to a point opposite the minister’s house, rising fifty yards away from amidst low orchard trees, he rested upon his oars. There was a light in an upper room, and as he looked Audrey passed between the candle and the open window. A moment later and the light was out, but he knew that she was sitting at the window. Though it was dark, he found that he could call back with precision the slender throat, the lifted face, and the enshadowing hair. For a while he stayed, motionless in his boat, hidden by the reeds that whispered and sighed ; but at last he rowed away softly through the darkness, back to the dim, slowmoving river and the Fair View landing.

This was of a Friday. All the next day he spent in the garden, but on Sunday morning he sent word to the stables to have Mirza saddled. He was going to church, he told Juba over his chocolate, and he would wear the gray and silver.

Mary Johnston.

( To be cotinued.)