A Speckled Bird

He gave him tonics, diet regimen on which he laid much stress, and ordered the family away to certain springs in a distant State. Having secured a cottage, Eglah avoided the hotel and maintained complete seclusion. Her father keenly enjoyed the change, and gradually the tendency to drowse was less apparent, but the prohibition of alcoholic drinks fretted him, and that which was tabooed at the cottage was alluringly accessible at the hotel.

When the season closed, he and Eglah decided to stop en route for a day, to pay their long promised visit to Calvary House.

As Mrs. Mitchell could not be persuaded to enter "an Episcopal monkish institution" of which she disapproved so vigorously, she went back alone to Nutwood and busied herself with household preparations for winter.

When the judge and his daughter reached home, Dr. Plympton expressed himself much pleased with improved conditions which Mrs. Mitchell could not discover, and Eglah's apprehensions were allayed. Her father's increasing dependence upon her touched and cheered her inexpressibly, and for his sake she diligently assisted him in work that forced her thoughts into a new channel. An important appropriation bill, in which Judge Kent's native State was much interested, would be presented to Congress about the middle of December, or soon after the holiday recess, and he had been requested by old friends and constituents to address the Senate committee, advocating a favorable report. The collection and arrangement of necessary statistics kept her busy at his side, and when the last type-written page was added to the pile at his elbow, he patted her hand fondly and complimented her useful accuracy.

Rejoicing in the accomplishment of their tedious task, the trap was ordered, and father and daughter drove until the dinner hour.

She noticed he dozed twice while she talked, although when they reached home he seemed as well as usual, humming a gay little Sicilian song as he divested himself of overcoat and muffler. It had been a perfect autumn day, crisp, crystalline. The deep, vivid yellow of the great undulating mass of walnut foliage hung against the western sky like cloth of gold curtains around a porphyry shrine, above which Venus burned as ministering taper. With her cheek pressed to the window pane in the library, Eglah watched the fading after-glow, and her hands clutched each other. This was the day when from the iron-bound, ice-sheathed fiords of Smith's Sound the sun disappeared. The long Polar night had set in. Would Mr. Herriott ever see the sun again?

She had procured all books written in English that related to Arctic travel, and in the sanctuary of her own room prepared, from an almanac and from explorer's diaries, a calendar, noting the length of each day, the coming of the moon, the date of shortest twilight, the falling of total darkness. Mr. Herriott's voyage began in May; no tidings had reached her. She expected none, but her lips moved: "Oh, God, keep him in safety through the awful night!"

The dreary vision of her imagination contrasted sharply with the luxurious aspect of the library, where a fire of oak logs glowed beyond the marble hearth. A crimson velvet carpet covered the floor, and warm winter draperies enhanced the atmosphere of comfort. On the table an oval cut-glass basket held great clusters of orange chrysanthemums; not the huge, solitary, odorless globes now so popular in cities, but thickly studded, fragrant branches that bloom nowhere with such lavish sweetness as in old Southern gardens.

Mrs. Mitchell brightened the lamp and began to match the squares of a calico "rising sun" quilt she was making as her Christmas present to the Methodist parsonage. Judge Kent leaned back in his arm-chair, his silver-powdered head on the red cushion, good looking, debonair, thoroughly content; and in one hand he held a richly gilded liqueur glass, brimming with an emerald cordial. Eglah came to his side and put her hand on his wrist.

"Father, Dr. Plympton forbids liqueurs. Please do not drink that."

"Only a thimbleful of crème de menthe! Babies take mint tea. Even Mrs. Mitchell drinks this."

His fine eyes sparkled mischievously, and he bowed to her.

"No, sir. I make my mint cordial from my own garden, and I know what is in it; but you can't be sure about foreign-fangled mixtures."

"I wish to make sure that delicious gumbo-filé will not give me nightmare."

"Father, I begged you not to touch it, and you had your favorite clam bouillon the doctor commends so highly."

"Bouillon – gumbo-filé? 'As moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.' My duchess, don't scold. Your pretty mouth was made for sweeter uses. Kiss me."

He brushed his white mustache aside, and leaning down she pressed her lips to his.

"Father, are you quite well to-night?"

"Quite well, and absolutely happy. Now, give me some music to round out and seal this glorious, perfect day."

She opened the upright piano, and while she played one of his favorite fugues – Handel's in E minor – he kept time, swinging the tiny, gilded glass. Flickering flames in the wide chimney were reflected on the polished rosewood panels of the piano, and as they wavered up and down before her, Eglah thought of spectral auroral fringes flashing in moonless Polar night, staining with prismatic hues the world of snow, kindling red beacons on pinnacles of immemorial ice.

The fugue ended, and as her fingers left the keys a tinkling crash caused her to turn her head.

The liqueur glass was shattered on the floor and Judge Kent lay insensible in his chair.

Paralysis appeared so complete that for some days Doctors Plympton and Eggleston entertained no hope; but the sufferer rallied surprisingly, and while his utterance was not fully intelligible, and he never regained the use of his lower limbs, he was often conscious.

Mrs. Mitchell and the physicians would have welcomed a passionate outbreak of the silent grief that seemed to have frozen Eglah, as, calm and dry-eyed, she ministered in the sick-room she rarely left. Two faithful men assisted in nursing – one by day, one by night, because she could not lift her father – and she slept on a cot beside him, or across the foot of his bed. She administered all his medicine, fed him with her own hands, caressed, and cheered him.

After a few weeks, though entirely helpless, he was able to be dressed and lifted into a reclining rolling-chair, and when the weather permitted she wheeled him around the sunny side of the long colonnade, where he usually fell asleep. The speech arranged so carefully for the Senate committee she read again critically, made a few corrections, and forwarded it with a brief announcement of his illness to the friends who had employed Judge Kent to prepare and deliver it in committee room.

Her stern self-repression discouraged conversation relative to the sufferer, and she buoyed herself with no false hopes.

A ripple of compassion stirred Y – , and some who had criticized her most severely for her haughty aloofness – some whose sole grievance was her absolute devotion to an "unprincipled father" – left cards, words of sympathy, and flowers for Mrs. Herriott. Except the doctors, she saw no one but Mrs. Eggleston and Mr. Whitfield, who had lost his wife a few months previous. Bishop Vivian had died during the summer, but her father's rector came often. At times the sick man's clouded mind seemed incapable of retaining any impression, but he never failed to respond to music, and when his chair was rolled close to the piano and Eglah played selections he loved best, it comforted her to watch the pleased, contented expression of the placid, handsome old face so dear to her. Noticing how wan and drawn the girl's lips were, the physicians urged Mrs. Mitchell to persuade her to drive or walk.

"No. I will not lose sight of him for a moment. He is my all, and what becomes of me makes no difference. I have but one wish now – to go with him."

One bright, warm day, late in December, Judge Kent appeared surprisingly better, though his articulation continued very indistinct, and his daughter understood him best because she closely watched his lips. The doctors had made their morning visit, and, wrapped in his dressing-gown, the sick man asked to be rolled into sunshine.

Eglah tucked a lap robe carefully about the reclining form, and he feebly lifted the one hand he could move, and pointed to the glass door.

"That way; not through library."

She unlocked and opened it, wheeling the chair out on the colonnade, and some change in his countenance arrested her attention. Bending down, she found tears on his cheeks.

"You opened this door the day Herriott came. Because you heard him tell me about Keith, you married him. You burned the papers – you saved me."

"No, father; no!"

She fell on her knees and hid her face in his gown.

"You tried to keep me from knowing you heard Herriott, but I saw you. You married him for my sake. My blessed child! When I am gone, I want you to remember no other man ever had such a daughter. My Eglah – "

After a moment he sighed, and with great difficulty added slowly:

"My dear, kiss me, and always – always you must know – how precious you – are, precious – "

She kissed him twice, dried his cheeks, and, as he turned his head on the pillow and closed his eyes, she rolled him up and down the colonnade, hoping that during his nap he would forget. He often slept soundly in this way, soothed by the motion like a child in a carriage.

Was he laboring under some delusion of an enfeebled brain – did he dream? Or was it possible he had actually seen her leave his room on her errand of rescue?

A half hour later a veil of cloud drifted across the sun, a blast of wind leaped out of the northwest, and, fearing a change of temperature, she turned the chair toward the door and wheeled it inside.

Leaning tenderly over the sleeper, his quiet, cold, set face told her he had gone to that bar of final trial where, in his Maker's infinite mercy, only He who fashions and reads human hearts and sees entirely around the circle of circumstances, can justly judge.

A low, long-drawn, quivering cry, as of some creature mortally stricken, summoned Mrs. Mitchell, who found the girl huddled over the still form, his grey head lifted to her breast.

Holding her solitary vigil that night beside him, her cheek laid on his shoulder, her hand clasping his icy, interlocked fingers, she found a solace which surprised her in the assurance that he had known the significance of her sacrifice – that he loved her better in consequence of all she had ventured and suffered in his behalf. Her supreme dread had been his discovery of the cause of her marriage, but now and then the scowling menace from which we cower, breaks in smiling, tender benediction. To love, that prompts and sustains in crucial hours of self-immolation, is occasionally added a transforming exaltation that sublimates the unworthy object for whom the sacrifice is borne; and the most pityingly merciful of all angels – Death – extinguishes life with one hand, while the other smooths scars of character, levels unlovely angles, lifts shadows of sin, and gives to memory that magic mantle whose halo never fades.

With singular and unnatural calmness, Eglah had arranged the details of the funeral service next day in her father's church. She telegraphed Father Temple to meet her in Washington en route to the North, and asked Mr. Whitfield to go with her until her cousin joined her on the train.

To lay her father to rest among his enemies in Y – was unendurable; she would take him to the cemetery in his native State, where his parents and sisters slept, and erect a monument there in sight of his constituents who had honored and loved him.

It had grown very cold; there was no fire in the long drawing-room, where portraits of Maurices and Vivians stared imperiously down at the alien lying motionless under the great cut-glass chandelier. Silent and tearless the girl kept watch. The undertaker had mentioned the date to be inscribed on the casket plate, and she recalled her Arctic calendar. This was the solstice, the sunless midnight, the core of Polar winter. To-morrow the sun would begin to climb back to Mr. Herriott, but the sun of her life had set forever. A shudder shook her, and she nestled closer, laying her lips against her father's throat. Eliza laid heavier wraps around the stooping shoulders, placed a hot blanket under her feet, and now and then kissed the girl's bowed head, but no words, no sob, profaned the sacred silence.

When the body was carried to the chancel of the crowded church, she walked alone, followed closely by the few who best understood her isolation. Shrouded in black, she sat still and silent as her dead; and some persons present who had cause for bitterness against "reconstruction judiciary" forgot their wrongs in genuine pity for the proud and lonely mourner.

Under a fragrant pall, woven of smilax and his favorite double white violets, that covered the casket and fell to its handles, she bore him away to the stony hills of New England.

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 Mitchell. 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-fashioned 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 passed 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 canal dug through the centre of the dairy had been paved with rock, and here, winter and summer, the milk bowls and butter 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 clustered 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 titi 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 clusters waiting to burst into bloom and with their crimped shell-pink cups rival fluted and tinted treasures from Sèvres 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. Mitchell 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 grass, 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 hoarse bassoon. 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, grassy 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. Mitchell'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. Mitchell 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?"

"I wish you to be there with me. I can not go alone."

"Dearie, you can't nurse the gardener. If Mr. Herriott were at home he would not listen to any such nonsense."

"I like Amos Lea, and I intend to put him in the hands of a good trained nurse until Mrs. Orr returns."

"That could be done easily by telegraph or letter. But, my baby, if it would comfort you to be in the house – "

Eglah threw up her hand with a warning gesture.

"I wish to stay only a few days; just long enough to assure myself that the old man is carefully attended to. I prefer not to start from Y – , and the train despatcher at Maurice can stop the up train at 11.45. We need no trunk, and I have the money to pay our way on. I shall write and have more forwarded from the bank. Ma-Lila, I wish to start to-night. Can you get ready?"

The little woman's level brows puckered, but the light in her eyes was a caress.

"Can I refuse any of your foolish whims? I have spoiled you all your life, and it is rather late in the day for me to undertake to oppose you. I see Hiram Boynton waiting, and I must arrange with him to have his boys sleep here and take care of everything in our absence. You know my pet cow's calf is only three days old, and her udder needs watching."