Audrey

The cabin in the valley was not three miles away. Down this ravine to a

level place of pines, through the pines to a strip of sassafras and a

poisoned field, past these into a dark, rich wood of mighty trees linked

together with the ripening grape, then three low hills, then the valley

and the cabin and a pair of starry eyes. It was full moon. Once out from

under the stifling walls of the ravine, and the silver would tremble

through the leaves, and show the path beneath. The trees, too, that they

had blazed,--with white wood pointing to white wood, the backward way

should be easy.

The earth, rising sheer in darkness on either hand, shut in the bed of the

stream. In the warm, scented dusk the locusts shrilled in the trees, and

far up the gorge the whippoorwill called and called. The air was filled

with the gold of fireflies, a maze of spangles, now darkening, now

brightening, restless and bewildering. The small, round pools caught the

light from the yet faintly colored sky, and gleamed among the rocks; a

star shone out, and a hot wind, heavy with the smell of the forest, moved

the hemlock boughs and rustled in the laurels.

The white man and the negro, each leading his horse, picked their way with

caution among the pitfalls of the rocky and uneven road. With the passing

of the Governor and his train a sudden cure had been wrought, for now

Haward's step was as firm and light as it had been before his fall. The

negro looked at him once or twice with a puzzled face, but made no comment

and received no enlightenment. Indeed, so difficult was their way that

they were left but scant leisure for speech. Moment by moment the darkness

deepened, and once Haward's horse came to its knees, crashing down among

the rocks and awakening every echo.

The way, if hard, was short. The hills fell farther apart, the banks

became low and broad, and fair in front, between two slender pines, shone

out the great round moon. Leaving the bed of the stream, the two men

entered a pine wood, dim and fragrant and easy to thread. The moon rose

higher, and the light fell in wide shafts between trees that stood well

apart, with no vines to grapple one to another or undergrowth to press

about their knees.

There needed no watchfulness: the ground was smooth, the light was fair;

no motion save the pale flicker of the fireflies, no sound save the sigh

of the night wind in the boughs that were so high overhead. Master and

man, riding slowly and steadily onward through a wood that seemed

interminably the same, came at last to think of other things than the road

which they were traveling. Their hands lost grasp upon the reins, and

their eyes, ceasing to glance now here, now there, gazed steadfastly down

the gray and dreamlike vista before them, and saw no longer hole and

branch, moonlight and the white scars that the axe had made for guidance.

The vision of the slave was of supper at the quarters, of the scraping of

the fiddle in the red firelight, of the dancing and the singing. The white

man saw, at first, only a girl's face, shy and innocent,--the face of the

woodland maid who had fired his fancy, who was drawing him through the

wilderness back to the cabin in the valley. But after a while, in the gray

stillness, he lost the face, and suddenly thought, instead, of the stone

that was to cover his father's grave. The ship that was to bring the

great, dark, carven slab should be in by now; the day after his return to

Williamsburgh the stone must be put in place, covering in the green sod

and that which lay below. Here, lieth in the hope of a joyful

resurrection-His mind left the grave in the churchyard at Williamsburgh, and visited

the great plantation of which he was now sole master. There was the house,

foursquare, high-roofed, many-windowed, built of dark red brick that

glowed behind the veil of the walnuts and the oaks. There, too, were the

quarters,--the home quarter, that at the creek, that on the ridge. Fifty

white servants, three hundred slaves,--and he was the master. The

honeysuckles in the garden that had been his father's pride, the shining

expanse of the river, the ship--his ship, the Golden Rose--that was to

take him home to England,--he forgot the night and the forest, and saw

these things quite plainly. Then he fell to thinking of London and the

sweets that he meant to taste, the heady wine of youth and life that he

meant to drain to the lees. He was young; he could spare the years. One

day he would come back to Virginia, to the dim old garden and quiet house.

His factor would give account, and he would settle down in the red brick

house, with the tobacco to the north and east, the corn to the west, and

to the south the mighty river,--the river silvered by the moon, the river

that lay just beyond him, gleaming through the trees-Startled by the sudden tightening of the reins, or by the tearing of some

frightened thing through the canes that beset the low, miry bank, the

horse sprang aside; then stood trembling with pricked ears. The white man

stared at the stream; turned in his saddle and stared at the tree trunks,

the patches of moonlight, and the impenetrable shadow that closed each

vista. "The blazed trees!" he exclaimed at last. "How long since we saw

one?"