Читать книгу True, and Other Stories - George Parsons Lathrop - Страница 7

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On a little headland at the southern end of Pamlico Sound where it narrows in to the waters of Core Sound, a small dwelling-house, half hut and half cottage, looked forth over the liquid expanses with an air of long habitude and battered self-reliance. It had but two meagre windows, and its chimney was short and black, suggesting an old tobacco-pipe; but the little house leaned comfortably against the low sandy ridge at its back, and did not seem to mind any of the imperfections in its own facial aspect. Along the ridge live oaks and red cedars flourished gracefully, and the ancient structure was closely enfolded at either side by thickets of that kind of holly known in the region as yaupon, the polished leaves and warm red berries of which glistened cheerily in the sunlight. Indeed, the whole place, dilapidated though it was, had the reassuring appearance of a home; and when from its narrow doorway a beautiful young woman stepped forth into the breezy afternoon, nothing more was needed to complete the effect.

If it was a home before, it now looked the ideal of a home.

The young woman turned to the holly bushes at the left and began clipping from them some of their lighter branches, which she let fall into a large basket, held gracefully against her hip with one rounded arm, while the other plied the shears. She was tall, but not fair. No daughter of the gods, but firmly and robustly human; yet, at the same time, there was in her humanity something noble and inspiriting. Am I not going too fast? Why talk in this way about a young girl in a calico gown, cutting holly-sprigs beside a tumble-down old cabin on the Nawth Ca'liny shore? No, she was not fair as to complexion; her skin was richly browned by out-door life, though a clear rose-tint shone faintly through the brown. She was beautiful, nevertheless; and yet—and yet what was it? It seemed as if that outer hue could never under any circumstances wear off. But a mere glance at her features would convince any one that she was not of octoroon or metif parentage. Only it was as if the sun, watching over her loveliness from birth, and searching into the depths of her nature, had warmed her blood until it had darkened a little and her pulses had spread a shadow in their flowing.

Suddenly she desisted from her work and, bending her head forward, gazed off across the light green waves that stretched for miles between her and the low-lying strip of sand that barred out the sea. Had she heard a distant hail from the boat that was scudding fast toward the headland? At any rate, there was the burly little craft, careening to the lively breeze amid a shower of spray, with a recklessness characteristic of the young helmsman, whom the girl's bright eyes would have recognized even farther away. And now, as the craft abruptly veered to windward, to approach the landing, her master's careless handling received a startling illustration, for she almost broached to; the sails were laid aback, and for an instant the boat threatened to capsize.

There was one passenger, an old woman, who sat near the helmsman; and at this juncture she snatched from her lips a short clay pipe, emitting a shrill cry of fright, together with an alarmed whiff of smoke—as if she herself had unexpectedly exploded.

"Lord save our souls, Dennis! What be you thinkin' on?"

"All right, auntie!" cried the young man, heartily. "The critter'll come straight in half a turn." And, exerting all his force, he caused the dug-out to round into her course again, with the breeze on her quarter. Two or three minutes later she touched the shore.

The young woman, having thrown down her basket, stood ready to greet the new-comers.

"Well, Deely dear!"

"Why, Aunty Losh, it don't seem possible that it's you come back again. And so you're really here."

"Yes; a'most really—though, as you see just now, I come nearer drowndin' in front o' my own door, Deely."

Dennis submitted his stout frame to a convulsive laugh, which for an instant gave him some resemblance to a dog shaking himself on emerging from the water, "Drownded in half a fathom," he exclaimed, hilariously. "I'll be dog-goned if that ain't the cutest, aunty! Why, I'm almost sorry we didn't overset the old boat, to show you. It would have livened you up fit to kill."

"Dennis!" exclaimed Deely, her eyes flashing indignantly, "you ought to be ashamed."

"Oh, never mind the boy," Aunty Losh soothingly interposed. "It's his natur' to be wild, ye know. He ain't never happy unless he's in some dare-devil scrape. But where's Sylvester?"

Deely, with eyes cast down, appeared needlessly embarrassed. "He went up to Beaufort to market," she explained.

Something in her tone caused Dennis to glance at her rather fiercely, as if he were jealous. "Yes, that suits him," he muttered, with a trace of contempt. "Market business is just about what Sylv is good for; that's what it is."

"It aren't right to speak so of your only brother, Dennis," said Aunty Losh, mildly.

"Oh, dog gone it!" (Dennis reverted to his favorite expletive.) "What does it matter whose brother he is? I speak my mind. Deely, don't look so down on me. What's the trouble?"

"Only you're so rough," said the girl, laying her hand on his arm. "You know I love you, don't you, Dennie? But it goes against me to hear you talk so."

He placed his own rough hand on her smooth one and patted it softly for an instant; then he moved it somewhat brusquely from its resting-place on his shoulder, and Deely drew away a step or two.

"I catch all the fish," he said, "and Sylv takes 'em for himself." There seemed to be an undertone of double meaning in his remark. But the next instant he changed from gloom to sunny cheer. "Come, aunty, you mustn't stand here on the mud. I reckon you've been away so long you'll be kind o' glad to see the inside of the old cabin again; hey?"

He was tall and sturdy, this Dennis De Vine; and though he could not have been described as handsome, his reddish hair and ruddy coloring, united with the glance of his blue eye and a certain good-humored Irish daring of expression, made his presence gay and attractive. Aunty Losh was quick to act on his suggestion, and they all went into the cabin, which despite its limited frontage spread out sufficiently, within, to afford rooms for the old woman and her two nephews.

"Now, aunty," said the girl, "the tarrapin is most ready, and I'll brew you a good cup of yaupon. I was just cutting some to dry when you came." And thereupon Adela, taking a handful of the seasoned leaves from their place of storage in a cupboard, swung the kettle from the fire and proceeded to infuse this local substitute for tea.

"My patience, but it's dear to my buddy and heart," Aunty Losh murmured, as she sipped from the smoking cup. "An' now tell me what's happened while I been away."

"Why, Sylv wrote you everything that happened hyar," Adela reminded her, in some surprise.

"Oh, I know, I know!" was the rejoinder. "But it didn't seem nachul-like when I had to have folks read it to me. I didn't mo'n half get it in."

"There ain't nothin' very novel," said Dennis, "except old Sukey strayed off on to the main yistiddy." Sukey was the cow.

"Sho! It'll allays be so, long as I live. Nothin' but stray and find, stray and find. Ye mout hev dug that ditch across the neck, Dennie, when ye knowed I wanted it so bad. If you'll do it one o' these near-comin' days, I'll knit ye a new pair o' socks."

The headland on which Aunty Losh's house had been built was connected with the main only by a narrow neck, and it was one of the grievances of her life that her cow and her two or three sheep, when turned loose to graze, could so easily make their way to the adjoining territory.

"I'm fearsome o' the tides," Dennis explained. "They run so strong that mebbe they'd cut a wider channel than you want, aunty. But I'll try it; I'll dig that ditch by-and-by—or arterward."

The talk then turned to other matters, and Miss Jessie Floyd was mentioned, the daughter of an ex-Confederate colonel who lived a few miles inland on an "estate" of some dozen acres, magnificently entitled "Fairleigh Park."

"Miss Jessie's been down hyar two or three times," Adela said, "to buy bluefish and tarrapin for the manor; and she was very kind to the boys. Wasn't she, Dennie?"

"That she was. She brought us jelly, one time." Dennis gently smacked his lips, in a reminiscent way.

"I reckon she hain't brought any money, though," his aunt skeptically meditated, aloud. "Any company up at the manor?"

"Why, yes," said the girl. "There's a young gen'l'man from the Nawth—a sort of English chap, I reckon; anyhow, he comes from New York. Mr. Lance; that's what they call him. I hain't seen him, but Dennis can tell you."

"Certain shore," said Dennis. "That's his name. He's got idees about buildin' up. He wants to eddicate folks all round—sort of free snack of knowledge for everybody."

"I reckon he'll be eddicating Miss Jessie to fall in love with him," Adela observed. "That's what."

"Well, I sha'n't find no fault with him if he do," Dennis returned. "Only he needn't come down hyar away with his idees and all. 'Pears like him and Sylv 'ud be chancey to take up with one another, though."

"What makes you think that?" Aunty Losh asked, with a trace of apprehension.

"'Cause Sylv don't think of nothin' now but book-larnin', and he's been hevin' talks with that ar fellow."

"Sylv'll be goin' off and leavin' us one o' these days," the old woman mused, as she put a match to the short pipe she had been filling for herself.

"Oh no, aunty! You ortenter think he'd be so mean!" Deely protested, with energy.

Dennis turned upon her, angered. "You keep still, d'you har!" he exclaimed. "What matters if he do go? I reckon I can take car o' you and aunty, all by myself, when it comes to that."

Deely was evidently impressed by his dictatorial manner, but she assumed a haughty air. "I reckon it's about time for me to go," she retorted, "if you can't be more civil. Just when aunty hain't no more'n set her foot inside o' home, too." And, despite her tone, there was a slight appearance about the girl's lips and eyelids as if she would like to cry.

"Oh, well; I didn't mean nothin', you know I didn't," Dennis answered, becoming penitent. "And when you go," he added, "I'm a-goin' with you as far as your dad's."

The rising trouble was thus allayed, and all three were soon engaged again in talking over the news, or the local affairs of the last few weeks. For Aunty Losh had achieved one of the most remarkable events of her life, in going to see some of her relatives at Norfolk, Virginia. She had much to tell about the journey and the ways of the people in that great city, and dwelt especially upon the hardship she had been compelled to suffer in drinking "China tea," instead of that far superior docoction, yaupon. The young people, in their turn, gradually discovered many little items which they must impart to her.

Aunty Losh, strange as it may seem, was the sole female representative of a stock which once gave promise of making itself distinguished. Her lineage was traceable from a certain Major De Vine, a young Irishman who, stirred by the sympathy that led the natives of two widely separate but oppressed countries to join the cause of the American colonies, had enlisted in the cavalry corps raised by Count Pulaski to join the Continental army, during our Revolution. Pulaski was a Pole, and De Vine an Irishman, but they had the same inspiration: they fought for freedom in America with the hope that their own people might also become free. De Vine performed many a gallant deed, in the course of the war, and rose to be a major; but the consciousness of his good service was his only recompense.

At the peace he retired from the struggle poor, and ill fitted to make his way by other means than the sword. He settled in the South, where the soil was not favorable for such a man as he. What little property he possessed was soon lost. Moreover, he and his children having surrendered to the reigning prejudice against work, there was no way open to a retrieval of even the meagre comfort they had at first commanded. The family, failing to make any advantageous alliance by marriage—which, indeed, would scarcely have been possible in their circumstances—soon declined into still deeper poverty. The Major died, followed by all his children excepting one son, who drifted across the border into North Carolina; and his posterity became a part of that strange population known as "poor whites."

Listless and inefficient as those people are, germs of energy are known to have been fostered among them, which have sometimes developed; and the De Vines always retained enough of their ancestral vigor to counteract their ancestral pride, as well as their sense of unmerited misfortune, and to keep them somewhat above the general hopeless prostration of the class into which they had fallen.

Aunty Losh, widowed by the Rebellion, and left childless, had settled in the little hut on the headland, with her two nephews, mere boys at the time, but now grown to efficient manhood. The elder one, Dennis, was stalwart and courageous, and became a successful fisherman on a small scale. Sylvester had also assisted in the common support, and together they had made a little headway. But in Sylvester the ambition for something higher had awaked: he had not only learned to read, but had actually become a student, and was now taking steps toward what seemed to his aunt and brother the attainment of a distant and dangerous witchcraft—namely, making himself a lawyer. Neither of them believed that he would ever accomplish this chimerical design, but Sylvester's scheme was always present to them in the guise of an impending danger, which was just as dreadful as if it had been realized. In fact, it was worse, because it seemed to them a spell in which he had been caught, and to which his life would ultimately be sacrificed. They regarded him with the mingled envy and commiseration that we are apt to bestow upon those who have the strength to devote themselves to an idea which we think is going to prove a failure.

Dennis, on the contrary, had never troubled himself to learn anything beyond that which his own instinct and contact with the forces around him could teach. There was a vague tradition stored up in the dust-heaps of Aunty Losh's mind, to the effect that his ancestor, the Major, had once at the siege of Savannah cut his way through the British with a detachment of Pulaski's Legion, and that in so doing he had slain with his own hand eleven of the enemy. Well, it was with the same sort of desperate rush that Dennis cut his way through the problems of existence. He was good for a short, sharp struggle, but he was not steady, and had no ability to plan long manœuvres or patient campaigns.

A streak of fierceness remained in him, also, derived from the man who had been so deadly to his enemies when placed in a perilous dilemma. As there were no British opposed to him, it did not manifest itself in just the same way; and, thus far, being temperate in his habits and having no foes so far as any one knew, he had not slain anybody. But his passionate impulses asserted themselves plainly enough at times, to the discomfort not only of others, but also of himself.

Here they were, then, these three people, the remote offspring of that old Revolutionary officer, living humbly on the North Carolina shore, unlike as possible to what Major De Vine might at one time have supposed his descendants would be, yet bearing his blood in their veins, and acting out every day his traits or those of some still earlier progenitor, with as much exactness as if what they did and said had been a part written for them in a play.

They knew nothing about the romance of Guy Wharton and Gertrude Wylde, so far back, so musty with age as it seems, yet so alive and fragrant, I think, when we pluck it out from the crumbled ruins of the past where it grew. They knew nothing of the deposit of stones in the waters up by Shallowbag Point, near Roanoke, which—being of foreign character—are probably the ballast of one of Raleigh's vessels thrown overboard there, in the stress of weather; nothing, except that Dennis had learned to steer clear of it at low tide. But when you consider the destiny that had befallen the family of the gallant young Revolutionary fighter, how much did it differ from that of the English colonists whose race had been extinguished in savagery? The change which had taken place was, essentially, of the same kind.