The Valiants of Virginia Part 36

Valiant stood still, looking about him. What could he learn here? He read no answer to the riddle. A little to one side of the path something showed snow-like on the ground, and he went toward it. Nearer, he saw that it was a ma.s.s of flowers, staring up whitely from the semi-obscurity from within an iron railing. He bent over, suddenly noting the scent; it was cape jessamine.

With a curious sensation of almost prescience plucking at him, he took a box of vestas from his pocket and struck one. It flared up illuminating a flat granite slab in which was cut a name and inscription:

_EDWARD Sa.s.sOON_ "Forgive us our trespa.s.ses."

The silence seemed to crash to earth like a great looking-gla.s.s and s.h.i.+ver into a million pieces. The wax dropped from his fingers and in the supervening darkness a numb fright gripped him by the throat.

s.h.i.+rley had laid these there, on the grave of the man his father had killed--the cape jessamines she had wanted that day, _for her mother_!

He understood.

It came to him at last that there was a chill mist groping among the trees and that he was very cold.

He went back along the Red Road stumblingly. Was this to be the end of the dream, which he had fancied would last forever? Could it be that she was not for him? Was it no h.o.a.ry lie that the sins of the fathers were visited upon the third and fourth generation?

When he reentered the library the candle was guttering in the burned wings of a night-moth. The place looked all at once gaunt and desolate and despoiled. What could Virginia, what could Damory Court, be to him without her? The wrinkled note lay on the desk and he bent suddenly with a sharp catching breath and kissed it. There welled over him a wave of rebellious longing. The candle spread to a hazy yellow blur. The walls fell away. He stood under the moonlight, with his arms about her, his lips on hers and his heart beating to the sound of the violins behind them.

He laughed--a harsh wild laugh that rang through the gloomy room. Then he threw himself on the couch and buried his face in his hands. He was still lying there when the misty rain-wet dawn came through the shutters.

CHAPTER XLI

THE COMING OF GREEF KING

It was Sunday afternoon, and under the hemlocks, Rickey Snyder had gathered her minions--a dozen children from the near-by houses with the usual sprinkling of little blacks from the kitchens. There were parents, of course, to whom this mingling of color and degree was a matter of conventional prohibition, but since the advent of Rickey, in whose soul lay a Napoleonic instinct of leaders.h.i.+p, this was more honored in the breach than in the observance.

"My! Ain't it scrumptious here now!" said Cozy Cabell, hanging yellow lady-slippers over her ears. "I wish we could play here always."

"Mr. Valiant will let us," said Rickey. "I asked him."

"Oh, _he_ will," responded Cozy gloomily, "but he'll probably go and marry somebody who'll be mean about it."

"Everybody doesn't get married," said one of the Byloe twins, with masculine a.s.surance. "Maybe he won't."

"Much a boy knows about it!" retorted Cozy scornfully. "Women _have_ to, and some one of them will make him. (Greenville Female Seminary Simms, if you slap that little n.i.g.g.e.r again, I'll slap _you_!)"

Greenie rolled over on the gra.s.s and t.i.ttered. "Miss Mattie Sue didn',"

she said. "Ah heah huh say de yuddah day et wuz er moughty good feelin'

ter go ter baid Mistis en git up Marstah!"

"Well," said Cozy, tossing her head till the flower earrings danced, "I'm going to get married if the man hasn't got anything but a character and a red mustache. Married women don't have to prove they could have got a husband if they had wanted to."

"Let's play something," proposed Rosebud Meredith, on whom the discussion palled. "Let's play King, King Katiko."

"It's Sunday!"--this from her smaller and more righteous sister. "We're forbidden to play anything but Bible games on Sunday, and if Rosebud does, I'll tell."

"Jay-bird tattle-tale!" sang Rosebud derisively. "Don't care if you do!"

"Well," decreed Rickey. "We'll play Sunday-school then. It would take a saint to object to that. I'm superintendent and this stump's my desk.

All you children sit down under that tree."

They ranged themselves in two rows, the white children, in clean Sabbath pinafores and go-to-meeting knickerbockers, in front and the colored ones, in ginghams and cotton-prints, in the rear--the habitual expression of a differing social station. "Oh!" shrieked Miss Cabell, "and I'll be Mrs. Merryweather Mason and teach the infants' cla.s.s."

"There isn't any infant cla.s.s," said Rickey. "How could there be when there aren't any infants? The lesson is over and I've just rung the bell for silence. Children, this is Missionary Sunday, and I'm glad to see so many happy faces here to-day. Cozy," she said, relenting, "you can be the organist if you want to."

"I won't," said Cozy sullenly. "If I can't be table-cloth I won't be dish-rag."

"All right, you needn't," retorted Rickey freezingly. "Sit up, Greenie.

People don't lie on their backs in Sunday-school."

Greenie yawned dismally, and righted herself with injured slowness.

"Ah diffuses ter 'cep' yo' insult, Rickey Snydah," she said. "Ah'd ruthah lose mah 'ligion dan mah laz'ness. En Ah 'spises yo' 'spisable dissisition!"

"Let us all rise," continued Rickey, unmoved, "and sing _Kingdom Coming_." And she struck up l.u.s.tily, beating time on the stump with a stick:

"From all the dark places of earth's heathen races, O, see how the thick shadows flee!"

and the rows of children joined in with unction, the colored contingent coming out strong on the chorus:

"De yerf shall be full ob de wunduhful story As watahs dat covah de sea!"

The clear voices in the quiet air startled the fluttering birds and sent a squirrel to the tip-top of an oak, from which he looked down, flirting his brush. They roused a man, too, who had lain in a sodden sleep under a bush at a little distance. He was ragged and soiled and his heavy brutal face, covered with a dark stubble of some days' growth, had an ugly scar slanting from cheek to hair. Without getting up, he rolled over to command a better view, and set his eyes, blinking from their slumber, on the children.

"We will now take up the collection," said Rickey. ("You can do it, June. Use a flat piece of bark). Remember that what we give to-day is for the poor heathen in--in Alabama."

"That's no heathen place," objected Cozy with spirit. "My cousin lives in Alabama."

"Well, then," acquiesced Rickey, "anywhere you like. But I reckon your cousin wouldn't be above taking the money. For the poor heathen who have never heard of G.o.d, or Virginia, or anything. Think of them and give cheerfully."

The bark-slab made its rounds, receiving leaves, acorns, and an occasional pin. Midway, however, there arose a shrill shriek from the bearer and the collection was scattered broadcast. "Rosebud Meredith,"

said Rickey witheringly, "it would serve you right for putting that toad in the plate if your hand would get all over warts! I'm sure I hope it will." She rescued the fallen piece of bark and announced: "The collection this afternoon has amounted to a hundred dollars and seven cents. And now, children, we will skip the catechism and I will tell you a story."

Her auditors hunched themselves nearer, a double row of attentive white and black faces, as Rickey with a preliminary ba.s.s cough, began in a drawling tone whose mimicry called forth giggles of ecstasy.

"There were once two little sisters, who went to Sunday-school and loved their teacher ve-e-ery much. They were always good and attentive--_not_ like that little n.i.g.g.e.r over _there_! The one with his thumb in his mouth! One was little Mary and the other was little Susy. They had a mighty rich uncle who lived in Richmond, and once he came to see them and gave them each a dollar. And they were ve-e-ery glad. It wasn't a mean old paper dollar, all dirt and creases; nor a battered whitey silver dollar; but it was a bright round _gold_ dollar, right out of the mint. Little Mary and little Susy could hardly sleep that night for thinking of what they could buy with those gold dollars.

"Early next morning they went down-town, hand in hand, to the store, and little Susy bought a bag of goober-peas, and sticks and sticks of striped candy, and a limber jack, and a gold ring, and a wax doll with a silk dress on that could open and shut its eyes--"

"Huh!" said the captious Cozy. "You can't buy a wax doll for a dollar.

My littlest, littlest one cost three, and she didn't have a st.i.tch to her back!"

"Shut up!" said Rickey briefly. "Dolls were cheaper then." She looked at the row of little negroes, goggle-eyed at the vision of such largess.

"What do you think little Mary did with _her_ gold dollar? She loved dolls and candy, too, but she had heard about the poo-oo-r heathen.

There was a tear in her eye, but she took the dollar home, and next day when she went to Sunday-school, she dropped it in the missionary-box.

"Little children, what do you reckon became of that dollar? It bought a big satchelful of tracts for a missionary. He had been a poor man with six children and a wife with a bone-felon on her right hand--not a child old enough to wash dishes and all of them young enough to fall in the fire--so he had to go and be a missionary. He was going to Alabam--to a cannibal island, and he took the tracts and sailed away in a s.h.i.+p that landed him on the sh.o.r.e. And when the heathen cannibals saw him they were ve-e-ery glad, for there hadn't been any s.h.i.+pwrecked sailors for a long time, and they were ve-e-ery hungry. So they tied up the missionary and gathered a lot of wood to make a fire and cook him.