"I am your debtor, Mr. Cross. That's it--that's precisely it! You heard it a.s.serted by all around you that he had gone by, and your keen mind arrived at the same conclusion. You saw and heard--in a fog--the negro boy, and later on your strong imagination provided him with a companion.

Just that--you thought you saw two where there was but one! I'm your servant, Mr. Cross, your very humble, very obliged servant!"

He drew out his purse, abstracted from it all the gold it contained, and gently slid the pieces into the hand which happened to rest upon the steps in an apt position for their reception. "A trifle of drink-money, Mr. Cross! If I might suggest a toast, I would have you drink to the next Governor of Virginia! Good-day, Mr. Cross, good-day! I think I begin to remember."

He mounted and rode away. "I begin to remember--I begin to remember. The boy and I were not always together upon the main road! Did we part at the guide-post? Then where did we come together again?"

He rode through March wind and sun, by fields where men were ploughing and copses where the bloodroot bloomed, beneath the branches of a great blasted oak, and past a red bank shelving down to the road from the forest above, then on by Red Fields, and so at last into Charlottesville. Here he turned at once to the office of an agent and man of business much respected in Albemarle.

Mr. Smith rubbed his hands and asked what he could do for Mr. Cary--who was looking well, extremely well! "Spring is here, sir, spring is here!

We all feel it. On a day like this I cultivate my garden, sir!"

"I also," said Cary. "Mr. Smith, my affair is short. I will thank you to keep it secret also. I want to buy, if possible, a negro boy called Young Isham, who is owned by Lewis Rand. You may offer any price, but my name is not to appear. Manage it skilfully, Mr. Smith, but manage it! I have reasons for wishing to own the boy. You will bear it in mind that my name is not to appear as purchaser."

An hour later, nearing the Greenwood gates, he saw before him another horseman, bent from the saddle and engaged with the fastening. Cary rode up. "Ned Hunter, is it you? Why, man, I have not seen you this long while! Where have you been in hiding?"

"I have visited," answered Mr. Hunter, "New York and the Eastern Sh.o.r.e.

You are looking well, Cary; better than you did at Christmas. I was in this quarter, and so I thought I would stop at Greenwood."

The two rode together up the hill, beneath the arching oaks. The servants appeared, the horses were taken, and Cary and his guest entered the quiet old house. A little later, in the drawing-room, over a blazing fire and a bottle of wine, Mr. Hunter laid aside a somewhat quaint air of injured dignity, and condescended to speak of Fontenoy and of how very changed it was since the old days. "Nothing like so bright, sir, nothing like so bright! I have not thought Miss Dandridge looking cheerful for more than a year--and she used to be the gayest thing!

always smiling, and with something witty to say every time I came near!

I hate changes. This is good wine, Cary."

"Yes. I do not, on the whole, think Fontenoy so changed."

"Don't you? I do. Well, well, it is not the only place that has changed!

You've no sign yet, have you, Cary, of the murderer?"

"He still goes free."

"If there's a man in the county that I dislike," remarked Mr. Hunter, "it is Lewis Rand. But if he had taken the river road that day as he said he should, he and your brother might have travelled together, and the two would have been a match for the d.a.m.ned gypsy, or whoever it was, that shot Mr. Cary. Have you ever noticed what little things make all the difference? Shall I pour for you, too?"

"_As he said he should._ How do you know that he said he should?"

"Why, he and I slept the night of the sixth of September at the Cross Roads Inn--"

"Ah!"

"Yes, one gets strange housemates at an inn. Well, after supper I went out on the porch and began calling to the dogs, and he was there sitting on the steps in the dusk. The wind was blowing, and there were fireflies, and the dogs were jumping up and down. 'Down, Rover!' said I, 'Down, Di! Down, Vixen!' And then Rand and I talked a bit, and I said to him, 'The river road's bad, but it's much the shortest.'"

"What," demanded Cary, in a strained voice,--"what did he answer?"

"He answered, 'I shall take the river road.'"

Mr. Hunter helped himself to wine. "I was tired, and he was tired, and I didn't like him anyway, and wasn't interested, so I went on calling to the dogs, and we didn't speak again. He and his negro boy went on at dawn, and he took, after all, the main road. He isn't," finished Mr.

Hunter, "the kind of person you think of as changeable, and it's a thousand pities he didn't hold to his first idea! Things might have been different."

Cary rose from the table. "Would you swear, Hunter, to what he said?"

"Why, certainly--before all the justices in Virginia. I don't believe,"

said Mr. Hunter, "that my parents could have had good memories, for somehow things slip away from me--but when I do remember, Cary, I remember for all time!" He drank his wine and looked around him. "I haven't been in this room, I don't believe, for five years! That was before it was all done over like this. What a lot of Carys you've got hanging on the walls--and just one left to sit and look at them! You haven't a portrait of your brother?"

"No. Not upon the walls. If you're not fatigued, would you object to riding with me to West Hill? That's the nearest justice."

"I'm not at all fatigued. But I can't see what you want it taken down for--"

"Perhaps not," answered Cary patiently, "but you'll swear to it, all the same?"

"Why," said Mr Hunter, "I can have no possible objection to seeing my words in black and white. I'll take another gla.s.s, and then I'll ride with you wherever you like."

At sundown Fairfax Cary, returning to Greenwood alone, gave his horse to Eli, and presently entered the library. It was a dim old room, unrenewed and unimproved, but the two brothers had loved and frequented it. Now, in the March sunset, with the fire upon the hearth, with the dogs that had entered with the master, the shadowy corners, and many books, it had an aspect both rough and gracious. It was a room in which to remember, and it had an air favourable to resolve.

The last of the Greenwood Carys walked to the western window and stood looking out and up. He looked from a hill-top, but the summit upon which lay the Cary burying-ground was higher yet. The flat stones did not show, nor the wild tangle of dark vine, but the trees stood sharp and black against the vivid sky. Cary stood motionless, a hand on either side of the window frame. The colour faded from the sky, and there set in the iron grey of twilight. He left the window, called for candles, and when they had been brought, sat down at the heavy table and began to draw a map of the country between the ford and Red Fields.

Three days later he rode into Charlottesville and stopped at the office of Mr. Smith, whom he found at the back of the house, watching from a chair planted in the sunshine the springing of a line of bulbs. "You see, sir," quoth the agent, "I cultivate my garden! Tulips here, crocus there, yonder hyacinths. Red Chalice has been up two days, and my white Amazon peeped out of the earth yesterday. King Midas and Sulphur and Madame Mere are on the way. Well, Mr. Cary, I tried my level best with that commission of yours, and I failed! The boy is not for sale."

"Ah!" said Cary, and stooped to examine the white Amazon. "I hardly expected, Mr. Smith, that he would be for sale. At no price, I presume?"

"At no price. He is one of the house servants, and his master is attached to him. I am very sorry, sir."

His client rose from the contemplation of the springing hyacinth. "Give yourself no uneasiness, Mr. Smith. I am not disappointed. There are reasons, no doubt, why Mr. Rand declines to part with him. Let us put it out of mind. What a bright little garden you will have, sir, when tulip, crocus, and hyacinth are all in bloom!"

He took his leave, and rode homeward through the keen March weather. "I am beginning to remember quite plainly," he said. "Presently I'll know it like an old refrain--every word, Saladin, every word, every word, down to the last black one."

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

THE SIMPLE RIGHT

An important case in a neighbouring county called Lewis Rand from home, and kept him an April week in the court room or in a small town's untidy tavern. It was his habit, known and deferred to, never to accept at such times the hospitality sure to be pressed upon him. The prominent men of his party urged him home with them, but accepted his refusal with a nod of understanding, and rode on strong in the conviction that a man so absorbed, so given over to watching and guarding his client's interests, was a.s.suredly a man to be relied upon in any litigation. A great lawyer was like a great general--headquarters on the field. As for Lewis Rand and the next election--if he wanted to be Governor of Virginia, men who heard him in the court room were not the ones to say him nay! To a rational man his genius vindicated his birth. If he wanted the post, and if it was to the interest of the state, in G.o.d's name let him have it--old Gideon to the contrary!

Rand won the case, and turned Selim's head toward Albemarle. There had been a weary half day of thanks and protestations, and he was conscious of a dull relief when the last house was left behind, when the cultivated fields fell away, and the Virginian forest, still so dominant in the landscape, opened its dark arms and drew him in.

He rode slowly now, with drooping head. Young Isham, some yards behind, almost went to sleep in his saddle, so dragging was the tread the mare must follow. The dark aisle of the forest led presently through a gorge where the woods were in effect primeval. Upon the one hand rose a bank, thick with delicate moss and fern and shaded by birch and ash; on the other the ravine fell precipitously to hidden water, and was choked by towering pine and hemlock. The air was heavy, cool, and dank, the sunshine entering spa.r.s.ely. The place was, however, a haunt of birds, and now a wood robin answered its mate.

Rand rode more and more slowly. The way was narrow, but here and there, between it and the bank, appeared grey boulders sunk in all the fairy growth of early spring. He drew rein, bared his head, and looked about him, then dismounted and spoke to Young Isham, coming up behind. "I will sit here a little and rest, Young Isham. Take Selim with you around the turn and wait for me there. I'm tired, tired, tired!"

The negro obeyed, and the master was left alone Beside the road, beneath the mossy bank, lay a great fallen rock Rand flung himself down upon this, and as he did so, he remembered a river-bank, a sycamore, and a rock upon which a boy of fourteen had lain and watched, coming over the hill-top, distinct against the sunset sky, the G.o.d from the machine It was such a stone as this, and it was seventeen years ago "Seventeen years. And a thousand years in Thy sight--"

The past weeks had seen a change in the condition of his brain. He was yet all but sleepless, and the physical strain had weakened his frame and sharpened his features, but the sheer force of the man, a.s.serting itself, had put down the first wild inner tumult. Imagination was not now whipped to giddy heights, it kept a full, dark level. When, at long intervals, he slept, it was to dream, but not so dreadfully. He had no more visions such as had haunted him in January. The thought of Cary was with him, full and deep, a clean and bitter agony, but he saw him no more save with the eye of the mind. He was as rational as a sleepless man with a murder on his soul might well be, and he suffered as he had hardly suffered before.

With his face buried in his arms he lay very still upon the rock. He lay in shadow, but the sunlight was on the treetops above him. The wood robin yet uttered its bell-like note, the moist wind brought down the bank the fragrance of the fringe tree to blend with the deeper odour of the pine and hemlock. Rand lay without moving, the fingers of one outstretched hand clenched upon the edges of the rock. "A thousand years in Thy sight--and my day is as a thousand years. Oh, my G.o.d!"

The minutes pa.s.sed, deep and grave, slow and full, with the sense of afternoon, of solemn and trackless woods, unbreathed air, silence and high heaven, then the April wind swept up the gorge and brought the sound of water. Rand sat up, resting his head upon his hands, and stared down the shadowy steep. There were flowers growing close to him, violets and anemones, and on a ledge of rock above, the maiden-hair fern. His eyes falling upon them, they brought to his mind, suddenly and sadly enough, Deb and her flower ladies, all in a ring beneath the cedars--Faith and Hope and Charity, Ruth and Esther and the Shulamite.

The recollection of that morning was followed by a thought of the night before--of the Fontenoy drawing-room and of all who had been gathered there. He saw the place again, and he saw every figure within it--the two Churchills, the two Carys, Unity, Jacqueline. "There is not one," he thought, "to whom I've worked no harm. All that I have touched, I have withered."