"That was sheer providence, honey. We _might_ have been cut in two before we had gone ten yards."

"But, Cousin Nancy!" catching at her hands as she began to wring them again, and to sob and squeal as she had done in the morning. "Listen! I am sure I could go out by the very same path! Let's try! We can't stay here always."

"_Path!_ There isn't a sign of a path! Look!"

She pointed a bony finger in the direction we had come. The leaves and blossoms disturbed by our feet and skirts were as still as the hundreds and thousands of other leaves on all sides of us. We had not bruised a vine, or left a footprint, that we could see. The sun poured down upon us like fire from heaven; we were in the middle of the patch that seemed, to my horrified eyes, miles and miles in extent, and not another creature was in sight.

"Our only hope is to scream as loud as ever we can," said Cousin Nancy.

"n.o.body knows where we are; the hands are all in the tobacco, a mile on the other side of the house, and Cap'n Gates and Mr. Owen may be even farther off, for all I know. If we can't make anybody hear us, the Lord have mercy upon our souls! We shall have sunstroke inside of an hour."

I picked up the green parasol, and with clumsy, shaking fingers opened it, and stood on tiptoe to hold it over her head, crying, meantime, as piteously as she, such was the contagion of hysterical terror. Then, with one accord, we lifted up our voices, weak with weeping, in a thin screech. I said "Help! help! help!" she cried, "Murder! murder!" and "Cap'n _Ga-a-tes!_" We made enough noise to startle the dogs in the house-yard and at the stables, and brought from the nearer "quarters"

and corn-field a gang of negroes, of all sizes and ages, all running at the top of their speed, and the faster as they descried us. It would have been excruciatingly funny at any other time, and to one that was not an actor in the drama, to observe that not one man, woman, or pickaninny of the excited crowd offered to pa.s.s the confines of the melon patch. Each one was mindful of the hundreds of buried side-blades with their edges uppermost, and almost all were bare-footed.

"Run! some of you-all, for Marster an' Mr. Owen!" shrieked Malviny, getting her wits together before the others could rally theirs. The shrill order arose above the chorus of groans and cries and pitying exclamations, and Cousin Nancy, on hearing it, gave one wild cry, and dropped where she stood, a heap of white cambric, head, arms, and green parasol, crushing the vines, and her head just grazing a mammoth melon.

I had never been so frightened in all my life as when I got hold of her head, and tried to lift it. It was as heavy as lead. Too much terrified and too foolish to bethink myself that a cut would bleed, I concluded that she had struck one of the murderous blades, and it had killed her.

Her eyes were closed; her jaw had fallen; her cheek lay close against that of the big melon, and the vines met over her nose. It was a ghastly and a grotesque spectacle, and I behaved as any other nine-year-old would--jumped up and down and screamed, beating my palms together, and calling alternately for "Father!" and "Cousin 'Ratio!"

Since that horrible moment I have believed stories read and heard of people being scared to death, or into insanity. In the great, round world, there was nothing present to me but a cruel expanse of green below, a white-hot sky above, and at my feet a dead woman, killed by the razor-like blades thick-set under every leaf, and guarding every melon. Then all this was swept out of sight by a black wave that took me off my feet.

I awoke in the shade of the peach orchard. Mr. Owen, the overseer, had laid me down on the gra.s.s, and I heard him say, "She's all right now." I sat up and stared around me. Cousin Nancy, still in a dead faint, was stretched upon the ground a little way off, a fluttering swarm of women about her, with water, brandy, hartshorn, cologne, fans, and burning feathers, and Cousin 'Ratio, kneeling over her, was calling in her ear, the tears running down his bristly cheeks.

"Miss Nancy! honey! sugar-lump! wake up! it's me, dearie! The danger is all over. What a _doggoned_ fool I was to put the side-blades there!"

When she at last revived, she was taken to the house and put to bed. She was not yet able to sit up when my father and mother drove over for me in the cool of the afternoon.

"My tomfoolery came near to being the end of the poor dear," said Cousin 'Ratio, walking with us to the carriage, when we had taken leave of his wife. "I feel mighty bad about it, too, as you may suppose, for it was my fault in not reminding her of those cussed side-blades. Between ourselves, Burwell,"--coming nearer to my father and glancing over his shoulder to be sure none of the servants were within hearing,--"Owen and I put just exactly _two_ in the whole patch, and they were near the fence. Miss Nancy never went within a Sabbath day's journey of them. We made a mighty parade of toting twenty of them past the quarters, taking two of the hands along to help. They laid them down by the fence, and we came down after dark and carried all but two off to the old tobacco barn, and hid them there. I wasn't likely to rust my best side-blades by burying them in the dirt. But I'd rather have ruined them all and lost every blessed melon on the place, than have given Miss Nancy's Nerves such a shock."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter XVI

Old Madam Leigh

n.o.body seemed to know how everybody got into the way of calling her "Old Madam Leigh." It was not a Virginia custom, and there was not another old lady in the neighborhood to whom the t.i.tle of "Madam" was ever given. After she had lived to be the oldest woman in the county, the "Old" was prefixed, naturally enough.

I got to know her through Cousin Molly Belle.

"I declare, Frank, Molly has never seen Queen Mab and her hummers!" she said at dinner one day. "I'm ashamed of myself for not having taken her there. It's just the sort of thing she would enjoy."

When Mrs. Frank Morton was ashamed of having done anything, or having left anything undone, the next, and a quick step with her, was to mend the fault without further waste of words. We went over to Old Madam Leigh's that same afternoon,--she, Cousin Frank, and I,--on horseback, "the road to Queen Mab's palace being the vilest in the State," as my hostess averred.

I thought it a delightful road. It left the main highway a mile beyond Cousin Frank's plantation gate, and lost its way in oak and hickory woods, where the trees touched over our heads. I said they were "trying to shake hands with one another."

"They will be hugging one another before we go much farther," said Cousin Frank.

As they did when we began to climb a long hill, washed into crooked gullies by the water that tore down to the creek at the bottom whenever it rained hard. After this was a short and steeper hill, and then another long one, and we were on the edge of a clearing, very bright and sunny after the green glooms of the forest.

"Does Queen Mab drive this way, often, in her chariot-and-four?" I inquired, as we struck into a gentle gallop along a gra.s.sy lane.

"Queen Mab's chariot has not been out of the carriage-house in twenty-five years," answered Cousin Molly Belle. "There is another road from her house to where everyday people live, but it would take us a long way around. Mother can recollect when this was a good road, and much travelled."

"Doesn't she make any visits?"

"Never to human beings."

"Doesn't she go to church?"

"Not that I have ever heard of."

"Cousin Molly Belle!" in an awed tone. "Is she a _heathen_?"

"She is very old, Namesake. Nearly ninety."

She said it gravely and gently, and Cousin Frank repeated a verse of poetry I did not know then:--

"He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear G.o.d who loveth us, He made and loveth all."

It was so nice that I turned it over in my mind several times before I asked another question. My mother sometimes called me "an animated interrogation-point."

"Is Old Madam Leigh married?"

"She has been married. She would not be 'Madam' if she had not been. She has been a widow for a long, long time. She had two children--twins--a boy and a girl. They lived to be twenty years old, and then died."

"Not both at the same time, Cousin Molly Belle?" for her tone suggested something very sorrowful.

"Yes, Molly dear. The sister fell into the river and the brother, in swimming out to save her, was seized with the cramp and sank before he could reach her. The mother has lived alone ever since, except for her servants. They are very good and faithful. Then, she has her hummers and her pygmies, who are a great deal of company to her."

"_Pigs!_" in intense disgust. "She can't be a very neat person."

A peal of laughter from my companions broke off the speech.

"You'll change your mind shortly," said Cousin Frank, cantering ahead to open a gate in the rail fence.

We saw the house from the gate,--a wee bit of a gray cottage, one story high, literally covered with honeysuckles of every kind I had ever heard of, and now in fullest bloom. An enormous catalpa tree, also in flower, stood in front of the cottage, shading all but one gable, and that looked as if it were made of gla.s.s. Between this gable and the garden were two spreading acacia trees, tufted with the ta.s.sel-like blossoms.

The deep front porch was curtained with white jessamine, and as we walked up the gravelled path leading to it, Madam Leigh stood in the doorway.

She was a tiny old lady, no taller than I was, and wore a white dress, fine and sheer. Cousin Molly Belle told me afterward that it was India muslin, and that she wore white, winter and summer. The waist of the gown was very short, the skirt was straight, and fell to the in-step of a foot no bigger than a baby's. Her cap was also old-fashioned, made of lace, with a full crimped border under which her hair, silvery-white, was dressed in short, round curls on each side of her forehead. Her skin reminded me of a bit of rice-paper I had picked up from the floor one day. It had dropped out of the back of my father's watch, and Bud had found it and played with it until it was creased and cracked all over like "crazed" china, yet not torn. Old Madam Leigh's face could not be said to be wrinkled, for the lines were shallow. They were as fine as if made with an inkless crow quill, and so close together you would have thought there was not room for another. Her eyes were dark and bright She had French blood in her veins, and showed it in her quick glance and lively motions.

She took us directly into "the chamber" on the left side of the hall that cut the house in two. Everything there was white, too,--bed and curtains and chair-covers being of white dimity, trimmed with lace. The walls were almost covered with portraits. Some were very old. Two of the brightest hung opposite the bed where Madam Leigh must see them as soon as she opened her eyes in the morning. One was of a pretty girl in a white frock, low-necked and short-sleeved, with a red rose in the bodice, making the fair skin it rested against all the fairer. Her eyes were dark and sweet; short brown curls, like Madam Leigh's white ones, cl.u.s.tered about her temples. The other picture was that of a handsome boy of twenty, or thereabouts, and strikingly like his sister. A dog, with silky ears, leaned his head against his young master's arm.

I tried hard not to stare at these portraits,--to me the most interesting things in the room,--for I knew they must be the twin-children who had died together, ever and ever so many years ago.

The instinct of kindly breeding told me that it would not be polite to remind the mother of her loss by looking inquisitively at them. But I could not help stealing a glance at one and the other when the grown people were intent in talk. Looking led to dreaming, as I was left to myself and the thoughts suggested by the portraits. I arranged it in my mind that brother and sister were very fond of each other; that the sister had fallen into the river where the current was strong, from some such place as Maiden's Adventure, on Mr. Pemberton's plantation, where the water was deep above a roaring fall. I thought how she called to her brother, and how he answered, and I wondered--a chill running down my spine and catching at my heart--who carried the awful news to the mother. How could she bear it? how live in this lonely place with n.o.body to keep her from thinking of, and missing, her husband and her children, n.o.body to care whether she were glad or sorry, sick or well, alive or dead?

I did not know that my mouth was drawn down at the corners, that my eyes were mournful, and my whole aspect that of a sadly bored little girl, who felt herself to be left entirely out of the thoughts of her friends and the hostess--until Madam Leigh's voice made me start, as if I had been asleep.