Late in the afternoon, as the Governor neared the tavern, he was met by a messenger with the news; and at once turning his horse's head, he started back to Uplands. A dim fear, which had been with him since boyhood, seemed to take shape and meaning with the words; and in a lightning flash of understanding he knew that he had lived before through the horror of this moment. If his fathers had sinned, surely the shadow of their wrong had passed them by to fall the heavier upon their sons; for even as his blood rang in his ears, he saw a savage justice in the thing he feared—a recompense to natural laws in which the innocent should weigh as naught against the guilty.
A fine rain was falling; and as he went on, the end of a drizzling afternoon dwindled rapidly into night. Across the meadows he saw the lamps in scattered cottages twinkle brightly through the dusk which rolled like fog down from the mountains. The road he followed sagged between two gray hills into a narrow valley, and regaining its balance upon the farther side, stretched over a cattle pasture into the thick cover of the woods.
As he reached the summit of the first hill, he saw the Major's coach creeping slowly up the incline, and heard the old gentleman scolding through the window at Congo on the box.
“My dear Major, home's the place for you,” he said as he drew rein. “Is it possible that the news hasn't reached you yet?”
Remembering Congo, he spoke cautiously, but the Major, in his anger, tossed discretion to the winds.
“Reached me?—bless my soul!—do you take me for a ground hog?” he cried, thrusting his red face through the window. “I met Tom Bickels four miles back, and the horses haven't drawn breath since. But it's what I expected all along—I was just telling Congo so—it all comes from the mistaken tolerance of black Republicans. Let me open my doors to them to-day, and they'll be tempting Congo to murder me in my bed to-morrow.”
“Go 'way f'om yer, Ole Marster,” protested Congo from the box, flicking at the harness with his long whip.
The Governor looked a little anxiously at the negro, and then shook his head impatiently. Though a less exacting master than the Major, he had not the same childlike trust in the slaves he owned.
“Shall you not turn back?” he asked, surprised.
“Champe's there,” responded the Major, “so I came on for the particulars. A night in town isn't to my liking, but I can't sleep a wink until I hear a thing or two. You're going out, eh?”
“I'm riding home,” said the Governor, “it makes me uneasy to be away from Uplands.” He paused, hesitated an instant, and then broke out suddenly. “Good God, Major, what does it mean?”
The Major shook his head until his long white hair fell across his eyes.
“Mean, sir?” he thundered in a rage. “It means, I reckon, that those damned friends of yours have a mind to murder you. It means that after all your speech-making and your brotherly love, they're putting pitchforks into the hands of savages and loosening them upon you. Oh, you needn't mind Congo, Governor. Congo's heart's as white as mine.”
“Dat's so, Ole Marster,” put in Congo, approvingly.
The Governor was trembling as he leaned down from his saddle.
“We know nothing as yet, sir,” he began, “there must be some—”
“Oh, go on, go on,” cried the Major, striking the carriage window. “Keep up your speech-making and your handshaking until your wife gets murdered in her bed—but, by God, sir, if Virginia doesn't secede after this, I'll secede without her!”
The coach moved on and the Governor, touching his horse with the whip, rode rapidly down the hill.
As he descended into the valley, a thick mist rolled over him and the road lost itself in the blur of the surrounding fields. Without slackening his pace, he lighted the lantern at his saddle-bow and turned up the collar of his coat about his ears. The fine rain was soaking through his clothes, but in the tension of his nerves he was oblivious of the weather. The sun might have risen overhead and he would not have known it.
With the coming down of the darkness a slow fear crept, like a physical chill, from head to foot. A visible danger he felt that he might meet face to face and conquer; but how could he stand against an enemy that crept upon him unawares?—against the large uncertainty, the utter ignorance of the depth or meaning of the outbreak, the knowledge of a hidden evil which might be even now brooding at his fireside?
A thousand hideous possibilities came toward him from out the stretch of the wood. The light of a distant window, seen through the thinned edge of the forest; the rustle of a small animal in the underbrush; the drop of a walnut on the wet leaves in the road; the very odours which rose from the moist earth and dripped from the leafless branches—all sent him faster on his way, with a sound within his ears that was like the drumming of his heart.
To quiet his nerves, he sought to bring before him a picture of the house at Uplands, of the calm white pillars and the lamplight shining from the door; but even as he looked the vision of a slave-war rushed between, and the old buried horrors of the Southampton uprising sprang suddenly to life and thronged about the image of his home. Yesterday those tales had been for him as colourless as history, as dry as dates; to-night, with this new fear at his heart, the past became as vivid as the present, and it seemed to him that beyond each lantern flash he saw a murdered woman, or an infant with its brains dashed out at its mother's breast. This was what he feared, for this was what the message meant to him: “The slaves are armed and rising.”
And yet with it all, he felt that there was some wild justice in the thing he dreaded, in the revolt of an enslaved and ignorant people, in the pitiable and ineffectual struggle for a freedom which would mean, in the beginning, but the power to go forth and kill. It was the recognition of this deeper pathos that made him hesitate to reproach even while his thoughts dwelt on the evils—that would, if the need came, send him fearless and gentle to the fight. For what he saw was that behind the new wrongs were the old ones, and that the sinners of to-day were, perhaps, the sinned against of yesterday.
When at last he came out into the turnpike, he had not the courage to look among the trees for the lights of Uplands; and for a while he rode with his eyes following the lantern flash as it ran onward over the wet ground. The small yellow circle held his gaze, and as if fascinated he watched it moving along the road, now shining on the silver grains in a ring of sand, now glancing back from the standing water in a wheelrut, and now illuminating a mossy stone or a weed upon the roadside. It was the one bright thing in a universe of blackness, until, as he came suddenly upon an elevation, the trees parted and he saw the windows of his home glowing upon the night. As he looked a great peace fell over him, and he rode on, thanking God.
When he turned into the drive, his past anxiety appeared to him to be ridiculous, and as he glanced from the clear lights in the great house to the chain of lesser ones that stretched along the quarters, he laughed aloud in the first exhilaration of his relief. This at least was safe, God keep the others.
At his first call as he alighted before the portico, Hosea came running for his horse, and when he entered the house, the cheerful face of Uncle Shadrach looked out from the dining room.
“Hi! Marse Peyton, I 'lowed you wuz gwine ter spen' de night.”
“Oh, I had to get back, Shadrach,” replied the Governor. “No, I won't take any supper—you needn't bring it—but give me a glass of Burgundy, and then go to bed. Where is your mistress, by the way? Has she gone to her room?”
Uncle Shadrach brought the bottle of Burgundy from the cellaret and placed it upon the table.
“Naw, suh, Miss July she set out ter de quarters ter see atter Mahaley,” he returned. “Mahaley she's moughty bad off, but 'tain' no night fur Miss July—dat's w'at I tell 'er—one er dese yer spittin' nights ain' no night ter be out in.”
“You're right, Shadrach, you're right,” responded the Governor; and rising he drank the wine standing. “It isn't a fit night for her to be out, and I'll go after her at once.”
He took up his lantern, and as the old negro opened the doors before him, went out upon the back porch and down the steps.
From the steps a narrow path ran by the kitchen, and skirting the garden-wall, straggled through the orchard and past the house of the overseer to the big barn and the cabins in the quarters. There was a light from the barn door, and as he passed he heard the sound of fiddles and the shuffling steps of the field hands in a noisy “game.” The words they sang floated out into the night, and with the squeaking of the fiddles followed him along his path.
When he reached the quarters, he went from door to door, asking for his wife. “Is this Mahaley's cabin?” he anxiously inquired, “and has your mistress gone by?”
In the first room an old negro woman sat on the hearth wrapping the hair of her grandchild, and she rose with a courtesy and a smile of welcome. At the question her face fell and she shook her head.
“Dis yer ain' Mahaley, Marster,” she replied. “En dis yer ain' Mahaley's cabin—caze Mahaley she ain' never set foot inside my do', en I ain' gwine set foot at her buryin'.” She spoke shrilly, moved by a hidden spite, but the Governor, without stopping, went on along the line of open doors. In one a field negro was roasting chestnuts in the embers of a log fire, and while waiting he had fallen asleep, with his head on his breast and his gnarled hands hanging between his knees. The firelight ran over him, and as he slept he stirred and muttered something in his dreams.
After the first glance, his master passed him by and moved on to the adjoining cabin. “Does Mahaley live here?” he asked again and yet again, until, suddenly, he had no need to put the question for from the last room he heard a low voice praying, and upon looking in saw his wife kneeling with her open Bible near the bedside.
With his hat in his hand, he stood within the shadow of the doorway and waited for the earnest voice to fall silent. Mahaley was dying, this he saw when his glance wandered to the shrunken figure beneath the patchwork quilt; and at the same instant he realized how small a part was his in Mahaley's life or death. He should hardly have known her had he met her last week in the corn field; and it was by chance only that he knew her now when she came to die.
As he stood there the burden of his responsibility weighed upon him like old age. Here in this scant cabin things so serious as birth and death showed in a pathetic bareness, stripped of all ceremonial trappings, as mere events in the orderly working out of natural laws—events as seasonable as the springing up and the cutting down of the corn. In these simple lives, so closely lived to the ground, grave things were sweetened by an unconscious humour which was of the soil itself; and even death lost something of its strangeness when it came like the grateful shadow which falls over a tired worker in the field.
Mrs. Ambler finished her prayer and rose from her knees; and as she did so two slave women, crouching in a corner by the fire, broke into loud moaning, which filled the little room with an animal and inarticulate sound of grief.
“Come away, Julia,” implored the Governor in a whisper, resisting an impulse to close his ears against the cry.
But his wife shook her head and spoke for a moment with the sick woman before she wrapped her shawl about her and came out into the open air. Then she gave a sigh of relief, and, with her hand through her husband's arm, followed the path across the orchard.
“So you came home, after all,” she said. For a moment he made no response; then, glancing about him in the darkness, he spoke in a low voice, as if fearing the sound of his own words.
“Bad news brought me home, Julia,” he replied, “At the tavern they told me a message had come to Leicesterburg from Harper's Ferry. An attack was made on the arsenal at midnight, and, it may be but a rumour, my dear, it was feared that the slaves for miles around were armed for an uprising.”
His voice faltered, and he put out his hand to steady her, but she looked up at him and he saw her clear eyes shining in the gloom.
“Oh, poor creatures,” she murmured beneath her breath.
“Julia, Julia,” he said softly, and lifted the lantern that he might look into her face. As the light fell on her he knew that she was as much a mystery to him now as she had been twenty years ago on her wedding-day.
When they went into the house, he followed Uncle Shadrach about and carefully barred the windows, shooting bolts which were rusted from disuse. After the old negro had gone out he examined the locks again; and then going into the hall took down a bird gun and an army pistol from their places on the rack. These he loaded and laid near at hand beside the books upon his table.
There was no sleep for him that night, and until dawn he sat, watchful, in the road and listening for the sound of approaching steps.
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