Book 3. When Fields Lie Fallow - Chapter 2

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_ BOOK III. WHEN FIELDS LIE FALLOW
CHAPTER II

The next day Nicholas went into Tom Bassett's office, where he met Dudley Webb, who was spending a dutiful week in Kingsborough. He was a genial young fellow, with a clear-cut, cleanly shaven face and a handsome head covered with rich, dark hair. His hands were smooth and white, and he gesticulated rapidly as he talked. It was already said of him that he told a poor story better than anybody else told a good one--a fact which was probably the elemental feature of his popularity.

As Nicholas looked in, he raised himself lightly from Tom's desk chair and gave him a hearty handshake.

"Hello, Burr! We were just talking of you. I was telling Tom a jolly thing I heard yesterday. Two farmers were discussing you at the post-office, and one of them said: ''Tain't that he's got so much sense--I had a sight more at his age--but he's so blamed sure of himself, he makes you believe in him.' How's that for fame?"

"Not so bad as it is for me," returned Nicholas with a laugh. "If you win one or two small cases, there's obliged to be undue influence of the devil."

"Which, occasionally, it is," added Tom seriously.

Dudley threw himself back into his chair and crossed his shapely legs. For a moment he smoked in silence, then he removed his cigar from his mouth and flecked the ashes upon the uncarpeted floor.

"Oh! the mystery to me is," he said, "that you exist down here and live to tell the tale--or at least that you earn enough crumbs to feed the crows."

"Kingsborough crows aren't high livers," remarked Nicholas as he threw himself into the remaining chair.

Dudley laughed softly--a humorous laugh that fell pleasantly on the ear.

"That reminds me," he began whimsically. "I met a tourist with spectacles walking along Duke of Gloucester Street. 'Sir,' he said courteously, 'I am looking for Kingsborough. I am told that it is a city.' 'Sir,' I responded, with a bow that did honour to my grandfather's ghost, 'it was once a chartered city; it is now only a charter.'"

Then he turned to Tom.

"We haven't got used to the railroad yet, have we?" he asked.

Tom shook his head.

"General Battle's still protesting," he replied. "He swears it makes Kingsborough common."

Dudley thoughtfully examined his cigar, an amused smile about his mouth.

"My mother doesn't want the cows turned out of the churchyard," he observed, "because it would abolish one of Kingsborough's characteristics. She's right, too, by Jove."

"They're having a fight over it now," put in Nicholas with the gravity he rarely lost. "The people who own cows call it an 'ancient right.' The people who don't, call it sacrilege. The rector leads one faction, and the congregation has split."

"And split we smash," added Dudley. "Well, these are exciting times in Kingsborough's history; it is almost as lively as Richmond. There we had a religious convention and an elopement last week. I don't suppose you come up to that?"

Nicholas ran his hand through his hair with a habitual gesture. He was idly watching the light of Dudley's cigar and noting the quality by the aroma. He could not afford cigars himself, and he wondered how Dudley managed to do so.

"We are a people without a present," he returned inattentively. "You've heard, I take it, that an old elm has gone near the court-house."

"My mother told me. I believe she knows every brick that used to be and is not. I'm trying to get her away with me, but she won't come."

"Sally Burwell was telling me," said Tom, a dawning interest in his face, "she had tried to persuade her."

"Yes, we tried and failed. By the way, is it true that Sally's engaged to Jack Wyth? I hear it at every turn."

"I--I shouldn't be surprised," gasped Tom painfully.

"I don't believe a word of it," protested Nicholas.

"He isn't much good, eh?"

"Why, he's a brick," said Nicholas.

"He's a cad," said Tom.

Dudley laughed and blew a cloud of smoke in the air.

"Well, she's a daisy herself, and as good as gold. She's the kind of woman to flirt herself hoarse and then settle down into dove-like domesticity. But what about Eugie? Is she really grown up? My mother declares she's splendid."

Nicholas was silent.

"Oh, she's handsome enough," Tom carelessly replied.

"But not like Sally, eh?"

"Oh, no! not like Sally."

Dudley tossed the stump of his cigar through the open window, lit a cigarette, and changed the subject. He talked easily, relating several laughable stories, referring occasionally to himself and his success, illustrating his remarks by his experience at the bar, giving finally the exclamation of a fellow-lawyer at the close of an argument he had made: "You may be a muff of a jurist, Webb," he had cried, "but, by George! you're a devil of an advocate!"

He was, withal, so affable, so confident, so thoroughly a good fellow, that an hour passed before Nicholas remembered he had looked in only for a moment.

When he rose to go, Dudley gripped his hand again, slapped him on the shoulder, declared him to be a "first-rate old chap," and ended by pressing him to drop in on him when he ran up to Richmond.

Nicholas gave back the friendly grasp and pledged himself to the "dropping in." He resistingly succumbed before the inherent jovial charm.

The afternoon being Saturday, he left town earlier than usual and spent a couple of hours with his father in the fields. The peanuts were being harvested. Amos Burr, with a peanut "share" attached to the plough, was separating the yellowed plants from the ripe nuts underground, and Nicholas, lifting the roots upon a pitchfork, shook them free from earth and threw them over the pointed staves which were the final supports of the "shocks." A negro hand went before him, driving the sticks into the sandy soil.

"I should say you might count on forty bushels an acre," remarked Nicholas cheerfully, as he lifted a detached root from a broken hill. "It's a fair yield, isn't it?"

Amos Burr shook his head and muttered that there was "no tellin'. Peanuts air one of the things thar's no countin' on," he added. "Wheat air another, corn air another, oats air another."

"Life is another," concluded Nicholas lightly. "Still we live and still we raise wheat and oats and corn. But I wish you'd look into market gardening. I believe it would pay you better."

"'Tain't no use," returned Amos, with his accustomed pessimism. "'Tain't no use my plantin' as long as the government ain't goin' to move, nohow. It's been promisin' to help the farmer ever since the war, an' it ain't done nothin' for him yet but tax him."

But Nicholas, to avoid his father's political drift, fell to talking with one of the negro workers.

Several hours later, when he had changed his farm clothes, he joined Eugenia in the pasture and walked with her to Battle Hall, where the general received him with ready, if condescending, hospitality. Eugenia had instructed her family upon the changed conditions of Nicholas's social standing, but her logic was powerless to convince her father that Amos Burr's son was any better than Amos Burr had been before him.

"Pish! Pish!" he exclaimed testily, "the boy's not a lawyer--only gentlemen belong to the bar, but there's nobody too high or too low to be a farmer. Polite to him? Did you ever see me impolite in my own house even to a chimney sweep?"

"I never saw a chimney sweep in your own house," Eugenia retorted, whereupon he pinched her cheek and accused her of "making fun of her old father."

Now, when Nicholas sat down on one of the long green benches on the porch, the general conversed with him as he conversed with the chicken sellers who came of an afternoon to receive payment for their luckless fowls.

"This'll be a busy season for you," he observed cheerfully, in the slightly elevated voice in which he addressed his inferiors. "You'll be cutting your corn before long and seeding your winter crops. What are you planting this fall?"

He could not be induced to engage upon social topics with the young man or to allude in the most distant manner to his legal profession. He was a Burr, and a Burr was a small farmer, nothing more.

"We're ploughing for oats now, sir," responded Nicholas diffidently, "and we're going to seed a little rye with clover--if the clover's killed, the rye'll last."

"I should advise you to look after the land," said the general, stuffing the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and pressing it down with his fat thumb. "What you need is to plant it in cow-peas and turn them down. There's nothing like them for fertilising."

Nicholas, who was listening attentively, rose to shake hands with Miss Chris who appeared in the doorway.

"The fall comes earlier than it used to," she remarked, drawing a light crocheted shawl about her shoulders. "Why, I remember when it used to be summer up to the middle of November. I was talking to Judge Bassett about it yesterday, and he said he certainly thought the seasons had changed since he was a boy."

"I don't reckon your father has much opinion of fertilisers," broke in the general, reverting to his pleasant patronage.

Nicholas answered before Eugenia could interpose. "No, sir, he doesn't believe in them much," he replied.

"Well, you tell him it's lime he needs," continued the general. "The most successful peanut grower I ever knew put about a thousand pounds of lime to an acre, and he cleared--"

"Have you seen Dudley Webb?" asked Eugenia, shaking her head at the general's frown.

"For an hour this morning. He was in Tom Bassett's office. He told some good stories."

Miss Chris heaved a reminiscent sigh.

"That's poor Julius Webb all over again," she said. "He could keep a dinner table laughing for two hours and fight a duel at daybreak. I remember at his own wedding, when they drank his health, he told such a funny story that old Judge Blitherstone, who was upwards of eighty, had to have cold bandages put to his head."

The general took his pipe from his mouth. "Dudley's a fine young fellow," he said. "I saw him yesterday when I went to the post-office. They tell me he's making a name for himself in Richmond."

Eugenia laughed lightly.

"Papa adores Mrs. Webb, so he thinks Dudley splendid," she said.

"That lady is one of the noblest of her sex," loyally asserted the general.

"And one of the most trying of either sex," added his daughter. "When I came home my last holiday, she asked me what I learned at school, and I danced a skirt dance for her."

"I always told you you spoiled Eugie to death, Tom," said Miss Chris in justification of her own responsibility. "In my day no young lady knew what a skirt dance was."

"But that's what I learned at school," protested Eugenia.

The general, feeling that the conversation excluded Nicholas, renewed his attack.

"What do you think of raising garden products?" he inquired affably. Then Eugenia rose, and he submissively retired.

"We aren't going to talk farming any more," said the girl. "Nick and I are going into the garden for roses," and she descended the steps, followed by Nicholas, who was beginning for the first time to breathe freely.

"Tell your father to look into the truck-growing," was the general's parting shot.

The garden was flushed with the riot of autumn. Over the little whitewashed fence double rows of hollyhocks and sunflowers nodded their heavy heads, and bordering the narrow walk were lines of chrysanthemums and dahlias. October roses, the richest of the year, bloomed and dropped in the quaint old squares where the long vegetable rows began. At the end of the straight, overgrown walk the hop vines on the fence threw out a pungent odour.

"Papa wants to have the garden ploughed," said Eugenia. "He says it takes too much time to hoe it. Give me your knife, please."

He opened the blade, and she stooped to cut off a crimson dahlia while the Indian summer sunshine slanted from the west upon her dark head and white dress. Over all was the faint violet haze of the season, hanging above the gay old garden like a delicate effluvium from autumns long decayed.

"There aren't many old-time gardens left," said Nicholas regretfully, "but I like this one best of all. I always think of you in the midst of it."

"Yes, we used to gather calacanthus blossoms and trade them for taffy at school. The bushes are almost all dead now. That is the only one left."

She laid the knife upon the grass and raised her arms to fasten a yellow chrysanthemum in her hair. As it lay against her ear it cast a clear, golden light upon her cheek, as warm as the late sunshine.

"Flowers suit you," he said.

"Do they?" she smiled in a quick, pleased way. "Is it because I love them?"

"It is because you are beautiful," he answered bluntly.

Some one had once called Eugenia's besetting vanity the love of giving pleasure; it was, perhaps, in reality, the pleasure of being loved. It was not the fact that she might be beautiful that now warmed her so gratefully, but the evidence that Nicholas was good enough to consider her so.

"You have seen so few girls," she remarked reasonably enough.

"I may see many, but it won't alter my view of you."

"How can you tell?"

He shook his head impatiently.

"I shan't tell. I shall prove it."

"And when you have proved it where shall I be?--old and toothless?"

"May be--but still beautiful."

There was a glow in her face, but she did not reply. His eyes and the last, long ray of sunshine were upon her. He was revoking from an old October a dark-haired, clear-eyed girl amid the dahlias, and it seemed to him that Eugenia had shot up in a season like one of the stately flowers. As she stood in the grass-grown walk, her skirt half-filled with blossoms, her white hands lifting the thin folds above her ruffled petticoat, she appeared to be the vital apparition of the place--a harbinger of the vivid sunlight and the dark shadows of the passing of the year.

"See how many!" she exclaimed, holding her lapful towards him. "You may take your choice--only not that last pink papa loves."

He plunged his hands amid the confusion of colours and drew out a yellow chrysanthemum.

"I like this," he said simply.

She laughed. "But it doesn't suit your hair," she suggested.

He met her sally gravely.

"It is my favourite flower," he returned.

"Since when, pray?"

"Since--since a half-hour ago."

He stooped and picked up his knife from the grass.

"Are you going away?" he asked, "or shall you stay here always?"

"Always," she promptly returned. "I'm going to live here with this old garden until I grow to be an ancient dame--and you may walk over on autumn afternoons and I'll be sympathetic about your rheumatism. Isn't that a picture that delights your soul?"

"No," he said bluntly; "I see a better one."

"Tell me."

"I can never tell you," he replied gravely--"not even when you are an ancient dame and I rheumatic."

She was merry again.

"Then I fear it's wicked," she said, "and I'm amazed at you. But my day-dreams are all common ones. I ask only the country and my home and horses and cows and chickens--and a rheumatic friend. You see I must be happy, I ask so little."

"And you argue that he who demands little gets it," he returned lightly. "On the other hand, I should say that he who is content with less gets nothing. I ask the biggest thing Fate has to give, and then stand waiting for--"

He paused for a breathless instant while he looked at her, and then slowly finished:

"For the skies to fall."

They swung open the gate into cattle lane, and stood waiting while the cows trooped by to the barnyard.

Eugenia called them by name, and they turned great stupid eyes upon her as they stopped to munch the hollyhocks.

"She was named after you," said the girl suddenly.

"She? Who?" he turned a helpless look upon the two small negroes who drove the cows.

"Why, Burr Bess, of course--that Jersey there. You know we couldn't name her Nick because she wasn't a boy, so Bernard called her Burr Bess. You don't seem pleased."

"She's a fine cow," observed Nicholas critically.

"Oh! she was the most beautiful calf! I thought you remembered it. One was named after me, but it died, and one was named after Bernard, but it went to the butcher. Bernard was so angry about it that he waylaid the cart on the road and let it out. But they caught it again. It was too bad, wasn't it?"

The garden gate closed behind them with a click, and they crossed the lane to the lawn.

Miss Chris, who stood shading her eyes in the back porch, was giving directions to Aunt Verbeny in the smoke-house. When she saw Nicholas she broke off and asked him to stay to supper, but he declined hastily, and, with an embarrassed good-evening, turned back into the lane. The hollyhocks over the whitewashed fence brushed him as he passed, and the spices of the garden came to him like the essence of the eternal Romance. _

Read next: Book 3. When Fields Lie Fallow: Chapter 3

Read previous: Book 3. When Fields Lie Fallow: Chapter 1

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