Home > Authors Index > Ellen Glasgow > Voice of the People > This page
The Voice of the People, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
||
Book 3. When Fields Lie Fallow - Chapter 6 |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ BOOK III. WHEN FIELDS LIE FALLOW CHAPTER VI She ran swiftly along the walk, into the gloom of the avenue, and out again to the open road. The sunset colours were flaming in the west, and above them a solitary star was shining. The fields lay sombre and deserted on either side, but straight ahead, in the lighter streak of the road, she saw Nicholas's figure swinging onward. She might have called to him, but she did not; she sped like a shadow in his path until, hearing her footfalls in the dust, he looked back and halted. "You!" he exclaimed. She came up to him, her hand at her throat, her face turned towards the sunset. For a moment her breath failed and she could not speak; then all the words that she had meant to say--the appeal to him for truth, the cry of her own belief in him--rang theatrical and ineffectual in her brain. When at last she spoke, it was to voice the mere tripping of her tongue--to utter words which belied the beating of her thoughts. "You must marry her," she said, and it seemed to her that it was a stranger who spoke. She did not mean that--she had never meant it. He looked at her blankly, and made a sudden movement forward, but she waved him off. "For God's sake, whom?" he demanded. She wished that he had laughed at her--that he had laid bare the whole hideous farce, but he did not; he regarded her gravely, with a grim inquiry. "Whom do you mean?" he repeated. A light wind sprang up, blowing across the pasture and whirling the dead leaves of distant trees into their faces. Overhead other stars came out, and far away an owl hooted. "Oh! you know, you know," she said, with a desperate anger at his immobility. "When I saw you with her to-day, I did not--I did not--" "Do you mean Bessie Pollard?" he asked. His voice was hard; it was characteristic of him that, in the supreme test, his sense of humour failed him. He met grave issues with a gravity that upheld them. She bowed her head. At the same time she flung out a despairing hand for hope, but he did not notice it. She was softening to him--if she had ever steeled herself against him--and a single summons to her faith would have vanquished the feeble resistance. But he did not make it--the inflexible front which she had seen turned to others she now saw presented to herself. He looked at her with an austere tightening of the mouth and held off. "And they have told you that I ruined her," he said, "and you believe them." "No--no," she cried; "not that!" His eyes were on her, but there was no yielding in them. The arrogant pride of a strong man, plainly born, was face to face with her appeal. His features were set with the rigidity of stone. "Who has told you this?" he demanded. "Oh, it is not true--it is not true," she answered; "but Bernard--Bernard believed it--and he is your friend." Then his smouldering rage burst forth, and his face grew black. It was as if an incarnate devil had leaped into his eyes. He took a step forward. "Then may God damn him," he said, "for he is the man!" She fell from him as if he had struck her. Her spirit flashed out as his had done. The anger of her race shot forth. "Oh, stop! stop! How dare you!" she cried; "for he tried to shield you--he tried to shield you--he would shield you if he could." But he crossed to where she stood and caught her outstretched hands in a grasp that hurt her. She winced, and his hold grew gentle; but his voice was brutal in its passion. "Be silent," he said, "and listen to me. They have lied to you, and you have believed them--you I shall never forgive--you are nothing to me--nothing. As for him--may God, in his mercy, damn him!" He let her hands drop and went from her into the silence of the open road. When the thud of his footsteps was muffled by the distance Eugenia turned and went back through the cedar avenue. She walked heavily, and there was a bruised sensation in her limbs as if she had hurt herself upon stones. A massive fatigue oppressed her, and she stumbled once or twice over the rocks in the road. Her happiness was dead, this she told herself; telling herself, also, that it had not perished by anger or by disbelief. The slayer loomed intangible and yet inevitable--the shade that had arisen from the gigantic gulf between separate classes which they had sought, in ignorance, to abridge. The pride of Nicholas was not individual, but typical--the pride of caste, and it was against this that she had sinned--not in distrusting his honour, but in offending it. It was in the clash of class, after all, that their theories had crumbled. He might come back to her again--she might go forth to meet him--but the bloom had gone from their dreams--in the reunion she saw neither permanence nor abiding. The strongest of her instincts--the one that made for the blood she bore--had quivered beneath the onslaught of his accusation, but had not bent. Wherever and whenever the struggle came she stood, as the Battles had always stood, for the clan. Be it right or wrong, true or false, it was hers and she was on its side. As she went beneath the great cedars, their long branches brushed her face, like the remembering touch of familiar fingers, and she put up her cheek to them as if they were sentient things. Long ago they had soothed her as a troubled child, and now their caresses cooled her fever. Underfoot she felt the ancient carpet they had spread throughout the century--and it smoothed the way for her heavy feet. She was in the state of subjective passiveness when the consciousness of external objects alone seems awake. She felt a tenderness for the twisted box bushes she brushed in passing, a vague pity for a sickly moth that flew into her face; but for herself she was without pity or tenderness--she had not brought her mind to bear upon her own hurt. Indoors she found the family at supper. The general, hearing her step, called her to her seat and gave her the brownest chicken breast in the dish before him. Miss Chris offered her the contents of the cream jug, and Congo plied her with Aunt Verbeny's lightest waffles; but the food choked her and she could not eat. A lump rose in her throat, and she saw the kindly, accustomed faces through a gathering mist. She regarded each with a certain intentness, a peculiar feeling that there were hidden traits in the commonplace features which she had never seen before--a complexity in the benign candour of Miss Chris's countenance, in the overwrought youthfulness of Bernard's, in the apoplectic credulity of the general's. Familiar as they were, it seemed to her that there were latent possibilities--obscure tendencies, which were revealed to her now with microscopic exaggeration. The general put his hand to her forehead and smoothed back the moist hair. "Ain't you well, daughter?" he asked anxiously. "Would you like a toddy?" "It's nothing," said Miss Chris cheerfully. "She's walked too far, that's all. Eugie, you must go to bed early." "I had her out all the morning in the sun," put in Bernard, with an affectionate nod at Eugenia, "and she's such a trump she wouldn't give out." "You must learn to consider your sister," said his father testily. "Oh! I liked it, papa," declared Eugenia. "I'm well and--I'm hungry." Congo brought more waffles, and she ate one with grim determination. The alert affection which surrounded her--which proved sensitive to a change of colour or a tremor of voice, filled her with a swift sense of security. She felt a sudden impulse to draw nearer in the shelter of the race--to cling more closely to that unswerving instinct which had united individual to individual and generation to generation. As they rose from the table, she slipped her arm through her father's and went with him into the hall. "I'm tired," she said, stopping him on his way to the sitting-room, "so I'll go to bed." The general held her from him and looked into her face. "Anybody been troubling you, Eugie?" he asked. She shook her head. "You dear old goose--no!" He patted her shoulder reassuringly. "If anybody troubles you, you just let me hear of it," he said. "They'll find out Tom Battle wasn't at Appomattox. You've got an old father and he's got an old sword--" "And he's hungry for a fight," she gaily finished. Then she rubbed her cheek against his brown linen sleeve, which was redolent of tobacco. The firm physical contact inspired her with the courage of life; it seemed to make for her a bulwark against the world and its incoming tribulations. She threw back her head and looked up into the puffed and scarlet face where the coarse veins were congested, her eyes seeing only the love which transfigured it. She was his pet and his pride, and she would always be the final reward of his long life. As she mounted the stairs, he blew his nose and called cheerfully after her: "Just remember, if anybody begins plaguing you, that I'm ready for him--the rascal." Once in her room she threw open the window and sat looking out into the night, the chill autumn wind in her face. Far across the fields a pale moon was rising, bearing a cloudy circle that betokened rain. It flung long, ghostly shadows east and west, which flitted, lean and noiseless and black, before the wind. Overhead the stars shone dimly, piercing a fine mist. Eugenia leaned forward, her chin on her clasped hands. Beyond the gray blur of the pasture she could see, like benighted beacons, the lights in Amos Burr's windows, and she found herself vaguely wondering if Nicholas were at his books--those books that never failed him. He had that consolation at least--his books were more to him than she had been. She was not conscious of anger; she felt only an indifferent weariness--a nervous shrinking from the brutality of his rage. His face as she had seen it rose suddenly before her, and she put her hand to her eyes as if to shut out the sight. She saw the clear streak of the highway, the gray pasture, the solitary star overhanging the horizon, and she felt the dead leaves blown against her cheek from denuded trees far distant. And lighted by a glare of memory she saw his face--she saw the convulsed features, the furrow that cleft the forehead like a seam, the heavy brows bent above the half-closed eyes, the spasmodic working of the drawn mouth. She saw the man in whom, for its brief instant, evil was triumphant--in whom that self-poise, which had been to her as the secret of his strength, was tumultuously overthrown. A great fatigue weighed upon her, as if she had emerged, defeated, from a physical contest. Her hands trembled, and something throbbed in her temple like an imprisoned bird. As she sat in the silence, the door opened softly and Miss Chris came in, bearing a lamp in her hand. "Eugie," she said, peering into the darkness, "are you there?" Eugenia lowered the window and came over to the hearth rug, where she stood blinking from the sudden glare of the lamp. There were some half-extinguished embers amid the ashes in the fireplace, and she threw on fresh wood, watching while it caught and blazed up lightly over the old brass andirons. Miss Chris set the lamp on the table and came over to the fire. She carried her key basket in her hand, and the keys jingled as she moved. Her smooth, florid face had a fine moisture over it that showed like dew on a well-sunned peach. "You aren't worrying about Nick Burr, Eugie," she said with the amiable bluntness which belonged to her. "I wouldn't let it worry me if I were you." Eugenia turned with a flash of pride. "No, I am not worrying about him," she answered. Miss Chris lifted a vase from the mantel-piece, dusted the spot where it had stood, and replaced it carefully. "Of course, I know you've seen a good deal of him of late," she went on; "but, as I told Tom, I knew it was nothing more than your being playmates together. He's a good boy, and I don't believe that scandal about him any more than I would about Bernard; but he's Amos Burr's son, after all, though he has raised himself a long way above him, and, as poor Aunt Griselda used to say, 'When all's said and done, a Battle's a Battle.'" Eugenia was looking into the fire. "Yes," she repeated slowly, "a Battle's a Battle, after all." "That's right, dear. I knew you'd say so. I always declared that you were more of a Battle than all the rest of us put together--if you do look the image of a Tucker. Tom was telling me only last week that he'd leave you as free as air and trust the name in your hands sooner than he would in his own--and he has a great deal of family pride, you know, though he was so wild in his youth. But I remember my father once saying: 'A Battle may go a long way down the wrong road, but he'll always pull up in time to turn.'" Her beautiful eyes shone in the firelight, and her placid mouth formed a round hole above her dimpled chin, giving her large face an expression almost infantile. She took up the key basket, which she had placed on the mantel-piece, cast a glance at the pile of logs to see if it had been replenished, felt the cover on the bed, after inquiring if it sufficed, and, with a cheerful "good-night," passed out, closing the door behind her. Eugenia did not turn as the door closed. She stood motionless upon the hearth rug, looking down into the fire. Something in the huge old fireplace, with its bent andirons supporting the blazing logs, in the increasing bed of embers upon the bricks, in the sharp odour of the knot of resinous pine she had thrown on with the hickory, brought before her the winter evenings in Delphy's little cabin, when they sat upon three-legged stools and roasted early winesaps. She saw the negro faces in the glow of the hearth, and she saw Nicholas and herself sitting side by side in the shadow. His childish face, with its look of ancient care, came back to her with the knotted boyish hands that had carried and fetched at her bidding. The whole wistful little figure was imaged in the flames, melting rapidly into the boy, eager to act, ardent to achieve, who had bidden her good-bye on that November afternoon, and, dissolving again, to reappear as the strong man who had come upon her in Uncle Ish's little shanty, bearing the old negro's bag upon his shoulder. She had loved him for his strength, his vigour, his gentleness--and she still loved him. Of the men that she had known, who was there so ready to assist, so forgetful of services which he had rendered? There was none so powerful and yet so kind--so generous or so gentle. An impulse stirred her to cross the fields to his door and fling herself into the breach that divided them; but again the phantom in the flames grew dim and then sent out the face that she had seen that afternoon--convulsed and quivering, with its flitting sinister likeness to Amos Burr. A voice that seemed to be the voice of old dead Aunt Griselda--of her whole dead race that had decayed and been forgotten, and come to life again in her--spoke suddenly from the silence: "When all's said and done, a Battle's a Battle." The resinous pine blazed up, the pungent odour filled the large room, and from the lightwood sticks tiny streams of resin oozed out and dripped into the embers, turning the red to gray. Mingling with the crackling of the flames there was a noise as of the soughing of the wind in the pine forests. The hearth grew suddenly blurred before her eyes; and a passion of grief rose to her throat and clutched her with the grip of claws. For an instant longer she stood motionless; then, turning from the fire, she threw herself upon the floor to weep until the daybreak. _ |
||