John March, Southerner

"Oh, sir, a new creed's too painful a thing fo' jest. Ow South'n press, Mr. Ravenel, is gett'n' a sad facility fo' recantin'. I don't say it's not sincere, sir – least of all ow Courier since it's come into the hands of you an' President Garnet!"

"Garnet! Oh, gracious!" laughed Jeff-Jack. "Sincere – Judge, if you won't say anything about sincerity, I'll tell you what I'd like to do for John, sir. I'll take your note, secured by land, for the money you need to put John through Rosemont, and you needn't pay it till you get ready. If you never get ready, I reckon John'll pay it some day."

The moment the offer began to be intelligible, Judge March tried to straighten up and look Jeff-Jack squarely in the face, but when it was completed his elbows were on his knees and his face in his slender brown hands.

Up in the old field Garnet had talked himself dizzy. Northern travelers are by every impulse inquirers, and Southern hosts expounders; they fit like tongue and groove. On the ridge he had said:

"Now, Mr. Fair, here it is. I don't believe there's a finer view in the world."

"Hm!" said the slender visitor.

The two guests had been shown the usual Sleeping Giant, Saddle Mountain, Sugar Loaf, etc., that go with such views. John had set Garnet right when he got Lover's Leap and Bridal Veil tangled in the bristling pines of Table Rock and the Devil's Garden, and all were charmed with the majestic beauty of the scene. On the way back, while Garnet explained to Mr. Gamble, the heavier guest, why negroes had to be treated not as individuals but as a class, John had been telling Mr. Fair why it was wise to treat chickens not as a class but as individuals, and had mentioned the names and personal idiosyncrasies of the favorites of his own flock; Mr. Fair, in turn, had confessed to having a son about John's age, and wished they knew each other. Before John could reply, the party gayly halted again beside his father and Mr. Ravenel. As they did so Mr. Fair saw Ravenel give a little nod to Garnet that said, "It's all arranged."

On another evening, shortly after this, father and son coming to supper belated, John brought his mother a bit of cross-road news. The "Rads" had given a barbecue down in Blackland, just two days before the visit of Jeff-Jack and those others to Widewood – and what did she reckon! Cornelius Leggett had there made a speech, declaring that he was at the bottom of a patriotic project to open a free white school in Suez, and "bu'st Rosemont wide open."

"Judge March," said the wife, affectionately, "I wonder why Mr. Ravenel avoided mentioning that to you. He needn't have feared your sense of humor. Ah! if you only had a woman's instincts!"

John said good-night and withdrew. He wished his mother loved his father a little less. They would all have a so much better time.

"No," Mrs. March was presently saying, "Mr. Ravenel's motives are not those that concern me most. Rosemont, to me, must always signify Rose Montgomery. It is to her presence – her spell – you would expose my child; she, who has hated me all her life. Ah! no, it's too late now to draw back, he shall go. Yes, without my consent! Oh! my consent! Judge March, you're jesting again!" She lifted upon him the smile of a heart really all but broken under its imaginary wrongs.

There was no drawing back. The mother suffered, but the wife sewed, and when Rosemont had got well into its season's work and November was nearly gone, John was ready for "college." One morning, when the wind was bitter and the ground frozen, father and son rode side by side down their mountain road. A thin mantle of snow made the woods gray, and mottled the shivering ranks of dry cornstalks. At each rider's saddle swung an old carpet-bag stuffed with John's clothes. His best were on him.

"Maybe they're not the latest cut, son, or the finest fit, but you won't mind; you're not a girl. A man's dress is on'y a sort o' skin, anyhow; a woman's is her plumage. And, anyhow, at Rosemont you'll wear soldier clothes. Look out son, I asked yo' dear motheh to mend – "

The warning came too late; a rope handle of one of the carpet-bags broke. The swollen budget struck the unyielding ground and burst like a squash. John sprang nimbly from the saddle, but the Judge caught his leg on the other carpet-bag and reached the ground in such a shape that his horse lost all confidence and began to back wildly, putting first one foot and then another into the scattered baggage.

One, or even two, can rarely get as much into a bursted carpet-bag, repacking it in a public road and perspiring with the fear that somebody is coming, as they can into a sound one at a time and place of their own choice. There's no place like home – for this sort of task; albeit the Judge's home may have been an exception. Time flew past while they contrived and labored, and even when they seemed to have solved their problem one pocket of John's trousers contained a shirt and the other was full of socks, and the Judge's heart still retained an anxiety which he dared neither wholly confess nor entirely conceal.

"Well, son, it's a comfort to think yo' precious motheh will never have the mawtification of knowin' anything about this."

"Yass, sir," drawled John, "that's the first thing I thought of."

XV.

ARRIVALS AT ROSEMONT

The air was mild down on the main road which, because it led from Suez to Pulaski City, was known as the Susie and Pussie pike. The highway showed a mere dusting of snow, and out afield the sun had said good-morning so cavalierly to some corn-shocks that the powder was wholly kissed off one sallow cheek of each. The riders kept the pike northwesterly a short way and then took the left, saying less and less as they went on, till the college came into view, their hearts sinking as it rose.

The campus was destitute of human sounds; but birds gossiped so openly on every hand concerning the tardy intrusion that John was embarrassed, and hardly felt, much less saw, what rich disorder the red and yellow browns of clinging and falling leaves made among the purple-gray trunks and olive-dappled boughs, and on the fading green of the sod.

The jays were everywhere, foppish, flippant, the perfection of privileged rudeness.

It seemed a great way through the grove. At the foot of the steps John would have liked to make the acquaintance of some fat hens that were picking around in the weak sunshine and uttering now and then a pious housewifely sigh.

There was an awful stillness as the two ascended the steps, carrying the broken carpet-bag between them. Glancing back down the campus avenue, John hoped the unknown woman just entering its far gate was not observing. So mild was the air here that the front door stood open. In the hall a tall student, with a sergeant's chevrons on his gray sleeve, came from a class-room and led them into a small parlor. Major Garnet was in Suez, but Mrs. Garnet would see them.

They waited. On the mantel an extremely Egyptian clock – green and gilt – whispered at its task in servile oblivion to visitors. John stared at a black-framed lithograph, and his father murmured,

"That's the poet Longfellow, son, who wrote that nice letteh to yo' dear motheh. This colo'ed picture's Napoleon crossing the Alps."

A footstep came down the hall, and John saw a pretty damsel of twelve or thirteen with much loose red-brown hair, stop near the door of the reception-room and gaze at someone else who must have been coming up the porch steps. He could not hear this person's slow advance, but presently a voice in the porch said, tenderly, "Miss Barb?" and gave a low nervous laugh.

Barbara shrank back a step. The soft footfall reached the threshold. The maiden retreated half a step more. Behind her sounded a faint patter of crinoline coming down the hall stairs. And then there came into view from the porch, bending forward with caressing arms, a slim, lithe negress of about nineteen years. Her flimsy dress was torn by thorns, and her hands were pitifully scratched. Her skirt was gone, the petticoat bemired, and her naked feet were bleeding.

"Miss Barb," said the tender voice again. From the inner stairs a lady appeared.

"What is it, son?" Judge March asked, and rising, saw the lady draw near the girl with a look of pitying uncertainty. The tattered form stood trembling, with tears starting down her cheeks.

"Miss Rose – Oh, Miss Rose, it's me!"

"Why, Johanna, my poor child!" Two kind arms opened and the mass of rags and mud dashed into them. The girl showered her kisses upon the pure garments, and the lady silently, tenderly, held her fast. Then she took the black forehead between her hands.

"Child, what does this mean?"

"Oh, it means nothin' but C'nelius, Miss Rose – same old C'nelius! I hadn't nowhere to run but to you, an' no chance to come but night."

"Can you go upstairs and wait a moment for me in my room? No, poor child, I don't think you can!" But Johanna went, half laughing, half crying, and beckoning to Barbara in the old-time wheedling way.

"Go, Barbara."

The child followed, while John and his father stood with captive hearts before her whom the youths of the college loved to call in valedictory addresses the Rose of Rosemont. She spent a few moments with them, holding John's more than willing hand, and then called in the principal's first assistant, Mr. Dinwiddie Pettigrew, a smallish man of forty, in piratical white duck trousers, kid slippers, nankeen sack, and ruffled shirt. Irritability confessed itself in this gentleman's face, which was of a clay color, with white spots. Mr. Pettigrew presently declared himself a Virginian, adding, with the dignity of a fallen king, that he – or his father, at least – had lost over a hundred slaves by the war. It was their all. But the boy could not shut his ear to the sweet voice of Mrs. Garnet as, at one side, she talked to his father.

"Sir?" he responded to the first assistant, who was telling him he ought to spell March with a final e, it being always so spelled – in Virginia. The Judge turned for a lengthy good-by, and at its close John went with his preceptor to the school-room, trying, quite in vain, to conceive how Mr. Pettigrew had looked when he was a boy.

XVI.

A GROUP OF NEW INFLUENCES

All Rosemonters were required to sit together at Sunday morning service, in a solid mass of cadet gray. After this there was ordinary freedom. Thus, when good weather and roads and Mrs. March's strength permitted, John had the joy of seeing his father and mother come into church; for Rosemont was always ahead of time, and the Marches behind. Then followed the delight of going home with them in their antique and precarious buggy, and of a day-break ride back to Rosemont with his father – sweetest of all accessible company. Accessible, for his mother had forbidden him to visit Fannie Halliday, her father being a traitor. He could only pass by her gate – she was keeping house now – and sometimes have the ecstasy of lingeringly greeting her there.

"Oh, my deah, she's his teacheh, you know. But now, suppose that next Sunday – "

"Please call it the sabbath, Powhatan."

"Yes, deah, the sabbath. If it should chance to rain – "

"Oh, Judge March, do you believe rain comes by chance?"

"Oh, no, Daphne, dear. But – if it should be raining hard – "

"It will still be the Lord's day. Your son can read and meditate."

"But if it should be fair, and something else should keep us fum church, and he couldn't come up here, and should feel his loneliness – "

"Can't he visit some of our Suez friends – Mary and Martha Salter, Doctor Coffin, or Parson Tombs, the Sextons, or Clay Mattox? I'm not puritanical, nor are they. He's sure of a welcome from either Cousin Hamlet Graves or his brother Lazarus. Heaven has spared us a few friends still."

"Oh, yes, indeed. Dead loads of them; if son would only take to them. And, Daphne, deah," – the husband brightened – "I hope, yet, he will."