"I thought you must be hungry," said the voice with energy, "so I've brought your supper."
Even while he instinctively grasped the tray she held out, he observed with quickened attention that the hands which offered him the food had toiled out of doors in good and bad weather—though small and shapely they were chapped from cold and roughened by marks of labour.
"You'd better drink your coffee while it's hot," said the voice again.
The practical nature of her advice put him immediately at his ease.
"It's the first hot thing I've had for a week," he responded.
"Then it will be all the better for you," replied the girl, while she reached up to hang the lantern from a rusted nail in the wall.
As the light fell over her, the red cape slipped a little from her shoulder and she put up her hand to catch it together on her bosom. The movement, slight as it was, gave Ordway a chance to observe that she possessed a kind of vigorous grace, which showed in the roundness of her limbs and in the rebellious freedom of her thick brown hair. The airy little curls on her temples stood out, he noticed, as if she had been walking bareheaded in the wind. At his first look it did not occur to him that she was beautiful; what impressed him most was the quality of radiant energy which revealed itself in every line of her face and figure—now sparkling in her eyes, now dimpling in her cheek, now quickening her brisk steps across the floor, and now touching her eyes and mouth like an edge of light. It may have been merely the effect of the red cape on a cold night, but as she moved back and forth into the dark corners of the barn, she appeared to him to gather both warmth and animation out of the gloom.
As she did not speak again during her work, he found himself forced to observe the same friendly silence. The ravenous hunger of the afternoon had returned to him with the odour of the food, and he ate rapidly, sitting up on his straw bed, while she took up a bucket and a piece of wood sharpened at one end and prepared a bran mash for the cow quartered in a stall in one corner. When a little later she gathered up an armful of straw to replenish the animal's bed, Ordway pushed the tray aside and made a movement as if to assist her; but stopping an instant in her task, she waved him aside with the easy dignity of perfect capability.
"I can do it myself, thank you," she said, smiling; and then, glancing at his emptied plate, she added carelessly, "I'll send back presently for the tray and lantern—good-night!"
Her tone had changed perceptibly on the last word, for its businesslike authority had given place to the musical Southern drawl so familiar to his ears in childhood. In that simple phrase, accompanied by the gracious bend of her whole person, she had put unconsciously generations of social courtesy—of racial breeding.
"Thank you—good-night," he answered, rising, and drawing back with his hand on the heavy latch.
Then before she could reach the door and pass through, a second lantern flashed there out of the blackness beyond, and the terrified face of a Negro urchin was thrust into the full glare of light.
"Fo' de good Lawd, Miss Em'ly, dat ar ole ram done butt Sis Mehitable clean inter de smoke 'us."
Perfectly unruffled by the news the girl looked at Ordway, and then held out her small, strong hand for the lantern.
"Very well, I'll come and shut him up," she responded quietly, and holding the red cape together on her bosom, she stepped over the threshold and followed the Negro urchin out into the night.
CHAPTER III
The Return To Tappahannock
AT sunrise he came out of the barn, and washed his face and hands at the well, where he found a coarse towel on the moss-covered trough. The day was breaking clear, but in the fine golden light the house and lawn appeared even more desolate than they had done under the full moon. Before the war the place had been probably a comfortable, unpretentious country mansion. Some simple dignity still attached to its bowers of ivy and its ancient cedars, but it was easy to imagine that for thirty years no shingle had been added to its crumbling roof, and hardly a ship gathered from the littered walk before the door. At the end of the avenue six great trees had fallen a sacrifice, he saw now, to the mere lust for timber—for freshly cut and still odorous with sap, the huge trunks lay directly across the approach over which they had presided through the tragic history of the house. Judged by what it must have been in a fairly prosperous past, the scene was sad enough even to the eyes of a stranger; and as Ordway walked slowly down the dim, fragrant curve of the avenue, he found it difficult to place against so sombre a background, a figure as full of life and animation as that of the girl he had seen in the barn on the evening before. She appeared to his imagination as the embodiment of youth amid surroundings whose only remaining beauties were those of age.
Though he had resolved yesterday not to return to Tappahannock, he found himself presently retracing, almost without an effort of will, the road which he had travelled so heavily in the night. Something between sunrise and sunset had renewed his courage and altered his determination. Was it only the wasted strength which had returned to him in his sleep? Or was it—he hesitated at the thought—the flush of shame which had burned his face when the girl's lantern had flashed over him out of the darkness? In that pitiless illumination it was as if not only his roughened surface, but his secret sin was laid bare; and he had felt again all the hideous publicity that had touched him and put him as one apart in the court-room. Though he had outgrown the sin, he knew now that he must carry the scar of it until his death; and he knew, also, that the reality of his punishment had been in the spirit and not in the law.
For a while he walked rapidly in the direction of Tappahannock; then sitting down in the sunshine upon the roadside, he ate the piece of cornbread he had saved last night from his supper. It would be several hours at least before he might hope to find the warehouses open for the day, so he sat patiently eating his bread under the bared boughs of a young peach-tree, while he watched the surface of the long white road which appeared to hold for him as much despondency as freedom. A farmer driving a spotted cow to market spoke to him presently in a friendly voice; and rising to his feet, he overtook the man and fell into the jogging pace which was rendered necessary by the reluctance of the animal to proceed.
"I declar' the sense in them thar critters do beat all," remarked the farmer, after an ineffectual tug at the rope he held. "She won't be drove no more 'n a woman will—her head is what she wants no matter whar it leads her."
"Can you tell me," inquired Ordway, when they had started again upon the advance, "the name of the old house I passed a mile or so along the road?"
"Oh, you mean Cedar Hill, I reckon!—thar now, Betsey, that thar toad ain't a turnip!"
"Cedar Hill, is it? Well, they appear to be doing their level best to get rid of the cedars."
"Mr. Beverly did that—not Miss Em'ly. Miss Em'ly dotes on them trees jest the same as if they were made of flesh and blood."
"But the place belongs to Mr. Beverly, I presume?"
"If thar's a shingle of it that ain't mortgaged, I reckon it does—though for that matter Miss Em'ly is overseer and manager, besides teachin' every day in the public school of Tappahannock. Mr. Beverly's got a soft heart in his body—all the Brookes had that they say—but the Lord who made him knows that he ain't overblessed with brains. He used to speculate with most of the family money, but as luck would have it he always speculated wrong. Then he took to