CHAPTER VII. THE CALL OF A SOUL.
Now and again Cherokee kissed the roses with pangs of speechless pain. The fragrance that floated from their lips brought only anguish. To her, white roses must ever mean white memories of despair, and their pale ghosts would haunt long after they were dead.
All day the family had been busy packing, for soon the Stanhopes would close the house and take flight. Cherokee had been forced to tell them she had changed her mind and would go to the country; she needed quiet, rest. Pride made her withhold the humiliating fact that she had just money enough to take her down to the South country.
There was a kind, generous friend, who, at her father’s death, offered her a home under his roof for always, and now that promise came to her, holding out its inducement, but she would not accept it; somehow she felt glad that the time of leaving the Stanhopes was near. This pleasant house, these cheerful, affectionate surroundings, had become most intolerable since she must keep anything from them—even though it be but an error of innocence.
“Let me forget the crushing humiliation of the past month,” she told herself, “I must try to be strong, reasonable, if not happy.” She must find some calling, something to sustain herself, to occupy her hands and time. The soft, idle, pleasant existence offered by the friend would enervate rather than fortify—would force her back on herself and on useless regrets.
As she sat in her own room, holding the blank page of her coming life, and studying what the truth should be, there arose before her inner gaze two scenes of a girlish life; fresh, vivid were they, as of yesterday, though both were now of a buried past.
First she recalled the hour when sorrow caught her by the hand, dragged her from the couch of childhood to a darkened room where lay the sphinx-like clay of her mother—the lids closed forever over what had been loving gleams of sympathy—the hands crossed in still rigidity. Her little child heart had no knowledge of the mysteries—love, anguish, death—in whose shadow the zest of life withers. She knew their names but they stood afar off, a veiled and waiting trio.
She crept, sobbing, from that terrible semblance of a mother to the out-door sunshine, and the yard, where the crape-myrtle nodded cheerfully to her just as it did before they frightened her so. The dark house she was afraid of, so she had gone far out of doors. The little lips that had lately quivered piteously, sang a tune in unthinking gaiety, and life was again the same, for she could not then understand.
The other scene was a radiant, sparkling, wildly joyous picture. The world, enticing as a fairy garden, received her in her bright, petted youth—her richly endowed orphanhood had been a perpetual feast. In this period not one single voice of cold or ungracious tenor could she recall.
But now she looked full over that garden, once all abloom. Here a flower with blight in its heart, yonder one whose leaves were falling. There whole bushes were only stems enthorned, and stood brown and bitter, leaves and flowers withered or dead.
“So,” thought she, “it is with my life.” A rap on the door brought her into the present. It was the delivery of the latest mail: some papers, a magazine, and one letter. The letter was postmarked Winchester, Ky. With a little sigh of triumphant expectation, she broke the seal. It, to her thinking, might contain good news from friends at home.
It only took her a moment to scan it all.
“I am sick and needy. Won’t you help me for I am dying from neglect.” This was signed:
“Black Mammy,
“Judy, (her X mark.)”
Cherokee read it again. Her eyes closed, and then opened, dilating in swift terror. Her slave-mother suffering for the necessities of life. She who had spent years in chivalrous devotion to the Bell family now appealed to her, the last of that honored name.
A swift pain shot through her veins—a sudden increased anguish—a sense of something irremediable, hopeless, inaccessible, held her in its grip, and a voiceless, smothered cry rent her breast. Tears gushed from her eyes, scalding waters which fell upon her hands and seemed to wither them. Even the fern-leaf, the birth-mark, looked shrunken and shrivelled, as she gazed at it; something told her to remember it held the wraith of a life.
Cherokee was wild with grief. She went to the window and looked far out into the night, letting her sight range all the Southern sky, and the stars looked down with eyes that only stared and hurt her with their lack of sympathy. A gentle wind crept by, and a faint sibilance, as of taut strings throbbed through the coming night. It was Fred, with his violin, waiting for her to come down to accompany him. But she did not go—she had no thought of it being time to eat or time to play—she had forgotten everything, except that a soul had cried to her and she must answer it in so niggardly and miserly a fashion.
Now three, four, five hours had gone since the sunken sun laved the western heaven with lowest tides of day. The tired world, that ever craves for great dark night to come brooding in with draught of healing and blessed rest that recreates, had been lulled to satisfaction. Still mute sorrow held Cherokee, and it was nearly day when peace filled her unremembering eyes and she had forgotten all.