"The brave, unthinking fellow, after embracing his beloved, dashed to the front"
Madly seizing both the recovered swords, declaring he would "fight as three," the brave, unthinking fellow, after embracing his beloved, put one of her hands in Hannah's and the other in Israel's, and, commending them to God by a speechless lift of his dark eyes, mounted his horse and dashed, as one afraid to look back, to the front.
VI
Every one knows the story of "poor Harold Le Duc"—how, captured, wounded, he lay for more than a year on the edge of insanity in a Federal hospital. Every one knows of the birth of his child on the lonely island, with only black hands to receive and tend it, and how the waiting mother, guarded by the faithful two, and loved by the three hundred loyal slaves who prayed for her life, finally passed out of it on the very day of days for which she had planned a great Christmas banquet for them in honor of their master's triumphant return.
The story is threadbare. Everyone knows how it happened that "the old people," Colonel and Madame Le Duc, having taken flight upon report of a battle, following their last son, had crossed the lines and been unable from that day to communicate with the island; of the season of the snake-plague in the heart of the brake, when rattlers and copperheads, spreading-adders, moccasins, and conger-eels came up to the island, squirming, darting, or lazily sunning themselves in its flowering grounds and lily-ponds, some even finding their way into the very beds of the people; when the trees were deserted of birds, and alligators prowled across the terraces, depredating the poultry-yard and even threatening the negro children.
In the presence of so manifold disaster many of the negroes returned to voodooism, and nude dances by weird fires offered to Satan supplanted the shouting of the name of Christ in the churches. A red streak in the sky over the brake was regarded as an omen of blood—the thunderbolt which struck the smoke-stack of the sugar-house a command to stop work.
Old women who had treated the sick with savory teas of roots and herbs lapsed into conjuring with bits of hair and bones. A rabbit's foot was more potent than medicine; a snake's tooth wet with swamp scum and dried in the glare of burning sulphur more to be feared than God.
War, death and birth and death again, followed by scant provender threatening famine, and then by the invasion of serpents, had struck terror into hearts already tremulous and half afraid.
The word "freedom" had scarcely reached the island and set the air vibrating with hope, commingled with dread, when the reported death of the master came as a grim corroboration of the startling prospect.
All this is an open story.
But how Israel and Hannah, aided in their flight by a faithful few, slipped away one dark night, carrying the young child with them to bear her safely to her father's people, knowing nothing of their absence, pending the soldier's return—for the two never believed him dead; how, when they had nearly reached the rear lands of the paternal place, they were met by an irresistible flood which turned them back; and how, barely escaping with their lives, they were finally rowed in a skiff quite through the hall of the great house—so high, indeed, that Mammy rescued a family portrait from the wall as they passed; how the baby slept through it all, and the dog followed, swimming—
This is part of the inside history never publicly told.
The little party was taken aboard a boat which waited midstream, a tug which became so overcrowded that it took no account of passengers whom it carried safely to the city. Of the poor forlorn lot, a few found their way back to the plantations in search of survivors, but in most instances, having gone too soon, they returned disheartened.
Madame Le Duc, who, with her guests and servants, had fled from the homestead at the first warning, did not hear for months of the flight of the old people with her grandchild, and of their supposed fate. No one doubted that all three had perished in the river, and the news came as tardy death tidings again—tidings arriving after the manner of war news, which often put whole families in and out of mourning, in and out of season.
VII
There is not space here to dwell upon Harold's final return to Brake Island, bent and broken, unkempt,—disguised by the marks of sorrow, unrecognized, as he had hoped to be, of the straggling few of his own negroes whom he encountered camping in the wood, imprisoned by fear. These, mistaking him for a tramp, avoided him. He had heard the news en route,—the "news," then several years old,—and had, nevertheless, yielded to a sort of blind, stumbling fascination which drew him back to the scene of his happiness and his despair. Here, after all, was the real battle-field—and he was again vanquished.
When he reached the homestead, he found it wholly deserted. The "big house," sacred to superstition through its succession of tragedies, was as Mammy and Israel had left it. Even its larder was untouched, and the key of the wine-cellar lay imbedded in rust in sight of the cob-webbed door.
It was a sad man, prematurely gray, and still gaunt—and white with the pallor of the hospital prison—who, after this sorrowful pilgrimage to Brake Island, appeared, as from the grave, upon the streets of New Orleans. When he was reinstated in his broken home, and known once more of his family and friends, he would easily have become the popular hero of the hour, for the gay world flung its gilded doors open to him.
The Latin temperament of old New Orleans kept always a song in her throat, even through all the sad passages of her history; and there was never a year when the French quarter, coquette that she was, did not shake her flounces and dance for a season with her dainty toes against the lower side of Canal Street.
But Harold was not a fellow of forgetful mind. The arch of his life was broken, it is true, but like that of the bridge he had begun—a bridge which was to invite the gay world, yes, but which would ever have dominated it, letting its sails pass under—he could be no other than a worthy ruin. Had his impetuous temper turned upon himself on his return to the island, where devastation seemed to mock him at every turn, there is no telling where it might have driven him. But a lonely mother, and the knowledge that his father had died of a broken heart upon the report of his death, the last of his three sons—the pathetic, dependence of his mother upon him—the appeal of her doting eyes and the exigencies of an almost hopeless financial confusion—all these combined as a challenge to his manhood to take the helm in the management of a wrecked estate.
It was a saving situation. How often is work the great savior of men!
Once stirred in the direction of effort, Harold soon developed great genius for the manipulation of affairs. Reorganization began with his control.
Square-shouldered and straight as an Indian, clear of profile, deep-eyed, and thoughtful of visage, the young man with the white hair was soon a marked figure. When even serious men "went foolish over him," it is not surprising that ambitious mothers of marriageable daughters, in these scant days of dearth of men, should have exhibited occasional fluttering anxieties while they placed their broken fortunes in his hands.
Reluctantly at first, but afterward seeing his way through experience, Harold became authorized agent for some of the best properties along the river, saving what was left, and sometimes even recovering whole estates for the women in black who had known before only how to be good and beautiful in the romantic homes and gardens whose pervading perfume had been that of the orange-blossom.
It was on returning hurriedly from a trip to one of these places on the upper river—the property of one Marie Estelle Josephine Ramsey de La Rose, widowed at "Yellow Tavern"—that he sought the ferry skiff on the night old man Israel answered the call.
VIII
Little the old man dreamed, while he waited, midstream, trying to think out his problem, that the solution was so near at hand.
We have seen how the old wife waited and prayed on the shore; how with her shaded mind she groped, as many a wiser has done, for a comforting, common-sense understanding of faith, that intangible "substance of things hoped for," that elusive "evidence of things not seen."
In a moment after she heard the creaking of the timbers as the skiff chafed the landing, even while she rose, as was her habit, to see who might be coming over so late, she dimly perceived two men approaching, Israel and another; and presently she saw that Israel held the man's hand and that he walked unsteadily.
She started, fearing that her man was hurt; but before she could find voice of fear or question, Israel had drawn the stranger to her and was saying in a broken voice:
"Hannah! Hannah! Heah Mars' Harol'!"
Only a moment before, with her dim eyes fixed upon the sky, she had experienced a realization of faith, and believed herself confidently awaiting her master's coming. And yet, seeing him now in the flesh before her, she exclaimed:
"What foolishness is dis, ole man? Don't practice no jokes on me to-night, Isrul!"
Her voice was almost gruff, and she drew back as she spoke. But even while she protested, Harold had laid his hand upon her arm.
"Mammy," he whispered huskily, "don't you know your 'indurin' devil'—?" (This had been her last, worst name for her favorite during his mischief period.)
Harold never finished his sentence. The first sound of his voice had identified him, but the shock had confused her. When at last she sobbed "Hush! I say, hush!" her arms were about his knees and she was crying aloud.
