For the blazing lard but typified a certain illumination in old Ephraim's mind.
CHAPTER X
It was a clear, gusty night when he emerged on the lawn at the side entrance of the house. For two hours with the faint and freakish light of candle ends he had been rummaging over old chests and boxes in the attic. The aspect of the desolate, deserted place that had held his young master, a tenant dear to his loyal heart, wrung from him a sigh. Sometimes he dropped his hands, lifted himself from his crouching attitude to a kneeling posture, looked wistfully about the dreary, dusty silence, shook his head sorrowfully to and fro, and then once more addressed himself to his search. When he began to find the various articles he desired, he grew tremulous, agitated. His breath was fast, and now and again he must needs check himself in his disposition to fluent soliloquy lest some one overhear in his sonorous voice such significant words as would reveal his intention. When these seizures supervened, he became anxious concerning the possible betrayal of his enterprise by the feeble light cast from the windows, and ever and anon he screened the bit of candle behind a trunk or some massive piece of furniture. He knew that the house was a marked spot; the events of the day had rendered the locality of special and suspicious interest to all the camps in the vicinity. Many an eye was turned thither, he was aware, as the evening drew on, and in fact he hardly dared to light the tiny tapers till he had heard tattoo sound and taps beat. The tents were lost in darkness and slumber, but there were the camp and quarter guards, and soon would come the patrol and grand rounds. The sentries about the house gave him less anxiety.
"They be 'bleeged to know we-all keep some of our stuff in the garrit—mought be huntin' fur suthin' fur dat ar Yankee man's nicked haid. But I ain't!" he soliloquized.
When at last he had found all he desired, he extinguished the light and quietly waited. Thus in the darkness the place was even more grewsome with its associations of concealment and flight, the imminence of his young master's capture and violent death. He heard his heart plunge at every stir of the wind, every clash of the boughs, and he muttered: "Dat pore chile wuz denied a light. His Pa p'intedly wouldn't 'low him a candle, fur fear folks would spy it out. An' here he set an' waited in de ever-lastin' night!"
Old Ephraim suffered here in the dark from a terror which had loosed its hold on his young master long ago,—the fear of the supernatural. Ghosts of many types, "ha'nts," headless horrors, spectral sounds from the other world, direful prognostications of signs, all in grisly procession passed and repassed and crowded the garret to suffocation. It would be impossible to imagine what the old gray-headed negro saw and heard as he crouched on the dusty floor, and listened to the rout of the wind in the trees, and watched the eerie aspect of the old furniture, itself associated with the long-gone dead, as the moon and the gust-driven shadowy clouds flickered and faded and flickered and faded across the dim spaces. When suddenly a shrill sound pierced the ghostly solitude, he fell prone in complete surrender on the floor, terrified, his nerves almost shattered. An inarticulate scream came again and again, and then a low chuckling chatter. A screech-owl, a tiny thing, had alighted on the window-sill, and hearing the stir, turned its head without shifting its body, its great round eyes encountering the reproachful rolling stare of old Ephraim as he tremulously gathered himself from the floor. Taking a package under his arm under the long coat he wore, he at last went noiselessly and swiftly down the stairs.
He looked out heedfully for Judge Roscoe, whom he did not wish to encounter.
"Marster hes been a jedge, an' dey say he hes set on de bench—dough I dunno whut fur dat's so oncommon, fur mos' ennybody kin set on a bench! He's sot in his own cushioned arm-chair in de lawbrary whut kin lean backwards on a spring, and recline his foots upwards, an' dat's a deal ch'icer dan enny bench I knows on! But he's been a jedge, an' he's got book-larnin', but somehow I 'low he ain't tricky enough ter be up ter dis kink. I ain't gwine ter let him know nuffin'."