“Oh, it's I, sure enough,” returned Dan, lightly, as he came into the cabin. “I'm on my way to Merry Oaks Tavern, Uncle Levi,—it's ten miles off, you know, and this blessed night is no better than an ink-pot. I'd positively be ashamed to send such a night down on a respectable planet. It's that old lantern of yours I want, by the way, and in case it doesn't turn up again, take this to buy a new one. No, I can't rest to-night. This is my working time, and I must be up and doing.” He reached for the rusty old lantern behind the door, and lighted it, laughing as he did so. His face was pale, and there was a nervous tremor in his hands, but his voice had lost none of its old heartiness. “Ah, that's it, old man,” he said, when the light was ready. “We'll shake hands in case it's a long parting. This is a jolly world. Uncle Levi,—good-by, and God bless you,” and, leaving the old man speechless on the hearth, he closed the door and went out into the night.
On the turnpike again, with the lantern swinging in his hand, he walked rapidly in the direction of the tavern road, throwing quick flashes of light before his footsteps. Behind him he heard the falling of free Levi's hammer, and knew that the old negro was toiling at his rude forge for the bread which he would to-morrow eat in freedom.
With the word he tossed back his hair and quickened his steps, as if he were leaving servitude behind him in the house at Chericoke; and, as the anger blazed up within his heart he found pleasure in the knowledge that at last he was starting out to level his own road. Under the clouds on the long turnpike it all seemed so easy—as easy as the falling of free Levi's hammer, which had faded in the distance.
What was it, after all? A year or two of struggle and of attainment, and he would come back flushed with success, to clasp Betty in his arms. In a dozen different ways he pictured to himself the possible manner of that home-coming, obliterating the year or two that lay between. He saw himself a great lawyer from a little reading and a single speech, or a judge upon his bench, famed for his classic learning and his grave decisions. He had only to choose, he felt, and he might be anything—had they not told him so at college? did not even his grandfather admit it? He had only to choose—and, oh, he would choose well—he would choose to be a man, and to come riding back with his honours thick upon him.
Looking ahead, he saw himself a few years hence, as he rode leisurely homeward up the turnpike, while the stray countrymen he met took off their harvest hats, and stared wonderingly long after he was gone. He saw the Governor hastening to the road to shake his hand, he saw his grandfather bowed with the sense of his injustice, tremulous with the flutter of his pride; and, best of all, he saw Betty—Betty, with the rays of light beneath her lashes, coming straight across the drive into his arms.
And then all else faded slowly from him to give place to Betty, and he saw her growing, changing, brightening, as he had seen her from her childhood up. The small white figure in the moonlight, the merry little playmate, hanging on his footsteps, eager to run his errands, the slender girl, with the red braids and the proud shy eyes, and the woman who knelt upon the hearth in Aunt Ailsey's cabin, smiling up at him as she dried her hair—all gathered round him now illuminated against the darkness of the night. Betty, Betty,—he whispered her name softly beneath his breath, he spoke it aloud in the silence of the turnpike, he even cried it out against the mountains, and waited for the echo—Betty, Betty. There was not only sweetness in the thought of her, there was strength also. The hand that had held him back when he would have gone out blindly in his passion was the hand of a woman, not of a girl—of a woman who could face life smiling because she felt deep in herself the power to conquer it. Two days ago she had been but the girl he loved, to-night, with her kisses on his lips, she had become for him at once a shield and a religion. He looked outward and saw her influence a light upon his pathway; he turned his gaze within and found her a part of the sacred forces of his life—of his wistful childhood, his boyish purity, and the memory of his mother.
He had passed Uplands, and now, as he followed the tavern way, he held the flash of his lantern near the ground, and went slowly by the crumbling hollows in the strip of “corduroy” road. There was a thick carpet of moist leaves underfoot, and above the wind played lightly among the overhanging branches. His lantern made a shining circle in the midst of a surrounding blackness, and where the light fell the scattered autumn leaves sent out gold and scarlet flashes that came and went as quickly as a flame. Once an owl flew across his path, and startled by the lantern, blindly fluttered off again. Somewhere in the distance he heard the short bark of a fox; then it died away, and there was no sound except the ceaseless rustle of the trees.
By the time he came out of the wood upon the open road, his high spirits had gone suddenly down, and the visions of an hour ago showed stale and lifeless to his clouded eyes. After a day's ride and a poor dinner, the ten-mile walk had left him with aching limbs, and a growing conviction that despite his former aspirations, he was fast going to the devil along the tavern road. When at last he swung open the whitewashed gate before the inn, and threw the light of his lantern on the great oaks in the yard, the relief he felt was hardly brighter than despair, and it made very little difference, he grimly told himself, whether he put up for the night or kept the road forever. With a clatter he went into the little wooden porch and knocked upon the door.
He was still knocking when a window was raised suddenly above him, and a man's voice called out, “if he wanted a place for night-hawks to go on to hell.” Then, being evidently a garrulous body, the speaker leaned comfortably upon the sill, and sent down a string of remarks, which Dan promptly shortened with an oath.
“Hold your tongue, Jack Hicks,” he cried, angrily, “and come down and open this door before I break it in. I've walked ten miles to-night and I can't stand here till morning. How long has it been since you had a guest?”