She reached out her hand. I felt her fingers close cold and hard on mine, as though loth to let me go. I kissed her fingers and withdrew, myself at least very glad to be away.
I retired presently to my room to arrange my portmanteaus for an early journey. And there, filling up one-half of the greater valise, was a roll of hide, ragged about its edge. I drew it out, and spread it flat upon the bed before me, whitened and roughened with bone, reddened with blood, written on with rude stylus, bearing certain words which all the time, day and night, rang, yes, and sang, in my brain.
"I, John Cowles—I, Ellen Meriwether—take thee, for better, for worse—till death—" I saw her name, E-l-l-e-n.
Chapter XLI - Ellen Or Grace
Presently once more I departed. My mother also ended her visit at Dixiana, preferring to return to the quiet of her two little whitewashed rooms, and the old fireplace, and the sooty pot-hooks which our people's slaves had used for two generations in the past.
As to what I learned at Huntington, which place I reached after some days of travel, I need say no more than that I began to see fully verified my father's daring and his foresight. The matter of the coal land speculation was proved perfectly feasible. Indeed, my conference with our agents made it clear that little remained excepting the questions of a partition of interests, or of joint action between Colonel Meriwether and my father's estate. The right of redemption still remained, and there offered a definite alternative of selling a part of the lands and retaining the remainder clear of incumbrance. We wrote Colonel Meriwether all these facts from Huntington, requesting his immediate attention. After this, I set out for home, not ill-pleased with the outlook of my material affairs.
All these details of surveying and locating lands, of measuring shafts and drifts, and estimating cubic yards in coal, and determining the status of tenures and fees, had occupied me longer than I had anticipated. I had been gone two days beyond a month, when finally, somewhat wearied with stage travel, I pulled up at Wallingford.
As I approached the little tavern I heard much laughing, talking, footfalls, hurrying, as men came or went on one errand or another. A large party had evidently arrived on a conveyance earlier than my own. I leaned against the front rail of the tavern gallery and waited for some stable-boy to come. The postmaster carried away his mail sack, the loungers at the stoop gradually disappeared, and so presently I began to look about me. I found my eyes resting upon a long figure at the farther end of the gallery, sitting in the shade of the steep hill which came down, almost sharp as a house roof, back of the tavern, and so cut off the evening sun. It was apparently a woman, tall and thin, clad in a loose, stayless gown, her face hid in an extraordinarily long, green sun-bonnet. Her arms were folded, and she was motionless. But now and then there came a puff of smoke from within the caverns of the sun-bonnet, accompanied with the fragrant odor of natural leaf, whose presence brooked no debate by the human nose. I looked at this stranger again and yet again, then slowly walked up and held out my hand. No one in all the world who could counterfeit Mandy McGovern, even so far away, and under conditions seemingly impossible for her presence!