Audrey

by Mary Johnston

Audrey turned the boat's head toward the steps and the gate in the wall. The man on the opposite shore let fall an oath.

"So you go to Fair View house!" he called across the stream. "There are only negroes there, unless"—he came to a pause, and his face changed again, and out of his eyes looked the spirit of some hot, ancestral French lover, cynical, suspicious, and jealously watchful—"unless their master is at home," he ended, and laughed.

Audrey touched the wall, and over a great iron hook projecting therefrom threw a looped rope, and fastened her boat.

"I stay here until you come forth!" swore Hugon from across the creek. "And then I follow you back to where you must moor the boat. And then I shall walk with you to the minister's house. Until we meet again, ma'm'selle!"

Audrey answered not, but sped up the steps to the gate. A sick fear lest it should be locked possessed her; but it opened at her touch, disclosing a long, sunny path, paved with brick, and shut between lines of tall, thick, and smoothly clipped box. The gate clanged to behind her; ten steps, and the boat, the creek, and the farther shore were hidden from her sight. With this comparative bliss came a faintness and a trembling that presently made her slip down upon the warm and sunny floor, and lie there, with her face within her arm and the tears upon her cheeks. The odor of the box wrapped her like a mantle; a lizard glided past her; somewhere in open spaces birds were singing; finally a greyhound came down the path, and put its nose into the hollow of her hand.

She rose to her knees, and curled her arm around the dog's neck; then, with a long sigh, stood up, and asked of herself if this were the way to the house. She had never seen the house at close range, had never been in this walled garden. It was from Williamsburgh that the minister had taken her to his home, eleven years before. Sometimes from the river, in those years, she had seen, rising above the trees, the steep roof and the upper windows; sometimes upon the creek she had gone past the garden wall, and had smelled the flowers upon the other side.

In her lonely life, with the beauty of the earth about her to teach her that there might be greater beauty that she yet might see with a daily round of toil and sharp words to push her to that escape which lay in a world of dreams, she had entered that world, and thrived therein. It was a world that was as pure as a pearl, and more fantastic than an Arabian tale. She knew that when she died she could take nothing out of life with her to heaven. But with this other world it was different, and all that she had or dreamed of that was fair she carried through its portals. This house was there. Long closed, walled in, guarded by tall trees, seen at far intervals and from a distance, as through a glass darkly, it had become to her an enchanted spot, about which played her quick fancy, but where her feet might never stray.

But now the spell which had held the place in slumber was snapped, and her feet was set in its pleasant paths. She moved down the alley between the lines of box, and the greyhound went with her. The branches of a walnut-tree drooped heavily across the way; when she had passed them she saw the house, square, dull red, bathed in sunshine. A moment, and the walk led her between squat pillars of living green into the garden out of the fairy tale.

Dim, fragrant, and old time; walled in; here sunshiny spaces, there cool shadows of fruit-trees; broken by circles and squares of box; green with the grass and the leaves, red and purple and gold and white with the flowers; with birds singing, with the great silver river murmuring by without the wall at the foot of the terrace, with the voice of a man who sat beneath a cherry-tree reading aloud to himself,—such was the garden that she came upon, a young girl, and heavy at heart.

She was so near that she could hear the words of the reader, and she knew the piece that he was reading; for you must remember that she was not untaught, and that Darden had books.