For a long time Miriam kept awake, lying in her narrow bed, her head on her mother’s breast, but at last her eyes closed. Presently she was asleep, breathing quietly. Margaret, for the child’s more easy lying, slipped her arm from beneath her, then waited until, with a little sigh, she settled more deeply among the pillows, then rose, waited another moment, and stepped lightly from the room. The hall window showed a sky yet red from the sunset. Across was the room that since boyhood had been Richard’s. The mother entered it, closed the door, and moving to an old, leather-covered couch, lay upon it face downward.
Outside the dusk closed in; the stars peered through the branches of the poplar without the window. Margaret rose, stood for a moment looking at the sword slung above the mantel, then quit the room, and going downstairs, ate her slender supper while Mahalah discoursed of a ghost the negroes had seen the night before.
It had been a frightful ghost—“Er ha’nt ez tall ez dat ar cedar ob Lebanon, an er part grey an’ er part white an’ er part black! An’ it hadn’t no mo’ touch to hit den de air has, an’ whar de eyes was was lak two candles what de wind’s blowin’, and it kept er-cryin’ lak somebody in de mountains—wooh!—wooh!—wooh!—No, ’m, Miss Margaret! hit wa’n’t ’magination. What we gwine ’magine for, when ever’body could see hit wif their own two eyes?”
Mahalah cleared the table, closed the shutters, and carried the lamp into the wide hall, where she set it on a leaf-table beside her mistress’s workbasket. Then, still muttering of the “ha’nt,” she threw her apron over her head, and departed for the quarter. Margaret mounted the stair and stood listening at Miriam’s half-open door. The girl was sleeping quietly, and the mother, turning, came down again to the hall, and took her low chair beside the table and the basket of lint she was carding. The night was mild and soft, the front door standing open, the scent of the autumn flowers perceptible.
Margaret Cleave, sitting carding lint, the lamplight upon her brown hair, her slender hands, the grave beauty of her face,—Margaret Cleave thought of many things. In the midst of her thinking she heard a step upon the gravel before the house. A man mounted the porch steps and came into the light from the open door. He had raised his hand to the knocker when he saw the mistress of the house sitting in the lamplight by the table.
Margaret rose and came forward. She saw that it was a soldier, an officer.
“Good evening,” she said; then as she came closer,—“One moment!... Major Stafford!”
With a gesture for silence she took up the lamp and led the way into the parlour. “My daughter is not well and has fallen asleep. But we can talk here without disturbing her.”
“I came,” said Stafford, “hoping to find Colonel Cleave. I have ridden from Lexington to-day. He is not here?”
“No.”