"She will be much better. Do not delay longer than that. I will accompany you; I want to see this Doctor Remy. Seeing is believing. But, mind, not a word of my coming, to him or any one else. Now, go back to your mother, or she will be alarmed. Good night."
Bergan walked back slowly and thoughtfully. Without being fully convinced of the truth of Doctor Trubie's suspicions, he was strangely disturbed and startled. Reaching the gate, he turned his face south-eastward, and gazed across the white meadows, toward the dim outline of the distant hills. His thoughts overleaped even that far barrier, and took an air line to Oakstead and to Carice. Her face rose vividly before him, not, strange to say, as he had seen it last, rosy and bright, but pale and piteous, and gazing toward him with a look that besought sympathy and succor, plainer than any speech. His eyes grew moist, his breath tremulous; his heart swelled with passionate love and longing.
"I will beg my mother to consent to my going at once," said he to himself. "I cannot wait another day."
The next afternoon, he was on his way to Berganton, whither Doctor Trubie was shortly to follow him.
XII.
TOO LATE.
In those days, there was a pleasant spice of uncertainty about Southern journeyings. Cars, steamboats, and stages ran in happy independence of each other and the time-table. The traveller never knew at what point of juniper swamp, or pine barren, or cotton plantation, he would be set down to while away some hours in botanical or ethnological investigations, if his mind were sufficiently at ease, or in chewing the bitter cud of impatience, if it were not. Defective machinery and lazy officials labored mightily together to miss connections, and wherever human inefficiency came short, down swept a hurricane from the skies, and strewed the roads with prostrate trunks of trees, through which the cumbrous stage coach had literally to hew its path.
More than one such delay attended Bergan's progress southward. Under their teasing friction, the shadowy anxiety with which he had set out, increased to a positive weight of alarm. Reaching Savalla on the twelfth evening, he stopped neither for rest nor refreshment, but looked up a horse, flung himself into the saddle, and set off toward Berganton at a rapid rate. Outside the city limits, however, he was forced to slacken his pace. The night was dark, no faintest gleam of moon or star tempered the black obscurity of the tree-arched and swamp-bordered road. Compelled thus to feel his way, as it were, it was near midnight when he came upon the outlying fields of Oakstead. Reluctantly he told himself that an interview with Carice, to-night, was out of the question; she and all the household were certain to be fast asleep, it was doubtful if even the faintest outline of the darkened dwelling would be discernible through the murky night. He had no choice but to ride on to Berganton.
Scarcely had he reached this conclusion, when a radiant window shone vision-like through the trees; a little farther on, and the cottage, though yet distant, came full into view through an opening in the forest, brilliantly illuminated from roof to foundation as for a festivity of no ordinary magnitude. Even the surrounding lawn was lighted up into the semblance of day; and in its remotest corner, a group of negroes, dancing to some strain of music inaudible to the wondering spectator, looked fantastic enough for the unsubstantial images of a dream.
For a moment or two, Bergan suspected his jaded senses of playing him false, as a step preparatory to taking leave of him altogether. There was something too incongruous to be real, between this gay scene of festivity and the picture presented by Doctor Remy's last letter,—a dull, silent house, its master a feeble, exacting convalescent, its mistress and daughter worn out with anxiety and watching. An intuition of some unlooked-for calamity seized him. Putting spurs to his horse, he dashed over the mile that intervened between him and the cottage, at a scarcely less furious rate than that with which Vic had borne him over the same road—how well he remembered it!—just one year ago. He did not suspect that he was now to taste the bitterest consequences of that ride.