University of Virginia Library

39. CHAPTER XXXIX.
SUNRISE.

Faithful to every duty, Neria had prepared for that terrible home-coming;
had broken the ghastly tidings to Claudia; had seen that Mr. Livingstone was
able and willing to soothe the agitation into which her passionate excitement had
subsided, and had singly told the story of Luttrell's death to the physician and
magistrate summoned to meet his dead body at the farm-house, before she
allowed herself a word with James, who, with the activity and tact of his class,
had superintended not only the removal of the body from the forest to the house,
but all the subsequent proceedings. Neria, released at length, found him sitting
in a shady porch at the back of the house. She gave him her hand, while her
eager eyes, asked as well before her lips:

“James, where is your master?”

“Up here, ma'am, among the mountains. We are camping in a log shanty
we found there.”

“But how—why—” She would not ask what wifely pride told her she never
should have needed to ask; but her magical eyes spoke for her, and the man
replied:

“I don't know, ma'am, except it was the Colonel's wishes that no one should
know. He was left for dead down there in the Chickahominy; but I found him,
and carried him off. He was sick a long spell; pretty nigh all winter, I might
say; but an old darkey and I took care of him, and finally he pulled through.
He hasn't been so as to enter again, and he never would have me write a line or
send a message to anyone. This summer we came up here, and have been gunning

and fishing for a living pretty much. I happened to find out about Dr.
Luttrell and—and the lady, and so I thought it no more than my duty to let
Mr. Livingstone hear where she was. I didn't say anything to the Colonel
about it, because I thought he might be disturbed at the chance of some of the
family coming this way, and think it best to remove.”

Neria smiled slightly; for, indeed, the solemn twinkle of James's eye, and
the elaborate innocence of his tone, in thus revealing his little plot for a return
to civilization and identity, were too funny to be resisted. “I will go with you to
him,” said she, after a moment of thought.

“It's a long and rough way, ma'am. Can't I take a message or a note to the
Colonel, asking him to come to you?”

“No; he might not—it is better I should go myself. Wait until I speak to
Mrs. Livingstone,” said Neria; and James submissively answered:

“Yes, ma'am;” while in his shrewd heart he thought—“She's afraid he'd be
off and never come.”

To Claudia, Neria simply said she must leave her for a few hours; and to Mr.
Livingstone that she needed no other escort upon her errand than that of James,
whose appearance in this place she did not attempt to explain. Absorbed in
their own emotions, neither husband nor wife questioned or watched her, and
just as the sun touched the tops of the tallest forest trees Neria passed under
their shadows, and with a heart strangely vibrating between joy and fear followed
her taciturn conductor toward the secluded hut where Vaughn had sought to
bury his broken life, his despairing love. The path led by the scene of the
morning's tragedy, and when James would have turned aside to avoid coming
within sight of it, Neria checked him. “Let us go straight on,” said she, quietly;
and as they reached the place she paused and gazed unshrinkingly at the spot
where the corpse had lain, while in her inmost heart she once more offered full
and free pardon to the guilty soul thence sped, and prayed that even so might
he be pardoned of God.

“Here is the bracelet, ma'am,” interposed James, thinking that must be the
object of her search. “I picked it up this morning, and would have given it to
you before, but the Justice wanted to see it.”

“Thank you, James; we will go on now,” said Neria, taking the bauble in a
reluctant hand, and hastily putting it out of sight, while its wicked eyes, catching
a ray of the setting sun, shot out a green and crimson light.

“It's a very odd thing, ma'am, that the p'ison should have laid on that little
spear so long and never got shot out before,” pursued James, with respectful curiosity.

“It is very old, and no one understood its construction. I supposed it harmless
or I should not have worn it,” replied his mistress.

“Certainly, ma'am; and even now I can't make out how to start it, or how
to hinder it. I tried it all sorts of ways, and so did the doctor and the squire;
and finally the doctor said he didn't believe it was that killed him, or that he was
p'isoned at all. He says he shall call it apoplexy in the report he's going to
write out.”

“I am glad if it is so,” said Neria, quietly; and James, suspecting the subject
a disagreeable one, said no more upon it.

The sun had set, and the moon—the moon that a few days before had shone
upon Neria through the riven walls of Cragness—now shed silver light upon her
head as she stood just within the edge of a clearing, half way up the mountain-side,
and looked at the picture to which her guide had silently pointed before he
left her.

It was a sylvan lodge, such as hunters build of saplings, boughs, and bark; and
upon the flat stone at its door sat a worn and haggard man, his chin resting upon
his hand, his elbow on his knee, as he looked wearily across the sea of foliage
beneath him to the mountain peaks beyond, gleaming white and strange in the
full moonlight. A lonely and a stricken man, said every line of his figure, said
his attitude, and his mournful eyes, and yet a stately and a gallant figure withal.

But to Neria the picturesque side of the scene could not present itself. She
saw before her the object of the love that since his reported death had risen to
a vital passion; the husband, whom, as she devoutly believed, God had given
back to her incessant prayers, if not from the grave, at least from a living death.
Heart and soul clamored for the joy and rest of his embrace, his kiss, his full,
free pardon and love, and yet a nameless doubt, a womanly diffidence, a Nerean
shyness held her back, would not let her run to fall at his feet as she would have
done; held her trembling and wavering there, a sweet statue of some wood-nymph
smitten with love and awe at her first sight of humanity.

So, like the spirit of the night, the genius of the wood, she stood as Vaughn
turned of a sudden and looked toward her, looked long and silently, and whispered,
half aloud,

“It is her spirit—she is dead.” Then, with bated breath and measured step,
as one who treads a holy place, he came toward her, and she, blind and sick with
the great joy swirling through her heart, stood mute and still awaiting him. A
few feet off he stopped, and whispering, “Neria!” held out his arms, imploringly
yet hopelessly, as one holds them toward the heavens.

Then, with a great sob, the fountains of her heart broke up, and throwing
herself into that longed-for embrace, she cried out, “My husband; O, my love,
my lord, my all!”

“Not dead! My Neria, mine at last, my very wife?” incoherently questioned
Vaughn, putting her away to look into the earnest, tearful face, all flushed with
love and excitement, that so bashfully, yet earnestly, returned his gaze, and then
straining her close, close and closer to the sad heart that had so longed to feel
her there. But Neria, struggling from his arms, slid to her knees,

“Say, say that you forgive me for all I have made you suffer,” murmured she.
“I did not know it then, but since I have learned to love I have learned to feel.”

“What! You will kneel to me? Nay, then; will you now give me the first
offence you have ever offered? Here, here in my arms, and so near my heart that
you may feel it beat the echo of my words, hear me say, sweet wife, that this one
moment repays the past tenfold; that I would not, if I might, abate one moment
of that past if so I must abate one instant of this hour. It was right that I
should wait and serve for you, my rich reward. It could not have been but that
you must learn earth by slow degrees, my pure angel. I only feared that you
should pine away in longing for your heavenly home, and so leave me desolate;
or that love, when he came, should point not toward me, but to another—”

“Stop, Sieur!” and in the bright eyes, whence the moonbeams flashed back
into his, Vaughn read for the first time the sweet imperiousness born of a conscious
love. He smiled, and would have kissed the clear, bright eyes, but Neria
held him back.

“By one thing in all our life you have done me wrong,” said she. “You have
fancied that I, being your wife, could love another man! O, Sieur, that grieved
me much.”

“That, and all the wrongs I have done you, my fairy princess, sprang from an
incapacity upon the part of my grosser nature to comprehend your pure spirituality.

But now, thank God and Neria, the love in my heart has reached to hers,
and across that rosy bridge sympathies and perceptions shall travel so incessantly
from the one heart to the other, that we may never say where the sweet pilgrims
really dwell, the two shall so become one heart. O, darling, is this true, is
it real? Can God have been so good to a sinful man like me? And how dare
I accept such gifts, I who— Neria, here upon this lonely mountain-side, before
we go back together to the world whence you have come to claim me, I
must tell you the errors and mistakes of my early life, and, if it may be, gain
pardon both for the concealment and for what has been concealed.”

“No, Sieur, do not speak a word of what is past. I know all, and I have
forgiven and forgotten all. Chloe, before she died, told me everything; and
Mrs. Rhee—”

“Did she see you?”

“Yes. Hush, Sieur, she is dead, and with her the story of the past. Let
us leave it all behind, and make our home in the future.”

“But did she speak to you of what I afterward wrote?” asked Vaughn, anxiously.
“Did she tell you that I believed—”

“She told me many things which I do not wish to remember or repeat. She
told me that you believed them, and it was as if she had told me the ocean was
dried up and the sun extinguished. I knew you too well even then to believe
that you believed such tales of me.”

“True woman and true wife! You but did me justice then, and yet I blush
to think I could fancy even such innocent faithlessness as I did. But now tell
me, sweet, how you came here, standing like a spirit in the moonlight, and
watching me with your dreamy eyes, until I thought you indeed a thing of air or
water or fire, altogether fashioned of the elements, and inspired with the pure
soul of my pure-hearted Neria.” He drew her toward his cabin as he spoke,
and seating her upon the great stone where she had found him, stretched himself
at her feet, gazing intently up into her face, while she related as briefly as
she might, the strange chain of events that had led her hither.

“And so Master James was weary of our incognito, and laid a little plot to
lead to its discovery,” said Vaughn, gayly. “I may truly say to him, `Well
done, good and faithful servant,' for without his intervention I do not know, my
Neria, how this tangled coil would have been undone. I could never resolve
whether I should arise from the dead, as it were, or allow my name to go down
to posterity among the killed of the battle of Seven Oaks. I think the leading
idea was, to live here in the woods a sort of wild hunter life, until, at last, dying
I should send for Neria to close my eyes, and give me one parting kiss. I
always meant to see you again, at least once.”

Neria looked at him with dim eyes and a quivering mouth.

“O, Sieur! You must have suffered so much before you could come to
that!”

“Suffer? What is suffering? I do not recognize the word with my arm
about Neria's waist, my head upon her knee, her eyes looking love into mine,”
whispered Vaughn, passionately; and then, man-like, he proudly smiled to see
the rose-tint mount her slender throat, flush her soft cheek, and faintly tinge her
brow.

“Neria, say `I love you, Sieur,' ” ordered he; and Neria, blushing yet more
brightly, whispered,

“I love you, Sieur; I love you better than my life,” and as he kissed her
lips she kissed back with the first wife-kiss they had ever formed.