Part 11

She knew, too, that Radical judges always wore chain shirts under their white ones, because they were afraid; and that they carried knives, oh, mighty big ones, forever up their sleeves, to show in bar-rooms sometimes to Uncle John when anybody talked too loudly of renegades and turn-coats. Then, too, and worst of all, they got rich in a single night and took beautiful homes from dear Prestons and lived in them themselves. The beloved Prestons, so nobly proud in their fallen fortunes,--so right and proper in their politics,--had once owned all the lovely grounds alongside the bald yard that inclosed the child's own hired house; grounds where peacocks were as much at home as in story-books--peacocks with tails more ravishing than fly-brushes; where magnolia-trees flung down big scented petals as fascinating as sheets of letter-paper, and tall poplars stood like angels with half-closed wings against the sky. And with her own tear-filled eyes Hope Carolina had seen the exiled ones depart from this paradise crying, ah, so bitterly; turning back, as the breaking heart turns, for long, last, kissing looks. And now the Radical Judge lived there--the bad Radical Judge _who went locked-arms with niggers_; lived there with the wife who took things to forget, and the little crippled child who had never walked in her life because somebody had let her fall long ago.

[Illustration: "AN UNTIDY MIDGET FOLLOWING CLOSELY AT HIS HEELS"]

Hope Carolina could never go over again and make brown writing marks on the sweet magnolia petals. She could never steal suddenly through the boxwood hedge which hid the paling fence at that side of the hired yard, and frighten the peacocks so that they would spread their tails proudly. Everything belonged to the Radical Judge, even the old yellow satin sofas in the parlor, on which negroes sat now. And besides, no matter how poor they were, Democrat families never had anything to do with Radical families. They only threw "rocks" at them--safely from behind fences.

One day the pile of stones near the broken paling fence seemed splendidly high. They were muddy too, splendidly muddy, for it had rained in the night, and Hope Carolina had gouged the last ones out of the wet dirt with a sharp stick. She had even intentionally kept nice pats of earth around some; and directly, with the enemy approaching in the lonely way desired, there she was "scrouged" behind the paling fence, as Robert Lee Preston scrouged when he threw stones at Radicals. The brisk heels clicked nearer--passed; and then, with a fine sweep of a fat arm, a loud "ooh, ooh, ooh," she let fly the deadly missile.

The effect of it was magical. The enemy leaped as if the long-expected bullet had indeed pierced his chain armor; for the stone, perhaps the tiniest in Democracy's fort, had neatly nipped his stiff back. But the dark frown he turned toward her changed instantly. A slow smile, and then laughter--the doting laughter of the child-lover, to whom even the naughtiest phases are dear--replaced it. And, indeed, Hope Carolina did seem a sweet and comical figure in her low-necked, short-sleeved calico, with her brass toes hitched in the paling fence somehow, and her cropped head rising barely above it. Excitement, too, had lent a warmer pink to her apple cheeks, and her blue eyes were like deep and hating stars.

"Oh, you bad baby!" he called in a moment, plainly ravished with the nature of his would-be assassin. He knew why the stone had come--only too well. "You hateful little Democrat!"

Hope Carolina fired up furiously at that. "Wadical!" she called back, her voice tremulous with rage. And then, deliberately, "Wenegade! Seef!" fell from her pouting baby lips.

A change came over the Radical Judge's face. It did not smile any longer; and yet, somehow--_somehow_--it did not seem exactly angry. He came a step nearer the paling fence.

"Little girl," he began softly, pleadingly, almost prayerfully. But the thrower of stones waited to hear no more. As he came nearer, almost near enough to touch, holding her with dumb eyes so different from those she had expected, she fired another shot--it seemed just to fly out of her hand--and ran.

As she scrambled up the high house steps, which went rented-fashion in Fairville, from the ground to the second story, she remembered the black splotch it had made on his white shirt; and then she remembered another thing--the chain one underneath, to keep away rocks and bullets and everything. Ah, if he hadn't worn that she might have killed him; and then all the trouble in dear South Carolina would be over forever and ever, amen.

As she sat in her high-chair at supper, eating hot raised corn-bread and sugar-sweet sorghum, it seemed a dreadful thing that she hadn't really done it; and directly, when a blue-eyed, full-breasted goddess, known in the hired house as Ma and Miss Kate, looked meaningly across the table, she sighed profoundly.

The fair lady, whose beauty was clouded by a deep sadness, turned soon to the third sitter at the table, a tall, lank gentleman of perhaps thirty-five, who, with dark, brooding eyes and a serious limp, had just entered. He was the redoubtable Uncle John, of loud and fearless opinion; and, if the bar-room bowie had missed him, a stray Radical bullet had been more successful. A political fight in the railroad turn-table, some months ago, had been the scene of this heartbreaking accident. "And all through the war without a scratch!" Ma had sobbed out to Mrs. Preston when speaking of that bullet, still in the long-booted leg now under the table.

Directly Hope Carolina forgot the reproof of mother eyes anent the table manners of well-brought-up children. She began listening attentively; for that was how, listening when Ma and Uncle John talked, she had acquired all her deep knowledge of men and things. For in this close domestic circle all the lurid happenings of the times were touched upon: more fights in the turn-table; barbecues, black enemy barbecues--at which the bad Radical Judge stood on stumps, with his blacked shoes Close together and his beaver hat off, as if he were talking, _truly_, to white people; where negroes, poor, pitiful, hungry, corn-field negroes, were bought with scorched beef and bad whisky to vote any which way. Even the price of bacon, the woeful rises in the corn-meal market, were discussed here--all the poignant things, indeed, which, as has been seen, had inspired Hope Carolina's own poignant and beautiful name.

Now they were speaking of Double-headed Pete, sweet, sorry Ma and good Uncle John, who must limp forever because he hadn't worn chain things underneath. Pete was feeling the oats of his new office, Uncle John said, and Ma said back, "To think!" and looked at Uncle John as if she were sorry for him.

Hope Carolina sat very quietly, but she was thinking hard. She knew Pete: he was a bad, bad nigger; and though he locked arms with white Radicals, and got a big, big salary, he could only put crosses instead of names at the bottom of the important papers. It seemed a strange thing that anybody who couldn't write names should get big salaries, when Uncle John, who did heavenly writing, couldn't get any at all. Then, along with everything else, there was Pete's maiden speech on the court-house steps--oh, a terrible maiden speech!

"_De white man is had his day._"

Whether there was any more of it Hope Carolina did not ask herself. That was enough, for folks looked tiptoe if you only spoke Pete's name.

Directly, thinking over it all, Hope Carolina said earnestly to herself, "Maybe I'd better put 'em back," meaning the two thrown stones. It looked, yes, truly, as if she would have to kill Pete, too; so her arsenal for destruction must not lack ammunition. It must rather flow over than fall short.

But a liberal allowance of hot corn-bread and sorghum are not conducive to murderous zeal. Slowly, almost painfully, the child got down from her high-chair. She went faster down the steep house steps; but as she neared the stone fort by the paling fence she halted, all but paralyzed by the audacity which was being committed under her very eyes.

Somebody was stooping down outside the fence, with a hand through the broken place, putting something--_two round, pinky somethings!_--on top of the stone fort, putting them exactly where the two spent shots had been.

[Illustration: "HOPE CAROLINA, FROM HER MARVELOUS BED, COULD SEE EVERYTHING THAT WAS GOING ON IN THE RADICAL JUDGE'S GARDEN"]

[Illustration: "FOREVER TURNING BACK TO KISS HIM, WITH HER HANDS FULL OF FLOWERS, AND WITH THE PEACOCKS TRAILING BESIDE"]

"Oh!" ejaculated Hope Carolina; and, reaching the fence with a rush, she stared down lovingly. For they were peaches, real, live, human peaches--the kind that you buy for five cents apiece, which was a great price in the hired house.

The form outside the fence straightened up then, and two oldish gray eyes looked over it into hers--the Radical Judge's eyes. "No more stones, please," they seemed to say, with a trace of embarrassment at being caught.

Hope Carolina nodded back with a lovely courtesy, as if to say in return: "Sholy not."

For this was no moment for politics. Besides, something in the watching eyes--a wistful something which spoke louder than words--had awakened all the lady in her; and there was more of it, I can tell you, than you may be inclined to believe.

Silently, with eyes still meeting eyes, they stood there for a moment; the great Radical almost shrinkingly, the fiery little Democrat with a new, sweet feeling which made her seem, for the instant, the bigger, stronger one of the two. Then, still silent, he was gone; and snatching the peaches with another ecstatic "Oh!" Hope Carolina did the thing she had dumbly promised. She kicked down the stone fort.

After she was in bed, she explained the deed to herself; for there, with reflection, had come some of the pangs that must pierce the breast of the traitor in any decent camp. You can't take peaches and throw stones too, no, not even if Democrats would almost want to hang you for not doing it!

She had come to the pits by now, and these, after more rapturous suckings, she put under her pillow for planting; for when you are six you plant everything. She did not know that another and more wonderful seed had already put forth a green shoot in her own so piteously hardened little heart.

Hope Carolina slept in a marvelous bed, almost the only thing of value, in fact, left in the hired house. Ma would not use it herself, she told dear friends, because of its memories; but as the child of the house had no recollections of other times, it seemed to her always a downy and restful nest. There were carved pineapples at the top of the high mahogany posts, and four more at the bottom of them; and when Hope Carolina lay in it in the morning, she could see everything that was going on in the Radical Judge's garden--that lovely paradise of peacocks and poplars and magnolias which had once been the dear Prestons'.

Sometimes, even before the truce of peaches, she had felt a little regret that the decencies barred out all acquaintance with Radical families. For always on the hot mornings--long, long before it was time for her to get up--there were the Radical Judge and the little crippled Grace going about among the shrubs and flowers as if they were the nicest people. And always the little pale, laughing child presented a very pretty picture in the wheeled chair, which her father pushed so patiently; forever turning back to kiss him, with her hands full of flowers, and with the peacocks trailing beside as if they had forgotten the dear Prestons entirely.

Then, the Radical Judge seemed to know bushels and bushels of fairy-stories; and when they came near the boxwood hedge, Hope Carolina would sometimes hear him begin a new one. They always began in the right way, "Once upon a time," and that seemed very remarkable, for how could a Radical Judge know the right sort of fairy-stories?

When they moved away again, the child in the enemy house would feel her throat gulp sometimes. She knew it was wrong, but oh, she would have loved to hear the end!

One morning, weeks and weeks after the peaches, when the peacocks had been gone for days,--they made too much noise, Hope Carolina knew,--when all the empty, sunburned garden seemed to say weepingly, "There will be no more fairy-tales," she woke with the morning star, and, sitting bolt up in bed, blinked wonderingly, a little painfully, in the direction of the Radical Judge's front door. It was too dark to see the knob yet, but she knew the thing must be there, the long, angelically sweet drop of white ribbon and flowers--the poetic and wistful mourning which is only hung for little dead children.

A great doctor had come down from Baltimore and gone again; and the Radical Judge's wife was still taking things to forget.

* * * * *

The heart of six is full of mystery. All that first morning, with a piteous earnestness, a piteous heartlessness, Hope Carolina played funeral in the front yard, in the place where the stone fort had once been and where the peach-pits were now planted. Every now and then she would stop patting the little mounds of earth--mounds of earth covered with sweet flowers, in a place as beautiful as any garden, were the chief thing in her idea of funerals--and, standing tiptoe, she would stare over the paling fence, hoping the Radical Judge would come by. At last, late in the forenoon, her dogged vigilance was rewarded; and in a moment, bonnetless, an untidy midget in low-necked pink calico which even had a hole behind--there she was out of the gate, following closely at his heels. She couldn't tell exactly why she followed him; she only knew she wanted to--perhaps to see if he thought, too, as everybody said, that the little crippled Grace was better off up in the sky. She fancied maybe he didn't, he was so different, somehow--not like the old, fierce Radical Judge at all. And when really nice white gentlemen--_Democrats_, who had never noticed him before--stood respectfully aside with _their_ beaver hats off, he walked still down the middle of the dirt sidewalk, and did not seem to see them at all.

[Illustration: "IT WAS THE QUAINT CUSTOM AT FUNERALS IN FAIRVILLE TO FOLLOW MOURNERS IN LINE FROM THE GRAVE"]

Once when her brass-toed shoe kicked his heel by the railroad,--along which, the littlest distance away, was the historic spot where Uncle John had got the bullet,--she said "Thank you" aloud.

She meant it for the peaches, for she had just remembered that it wasn't very polite not to thank people for things. But still he seemed not to see, not to hear; and directly, in this blind, groping way, as if he were falling to pieces somehow, there he was turning into Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham's store, where they only sold lady things.

Hope Carolina waited outside, openly and shamelessly watching to see what he was going to do. She never peeped secretly; that wouldn't be respectable.

In a minute she said, "Oh!" her eyes stretched wide with delighted wonder; for he was _buying_ lady things--fairy lace, shimmering satin, narrow doll-baby ribbon, as lovely as heaven! When he went out, quickly, as if he were almost running, Hope Carolina still waited, wondering what Miss Sally and Miss Polly, the two old-maid sisters, who were Democrats and very nice people themselves, were going to do with the splendor which still lay upon the counter.

But they did not tell. They told something else--a thing so full of wonder, so dreadful, that, with another exclamation, one which drew four astonished maiden eyes to her suddenly blanched cheeks, the child took to her heels and fled as if pursued by a thousand terrors.

She thought of it all the time she was eating more hot corn-bread and sorghum at dinner--the thing Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham had said to each other; the thing which seemed so new, so strange, so _loud and awful_, like the hellfire things Baptist ministers talked about.

Then, after supper, she fell asleep in the pineapple bed, still thinking of it; and all the next day, still playing funeral by the paling fence, she thought of it again. And that night, when once more she lay in the pineapple bed, there it was again, the strange loud thing Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham had said to each other--said in a soft, _crying_ way.

All at once she had a waked-up feeling; she sat bolt upright in bed and thought, "Comp'ny." There were voices coming across the passageway from the parlor. A light streamed, too; and when she stood faintly bathed in its glow, she saw that Mrs. Preston was there--Mrs. Preston, in the deep mourning she had vowed never to put off as long as her beloved State lay with her head in the dust. But something in her lap brightened it now, this shabby, soldier-widow black: a slim cross, divine with green and white, as daintily delicate, with its tremulous myrtle stars, as had been the lady things in Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham's store.

Mrs. Preston was saying that she was going to send it "anonymously." Then she asked Ma if she knew that _he_ had had to attend to all the arrangements himself. "Even the dress," went on Mrs. Preston, crying a little; and Uncle John coughed in the deep, growly way gentlemen always cough when they are ashamed to cry themselves.

Then they all began talking about funerals, saying to each other they would like to go, but how _could_ they? Uncle John saying at last, with more of the growly, coughy way, that no, no, they "couldn't flout him."

It would be more cruel, far, far more cruel, said Uncle John, than to stay away. Besides,--didn't the ladies know?--it was private. "Though," the speaker went on, his worn, somber face lighting up with something like a gleam of comfort, "I reckon that was to keep those other white hounds away as well as the rest of us."

Ma nodded. They weren't gentlemen-born, as he was, she sighed--"born to Southern best." And then, with a "Poor wretch--poor, proud, degraded wretch!" she handed out the thing she had been making--a white rosette as beautiful as any rose--and told Mrs. Preston to put it "there," touching the myrtle cross with fingers kissing-soft.

But Mrs. Preston only said back, "He's refused even the minister!" and seemed more unhappy, oh, mighty unhappy.

Hope Carolina gasped with the wonderment of it all. How funny it seemed, how dreadfully funny, that everybody had forgotten everything just because a child had gone up into the sky: Uncle John the bullet, and Mrs. Preston the lost paradise next door, and Ma the barbecue speeches that made niggers vote any which way--all, all that Radicals had ever done to them!

After a while one of the voices spoke again--whose, Hope Carolina could never tell:

"_Think, there won't be a white face there!_" And then, after a pause, another voice:

"_No, not one!_"

Hope Carolina jumped in bed, trembling.

Presently Mrs. Preston went, and then everybody else went to bed. But still Hope Carolina trembled. For that was exactly what Miss Polly and Miss Sally Graham had said--_about the white face_.

After a while she knew. It meant, oh, the mightiest, biggest disgrace on earth not to have white people at your funerals. They went to black funerals, even--_good_ black funerals.

"Oh!" moaned Hope Carolina suddenly, loud enough for everybody to hear. But she cried silently. It was a way she had.

She cried again in the night, too--so loudly everybody did hear; but the dream mother who came and loved her, putting her head on the dear place, drove away all the lumps in her throat. After that the dark was still like the dear place, and like arms around her, too.

She had forgotten the dream mother when breakfast came; but she hadn't forgotten the other thing--the thing about the white face.

Ma said anxiously once to Uncle John, "Do you think she can be sick, brother?" and Uncle John shook his head, though he knew, too, of the tearful night.

Hope Carolina sat very still, not seeming to hear even when Ma announced that the funeral was at nine o'clock. She ate her breakfast like a ravenous cherub, smiling silently, mysteriously, whenever her mother looked at her with adoring eyes. Sometimes these dear, watching eyes, as blue as jewels, set wide apart under a low brow crowned with waved, satin-bright brown hair, filled slowly. But the darling child, who had certainly proved her excellent condition, only grinned back sweetly. All Hope Carolina was thinking of was that she had a _hole_--she was still wearing the soiled pink calico--and that her frilled white apron was mussed, and that shoe-strings wouldn't tie good. In the tarnished gilt-framed mirror behind Ma's lovely head she could see her own. _That_ was all right; beautiful! She had doused it with water, the round baby poll, and plastered the short hair smooth, so that under this close, shining cap her apple cheeks seemed fresher than ever.

Ma kissed them in passing, going then swiftly, with her eyes closed tight lest she herself should see, to shut windows on _that_ side of the house. Hope Carolina knew. Children mustn't look out of windows when funerals were going on. They mustn't play in the yard, either, till after they were over.

The big clock in the corner ticked, ticked, ticked, seeming to say always, "Hurry up, hurry up." And then--it was the longest, longest while afterward--Ma called from another room that Hopey (it was the foolish home name) could go and play in the yard now, for it was nine o'clock.

"Quite half-past, darling," went on the liquid Southern voice, still tremulous with emotion, still with the yearning anxiety for its own that the death of any child of kindred age brings to the mother breast. But there was no answer, and for a very good reason.

Down the long clay road which led from living and now pitying Fairville to the little cemetery where slept its quiet dead, Hope Carolina was running.

* * * * *

A mile and a half is a long way for a wee fat maiden to go when the August sun is beating down upon bare heads and necks, and red clay roads spread sun-baked ruts and furrows as sharp as knives. As many times as her years, Hope Carolina fell by the way; oftener, indeed. But the good folk in the scattered blind-closed houses along the way--who, too, a half-hour ago had whispered tremulously, "There won't be a white face"--saw no sign of tears.

"It's only Hope Carolina," called somebody, and other watchers laughed; for all knew the wandering ways of this wise and fearless child.

And so, stumbling, falling, struggling to her feet again,--wiping away blood once, even, with impatient hand,--on, on the little figure in pink and white had gone, a brave and storm-driven flower in the cruel road. And at last there were the shining crosses and columns of the dead. One inclosure, radiant with more magnolias and angel poplars, more stately and wonderful than all the rest, was the dear Preston plot.