The days sped on. To the onlooker life jogged along as monotonously at Livingston Hall as in any other quiet home. The couple dined and rode, and received friends in the conventional way. Many festivities were planned in honor of the beautiful bride. But, alas! these days but goaded her to madness. The uncertainty of Reuel’s fate, her own wrongs as a wife yet not a wife, her husband’s agency in all this woe, the frailness of her health, weighed more and more upon a mind weakened by hypnotic experiments. Her better angel whispered still, and she listened until one day there was a happening that turned the scale, and she pronounced her own dreadful doom—“For me there’s no retreat.”
XXI
It was past midday about two weeks later that Dianthe wandered about the silent woods, flitting through the mazes of unfamiliar forest paths. Buried in sad thoughts she was at length conscious that her surroundings were strange, and that she had lost her way. Every now and then the air was thick and misty with powdery flakes of snow which fell, or swept down, rather, upon the brown leaf-beds and withered grass. The buffeting winds which kissed her glowing hair into waving tendrils brought no color to her white cheeks and no light to her eyes. For days she had been like this, thinking only of getting away from the busy house with its trained servants and its loathsome luxury which stifled her. How to escape the chains which bound her to this man was now her only thought. If Reuel lived, each day that found her still beneath the roof of this man whose wife she was in the eyes of the world, was a crime. Away, away, looking forward to she knew not what, only to get away from the sight of his hated face.
Presently she paused and looked about her. Where was she? The spot was wild and unfamiliar. There was no sight or sound of human being to question as to the right direction to take, not that it mattered much, she told herself in bitterness of spirit. She walked on more slowly now, scanning the woods for signs of a human habitation. An opening in the trees gave a glimpse of cultivated ground in a small clearing, and a few steps farther revealed a typical Southern Negro cabin, from which a woman stepped out and faced her as if expecting her coming. She was very aged, but still erect and noble in form. The patched figure was neat to scrupulousness, the eye still keen and searching.
As the woman advanced slowly toward her, Dianthe was conscious of a thrill of fear, which quickly passed as she dimly remembered having heard the servants jesting over old Aunt Hannah, the most noted “voodoo” doctor or witch in the country.
“Come in, honey, and res’,” were her first words after her keen eyes had traveled over the woman before her. Dianthe obeyed without a murmur; in truth, she seemed again to have lost her own will in another’s.
The one-roomed cabin was faultlessly neat, and the tired girl was grateful for the warmth of the glowing brands upon the wide hearth. Very soon a cup of stimulating coffee warmed her tired frame and brought more animation to her tired face.
“What may your name be, Auntie?” she asked at length, uneasy at the furtive glances cast by the eyes of the silent figure seated in the distant shadow of the chimney-corner. The eyes never wavered, but no answer was vouchsafed her by the woman in the corner. Somewhere she had read a description of an African princess which fitted the woman before her.
“I knew a princess; she was old,
Crisp-haired, flat-featured, with a look
Such as no dainty pen of gold
Would write of in a fairy book.
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Her face was like a Sphinx’s face, to me,
Touched with vast patience, desert grace,
And lonesome, brooding mystery.”
Suddenly a low sound, growing gradually louder, fell upon Dianthe’s ear; it was the voice of the old woman crooning a mournful minor cadence, but for an instant it sent a chill about the girl’s heart. It was a funeral chant commonly sung by the Negroes over the dead. It chimed in with her gloomy, despairing mood and startled her. She arose hastily to her feet to leave the place.
“How can I reach the road to Livingston Place?” she asked with a shudder of apprehension as she glanced at her entertainer.
“Don’t be ’feared, child; Aunt Hannah won’t hurt a ha’r of that purty head. Hain’t it these arms done nussed ev’ry Livingston? I knowed your mother, child; for all you’re married to Marse Aubrey, you isn’t a white ’ooman.”
“I do not deny what you say, Auntie; I have no desire so to do,” replied Dianthe gently.
With a cry of anguish the floodgates of feeling were unloosed, and the old Negress flung her arms about the delicate form. “Gawd-a-mercy! My Mira’s gal! My Mira’s gal!” Then followed a harrowing scene.
Dianthe listened to the old story of sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. A horrible, paralyzing dread was upon her. Was she never to cease from suffering and be at rest? Rocking herself to and fro, and moaning as though in physical pain, the old woman told her story.
“I was born on de Livingston place, an’ bein’ a purty likely gal, was taken to de big house when I was a tot. I was
