fightin' with awful fear. She couldn't--she couldn't."

"But there are girls--women, who have to bear it," said Miss Amory. "Good God, who _have_ to!"

"Yes--yes--yes," cried Susan. She drew her hand across her brow as if suddenly it felt damp, and for a moment her eyes looked wild with a memory of some awful thing. "I told her so," she said.

Miss Amory Starkweather turned in her chair with something like a start.

"You told her so," she exclaimed.

Susan stared out of the window and her voice fell.

"I didn't go to," she answered. "It was like this. That last time she came to see me--to tell me how ill she was and how Lucien was going to take her away--I'd been lookin' at the little clothes I'd got ready for--it." The tears began to roll fast down her cheeks. "Oh, Miss Starkweather! they was lyin' on the bed--an' she saw 'em an' turned as white as a sheet."

"Ugh!" the sound broke from Miss Amory like a short, involuntary groan.

"She said she didn't know how people could _bear_ it," Susan hurried on, "an' I said--just like you did--that they _had_ to bear it."

She suddenly hid her face in her arms.

"You were thinking of yourself," said Miss Amory. She felt and looked a little sick.

"Yes," said Susan, "I was thinkin' of how it is when a girl's goin' to have a child an' can't get away from it--can't--can't. She's got to go through with it--an' no one can't save her. But I suppose it made her think of her death that was comin'--her death that I b'lieve she knowed she was struck for. When I'd said it she looked like some little hunted animal dogs was after--that had run till its breath was gone an' its eyes was startin' from its head. Her little chest went up an' down with pantin'. I didn't wonder when I heard after that she'd dropped in the street in a dead faint."

"Was that the day I picked her up as she lay on the pavement?" Miss Amory asked.

Susan nodded, her face still hidden.

Old Miss Starkweather put out her hand and laid it on the girl's shoulder.

"She has had time to forget," she said, rather as if she was out of breath--"forget and grow quiet. She is dust by now--peaceful dust. Let us--my good girl--let us remember that happy story of how she died."

"Yes," answered Susan, "in Italy--lying before the open window--with the sunset all rosy in the sky."

But her head rested on her folded arms upon her knee, and she sobbed a low, deep sob.

CHAPTER XVIII

Just before the breaking out of the Civil War, Delisleville had been provided with a sensation in a piece of singularly unexpected good fortune which befell one of its most prominent citizens. It was indeed good fortune, wearing somewhat the proportions of a fairy tale, and that such things could happen in Delisleville and to a citizen who possessed its entire approval was considered vaguely to the credit of the town.

One of the facts which had always been counted as an added dignity to the De Willoughbys had been their well-known possession of property in land.

"Land" was always felt to be dignified, and somehow it seemed additionally so when it gained a luxuriously superfluous character by merely lying in huge, uncultivated tracts, and representing nothing but wide areas and taxes.

"Them big D'Willerbys of D'lisleville owns thousands of acres as never brings 'em a cent," Mr. Stamps had said to his friends at the Cross-roads at the time Big Tom had first appeared among them. It was Mr. Stamps who had astutely suggested that the stranger was possibly "kin" to the Delisleville family, and in his discreet pursuit of knowledge he had made divers discoveries.

"'Twarn't Jedge D'Willerby bought the land," he went on to explain, "'n'

it seems like he would hev bin a fool to hev done it, bein' as 'tain't worked an' brings in nothin'. But ye never know how things may turn out.

'Twas the Jedge's gran'father, old Isham D'Willerby bought it fer a kinder joke. Some said he was blind drunk when he done it, but he warn't so drunk but what he got a cl'ar title, an' he got it mighty cheap too.

Folks ses as he use ter laugh an' say he war goin' to find gold on it, but he never dug fer none--nor fer crops nuther, an' thar it lies to-day in the mountains, an' no one goin' nigh it."

In truth, Judge De Willoughby merely paid his taxes upon it from a sense of patriarchal pride.

"My ancestor bought it," he would say. "I will hand it to my sons. In England it would be an estate for an earldom, here it means merely tax-paying. Still, I shall not sell it."

Nobody, in fact, would have been inclined to buy it in those days. But there came a time when its value increased hour by hour in the public mind, until it was almost beyond computation.

A chance visitor from the outside world made an interesting discovery. On this wild tract of hill and forest was a vein of coal so valuable that, to the practical mind of the discoverer, the Judge's unconsciousness of its existence was amazing. He himself was a practical, driving, business schemer from New York. He knew the value of what he saw, and the availability of the material in consequence of a certain position in which the mines lay. Before he left Delisleville he had explained this with such a presenting of facts that the Judge had awakened to an enthusiasm as Southern as his previous indifference had been. He had no knowledge of business methods; he had practised his profession in a magnificent _dilettante_ sort of way which had worn an imposing air and impressed his clients, and, as he was by inheritance a comparatively rich man, he had not been driven by necessity to alter his methods. The sudden prospect of becoming a multimillionaire excited him. He made Napoleonic plans, and was dignified and eloquent.

"Why should I form a company?" he said. "If I am willing to make the first ventures myself, the inevitable returns of profit will do the rest, and there will be no complications. The De Willoughby Mine will be the De Willoughby Mine alone. I prefer that it should be so."

The idea of being sole ruler in the scheme made him feel rather like a king, and he privately enjoyed the sensation. He turned into money all the property he could avail himself of; his library table was loaded with books on mining; he invested in tons of machinery, which were continually arriving from the North, or stopping on the way when it should have been arriving. He sent for engineers from various parts of the country and amazed them with the unprofessional boldness of his methods. He really indulged in a few months of dignified riot, of what he imagined to be a splendidly executive nature. The plans were completed, the machinery placed, the engineers and cohorts of workmen engaged in tremendous efforts, the Judge was beginning to reflect on the management of his future millions, when--the first gun was fired on Fort Sumter.

That was the beginning, and apparently the end. Suddenly the storm of war broke forth, and its tempest, surging through the land, swept all before it. The country was inundated with catastrophes, capitalists foundered, schemes were swamped, the armies surged to and fro. The De Willoughby land was marched and fought over; scores of hasty, shallow graves were dug in it and filled; buildings and machinery were destroyed as if a tornado had passed by. The Judge was a ruined man; his realisable property he had allowed to pass from his hands, his coal remained in the bowels of the earth, the huge income he was to have drawn from it had melted into nothingness.

Nothing could have altered the aspect of this tragedy; but there was a singular fact which added to its intensity and bitterness. In such a hot-bed of secession as was Delisleville, the fact in question was indeed not easily explainable, except upon the grounds either of a Quixotic patriotism or upon those of a general disposition to contradictoriness. A Southern man, the head of a Southern family, the Judge opposed the rebellion and openly sided with the Government. That he had been a man given to argument and contradiction, and always priding himself upon refusing to be led by the majority was not to be denied.

"He is fancying himself a Spartan hero, and looking forward to laurels and history," one of his neighbours remarked. "It is like De Willoughby after all. He would have been a Secessionist if he had lived in Boston."

"The Union General George Washington fought for and handed down to us _I_ will protect," the Judge said loftily himself.

But there was no modifying the outburst of wonder and condemnation which overwhelmed him. To side with the Union--in an aristocratic Southern town--was to lose social caste and friends, to be held a renegade and an open, degraded traitor to home and country. At that period, to the Southerner the only country was the South--in the North reigned outer darkness. Had the Judge been a poor white, there would have been talk of tar and feathers. As a man who had been a leader among the aristocratic classes, he was ostracized. In the midst of his financial disasters he was treated as an outlaw. He had been left a widower a few years before, during the war his son De Courcy died of fever, Romaine fell in battle, and his sole surviving daughter lost her life through diphtheria contracted in a soldiers' hospital. The family had sunk into actual poverty; the shock of sorrows and disappointment broke the old man's spirit. On the day that peace was finally declared he died in his room in the old house which had once been so full of young life and laughter and spirit.

The only creature with him at the time was his grandson, young Rupert De Willoughby, who was De Courcy's son. The sun was rising, and its first beams shone in at the open window rosily. The old Judge lay rubbing his hands slowly together, perhaps because they were cold.

"Only you left, Rupert," he said, "and there were so many of us. If Tom--if Tom had not been such a failure--don't know whether he's alive--or dead. If Tom----"

His hands slowly ceased moving and his voice trailed off into silence.

Ten minutes later all was over, and Rupert stood in the world entirely alone.

For the next two years the life the last De Willoughby lived in the old house, though distinctly unique, was not favourable to the development of youth. Having been prepared for the practice of the law, after the time-honoured De Willoughby custom, and having also for some months occupied a corner in the small, unbusiness-like, tree-shaded, brick building known as the Judge's "office," Rupert sat now at his grandfather's desk and earned a scant living by endeavouring to hold together the old man's long-diminished practice. The profession at the time offered nothing in such places as Delisleville, even to older and more experienced men. No one had any money to go to law with, few had any property worth going to law about.

Both armies having swept through it, Delisleville wore in those days an aspect differing greatly from its old air of hospitable well-being and inconsequent good spirits and good cheer. Its broad verandahed houses had seen hard usage, its pavements were worn and broken, and in many streets tufted with weeds; its fences were dilapidated, its rich families had lost their possessions, and those who had not been driven away by their necessities were gazing aghast at a future to which it seemed impossible to adjust their ease-loving, slave-attended, luxurious habits of the past. Houses built of wood, after the Southern fashion, do not well withstand neglect and ill-fortune. Porticos and pillars and trellis-work which had been picturesque and imposing when they had been well cared for, and gleamed white among creepers and trees, lost their charm drearily when paint peeled off, trees were cut down, and vines were dragged away and died. Over the whole of the once gay little place there had fallen an air of discouragement, desolation, and decay. Financial disaster had crippled the boldest even in centres much more energetic than small, unbusiness-like Southern towns; the country lay, as it were, prostrate to recover strength, and all was at a standstill.

Finding himself penniless, Rupert De Willoughby lived in a corner of the house he had been brought up in. Such furniture as had survived the havoc of war and the entire dilapidation of old age, he had gathered together in three or four rooms, which he occupied with the one servant good fortune brought to his door at a time when the forlornness of his changed position was continually accentuated by the untidy irregularity of his life and surroundings. He was only able to afford to engage the shiftless services of a slatternly negro girl, rendered insubordinate by her newly acquired freedom, and he had begun to feel that he should never again find himself encompassed by the decorous system of a well-managed household.

It was at this juncture that Uncle Matthew arrived and presented his curious petition, which was that he should be accepted as general servant, with wages or without them.

He had not belonged to Judge De Willoughby, but to a distant relative, and, as he was an obstinate and conservative old person, he actually felt that to be "a free nigger" was rather to drop in the social scale.

"Whar's a man stand, sah, if he ain't got no fambly?" he said to Rupert when he came to offer his services to him. "He stan' nowhar, that's war he stan'; I've got to own up to it, Marse Rupert, I'se a 'ristycrat bawn an' bred, an' I 'low to stay one, long's my head's hot. Ef my old mars's fambly hadn't er gone fo'th en' bin scattered to de fo' win's of de university, I'd a helt on, but when de las' of 'um went to dat Europe, dey couldn't 'ford to take me, an' I had ter stay. An' when I heerd as all yo' kin was gone an' you was gwine to live erlone like dis yere, I come to ax yer to take me to wait on yer--as a favier, Marse Rupert--as a _favier_. 'Tain't pay I wants, sah; it's a fambly name an' a fambly circle."

"It's not much of a circle, Uncle Matt," said Rupert, looking round at the bareness of the big room he sat in.

"'Tain't much fer you, suh," answered Uncle Matthew, "but it's a pow'fle deal fer me in dese yere days. Ef yer don't take me, fust thing I knows I'll be drivin' or waitin' on some Mr. Nobody from New York or Boston, an' seems like I shouldn't know how to stand it. 'Scuse me a-recommendin'