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Others sought her, watched for her, laid traps that might achieve at least her presence, but largely in vain. She kept within the house; when the knocker sounded she went to her own room. No flowery message, compliment, or appeal, not even Mary Stagg's kindly importunity, could bring her from that coign of vantage.
There were times when Mistress Stagg's showroom was crowded with customers; on sunny days young men left the bowling green to stroll in the shell-bordered garden paths; gentlemen and ladies of quality passing up and down Palace Street walked more slowly when they came to the small white house, and looked to see if the face of Darden's Audrey showed at any window. Thus the winter wore away.
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Tony Oakes, the Hermitage, and Cornelius Stagg's were noted road-houses where fine meals were served, but these are scarcely to be considered as San Francisco Bohemian restaurants.
With twelve of the clock came Darden, quite sober, distrait in manner and uneasy of eye, and presently interrupted Mistress Stagg's flow of conversation by a demand to speak with his wife alone. At that time of day the garden was a solitude, and thither the two repaired, taking their seats upon a bench built round a mulberry-tree. "Well?" queried Mistress Deborah bitterly. "I suppose Mr.
Stagg's brigade and Miller's battery, which, as I have said, had been left at the forks of the Deatonsville road, had meanwhile broken in between the rear of Ewell's column and the head of Gordon's, forcing Gordon to abandon his march for Rice's Station, and to take the right-hand road at the forks, on which he was pursued by General Humphreys.
Before long the enemy's trains were discovered on this road, but Crook could make but little impression on them, they were so strongly guarded; so, leaving Stagg's brigade and Miller's battery about three miles southwest of Deatonsville where the road forks, with a branch leading north toward the Appomattox to harass the retreating column and find a vulnerable point, I again shifted the rest of the cavalry toward the left, across-country, but still keeping parallel to the enemy's line of march.
She passed through the grape arbor, and opened the door at which Haward had knocked that September night of the Governor's ball. She was in Mistress Stagg's long room; at that hour it should have been lit only by a dying fire and a solitary candle. Now the fire was low enough, but the room seemed aflare with myrtle tapers. Audrey, coming from the dimness without, shaded her eyes with her hand.
There, you are crowned! Hail, Queen!" Audrey felt the touch of his lips upon her forehead, and shivered. All her world was going round; she could not steady it, could not see aright, knew not what was happening. The strangeness made her dizzy. She hardly heard Mistress Stagg's last protest that it would never do, never in the world; hardly knew when she left the house.
What was real was a past that was not hers, and those dead women to whom night by night she gave life and splendor. There were visitors to whom she was not denied. Darden came at times, sat in Mistress Stagg's sunny parlor, and talked to his sometime ward much as he had talked in the glebe-house living room, discursively, of men and parochial affairs and his own unmerited woes.
Mistress Stagg's garden lay to the south, and in sheltered corners bloomed marigolds and asters, while a vine, red-leafed and purple-berried, made a splendid mantle for the playhouse wall. Within the theatre a rehearsal of "Tamerlane" was in progress. Turk and Tartar spoke their minds, and Arpasia's death cry clave the air.
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