Black Bess

“ Bess’s beauty had become an apple of discord in the hamlet; all the young men wanted her, and Black Dan would put up with no rival. Isaac spoke mysteriously of the need for good-fellowship among the forest-folk; there must be no mating of Bess to a bachelor outside the hamlet; she was one of them and with them she must remain. Old Ursula looked surly and displeased during the patriarch’s harangue. The match was little to her liking, and she distrusted Dan’s ability to make marriage bearable to such a woman as Bess. ”

“ I'll bet they will,” replied Venters. “What do you say, Bess?”
The shadow brightened in Bess's somber blue eyes, as if his words had recalled her from a sad and memorable past.
“Black Star will know her, surely,” replied Bess. “Sometimes he points his nose toward the west and watches as if he saw the purple slopes and smelt the sage of Utah! He has never forgotten. But Night has grown deaf and partly blind of late. I doubt if he'd remember.”
Shefford and Fay walked arm in arm in the background. ”

“ Bess Hall, who had no ambition to play the part of a queen, but had, on the other hand, a wholesome and instinctive fear of breaking her neck, now stood on the landing, helpless amid all her finery, and looking down at her aunt in a beseeching sort of way.
"I shall tumble down, Aunt Judith; I know I shall," said she, and budge she would not.
"Tumble down, little stupid! Why, what should make you tumble down? Are you going forever to be a baby? Any baby can crawl down-stairs by holding on to the balusters." ”

“ She eyed the Frenchwoman a little haughtily, glanced at herself in the pier-glass, put back the stray strands of black hair over her ears, and smiled as her eyes met Jeffray’s.
“I am afraid we are taxing your ingenuity, madame,” he said, to the aristocratic little lady, with a grave smile.
The Frenchwoman, with her gray ringlets, gave a merry and meaning laugh, glided up to Bess, took off the gray cloak, her deft hands fluttering white and delicate about the girl’s body.
“Ah, no, a pleasure, monsieur. A Frenchwoman is never taken by surprise. Come. ”

“ Jeffray went a step nearer and gazed down at the man lying in the grass. His head was twisted to one side, the upper lip drawn up over the teeth in a snarling grin. There was blood on the black beard, blood on the hairy chest and on the shirt that flapped open from the massive throat. It was Dan who lay dead with a musket-bullet through his chest.
Bess and Jeffray stood and looked into each other’s eyes. Her hand still gripped his wrist spasmodically. He saw her lips move, saw the unuttered question in her eyes.
“He is dead,” he said, solemnly. ”

“ The name riveted his consciousness upon the one man of all men upon earth whom he had wanted to meet. He had met the rustler. Venters recalled the smoky haze of the saloon, the dark-visaged men, the huge Oldring. He saw him step out of the door, a splendid specimen of manhood, a handsome giant with purple-black and sweeping beard. He remembered inquisitive gaze of falcon eyes. He heard himself repeating: "Oldring, Bess is alive! But she's dead to you," and he felt himself jerk, and his ears throbbed to the thunder of a gun, and he saw the giant sink slowly to his knees. ”

“ Coming to the narrow landing at the top of the stairs, she stood listening, with her head bent forward, the candle shaded behind her hand. The two doors that opened upon the landing were shut, and Bess knew not what their black panelling might hide. Putting her ear close to the door of her own bedroom, she heard the casement rattling from time to time, and a sound as of some one at work on the iron bars closing the window. The candle shook a little in her hand. Setting it down on an old chest by the wall, she gathered her courage, and, lifting the latch, threw the door open at arm’s-length. ”

“ Phil Selden has the very nicest sled in school and he took her on it ever and ever so many times, then Maria Black made a fuss over her and Leonora Stayman gave her a ring that was too small for herself and—and——”
“You and Bess were jealous, I see. So that much was true, and you said things to one another behind her back that you wouldn’t have said to her face. I suppose we might call that deceitful.”
Betsy nodded in token that she thought this true. “And Bess is fat,” she declared.
Mr. Tyson repressed a smile. “While no one can say truthfully that Elizabeth is lazy. ”

“ Throw him a bone now and then, lass, to keep him from growing surly. He’s no mate for you, girl, the great, black-faced oaf. David’s the lad to make a good husband. You must be shy of Dan, Bess.”
The girl swept her black hair over her ears, laughed, and began to bustle about the kitchen.
“I can take care of myself, mother,” she said.
“Better be your own mistress, lass, than let Black Dan have the handling of your love.”
Thus a certain superficial similarity may be traced between the lots of Richard Jeffray and Bess of the Woods. ”

“ Each girl had taken her bundle of poverty-stricken clothes and had carried it to the hollow trysting-tree. This being in a most secluded spot, they were not observed when they changed their appearance and assumed the characters of old women.
“You look so funny,” giggled Betsy when Elizabeth, in a much stained and faded skirt of Electra’s, an old worsted shawl, and a battered felt hat tied down over her ears, announced that she was ready and how did she look.
Betsy was more respectable in a cast-off skirt of Elizabeth’s, a black shawl over her head, and a basket on her arm. ”

“ If you love what is noble, pledge Turpin's brave mare;
And the draught will be welcome, the wine will be good;
If it have half the spirit and strength of her blood.
May the steed that comes nigh her in courage and fire
Carry rider more worthy to make its heart tire ”

“ Yet her life was most precious by far of the two.
I live on the sea and I'm lord of a ship,
That starts from her rest like a hound from the slip;
Her speed is unrivalled, her beauty is rare;
But her timbers are black as the highwayman's mare. ”

“ How Bess, the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.
IX
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.
[Pg 196] * * * *
X
And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees, ”

“ XLII Jeffray stood gripping his pistols in the cottage room, driven by strange stress of circumstances to fight for a peasant girl against a crowd of cursing and sweating smugglers. He had never stood forward as a hero among his peers, those blue-eyed, plump-bellied worthies who preached or swore in the pulpit and at the dining-table. Slim, sensitive, yet strong now as a band of steel, he waited, watching the door heave and creak beneath the weight of Dan’s great body. Bess, kneeling behind her chair, was plying the ramrod. ”

“ Presently he knew, by light of this adventure on the ice, that Bess was more than mere companion in toil and hardship, some one to shelter and protect. She was a comrade-at-arms,—such a fortress of strength as the best of women have always been to the men they loved. ”

“ She lay still, yet shivering a little, the vision still playing before her eyes. A low wind had risen, and she could hear it moving in the boughs of the trees without. Beams of moonlight came slanting through the casement to shine upon the polished panelling of an old cupboard that stood against the wall. The cottage seemed utterly still and dark. Bess started up in bed on her elbow of a sudden, her hair falling down upon the pillow, her eyes shining even in the dusk of the room. ”

“ How many poor souls live and die with most of their energies dormant.
There had never been but one dream to Dil’s life, and that was Bess. Here her imagination had some play. When they took their outings through the more respectable streets for the cleanliness and quiet, or paused awhile in the green and flowery squares, she sometimes “made believe” that Bess was the lovely child in the elegant carriage, with wraps of eider down and 121 lace, and she the nurse-maid in white apron and cap who trundled her along jauntily. ”

“ The wood fire was burning brightly on the irons, the light twinkling on the pewter, and playing with the shadows in the dark corners of the room. She tried the door softly—found that Dan had locked it and taken the key. With a feeling of tense excitement, Bess unlatched the casement, climbed out on to the ledge, and slipped down into the garden. She stood listening a moment, cowering under the shadow of the wall, and looking out into the dark. She could see a light twinkling behind the kitchen window of Isaac’s cottage and hear voices coming gruffly out of the gloom. ”

“ She smoothed his pillow, talked to him in her quaint, bold way, and altogether reconciled Richard to his lodging for the night. Solomon Grimshaw, Isaac’s brother, had ridden over on his pony to Rodenham to ease the Lady Letitia of any anxiety on her nephew’s account. Bess had brought Jeffray a quill, inkhorn, and paper, and stood by the bed watching the man’s clever hand at work. He was a being full of strangeness and mystery to this forest elf, who had learned to look on men of coarser fibre. ”

“ Whatever darkness engrossed him at the sight of the ignoble girl, begging for her little life even at the cost of her lover’s, showed not at all in his white, set face. Whatever unspeakable despair came upon him at this ruin of his ideals, this destruction of all his hopes, it was evidenced neither in his actions nor in the clear, cool quality of his thought.
No other crisis had ever found him better disciplined. His mind seemed to circumscribe the whole, dread situation in an instant. He turned, met Bess’s straightforward gaze, saw her half-smile of complete understanding. ”

“ Bess would turn back, in her red petticoat, white cap and apron, into the kitchen and sing softly to herself as she turned the joint on the spit, polished the pewter, or peeled apples for a tart. As yet she knew nothing of Jeffray’s betrothal to Miss Hardacre, and in her simple and passionate way she let her imagination roam at will. It was more a rare and sensuous dream with the girl, a passing and repassing of mysterious and alluring visions. Practical as she was in the trivialities of life, she became a desirous-eyed child of nature when love opened the gates of the sunset and of the dawn. ”

“ She was near Jeffray; sometimes her knee touched his. They could almost hear each other breathing, while the sweet smell of the wet woods steamed up like incense into the night.
Jeffray appeared sunk in thought. He looked often at Bess with kindlings of tenderness in his eyes. The pleasurableness of life seemed to steal into either heart, chastened by a melancholy born of the troubled happenings of the day. They remembered, both of them, the dead man lying in the grass. It seemed that the blood-red flower of Bess’s dream had colored forth the shedding of Dan’s blood. ”

“ And all the time she went on picking, never once overlooking her hand. She was a large woman, belligerent of aspect, and Bess was only a woman and not prone to fisticuffs. So the invader picked until she could pick no more, said "Good-day," and sailed majestically away.
"People have really grown worse in the last several years, I think," said Bess to me in a tired sort of voice that night, as we sat in the library after dinner.
Next day I was inclined to agree with her. "There's a woman and a little girl heading straight for the poppies," said May, a maid about the bungalow. ”

“ The embers of the fire still glowed on the hearth, and the kitchen reeked of Isaac’s tobacco. Creeping to the cottage door, she took down the bar noiselessly and shot back the bolts. Without the world seemed built up of magic, the moonlight flooding down upon the orchards and the woods. Bess shut the door gently, passed through the garden, and half ran across the open grass-land betwixt the cottage and the forest. She took the path leading up towards the heath about the Beacon Rock, and, gathering her cloak round her, fled away into the moon-streaked shadows. ”

“ For bully her he did after the fashion of a great, clumsy savage, proud of his own huge strength and the prerogatives thereof. It pleased the oaf to fancy that he was taming Bess as he would have tamed a bad-tempered filly; that he was breaking her spirit, and fastening his bondage upon her with the masterful complacency of a lord and a possessor. Like a great ape he would grin and mock her, tweak her hair, pinch her arms, twit her with his triumph, and gloat over the passivity that seemed to flatter his strength. ”

“ A few feet distant on the deck Bess's eyes turned from the miracle in the skies to watch the slowly growing light in Ned Cornet's face. It was well enough for him to find his inspiration in the majesty of nature. Bess was a woman, and that meant that man that is born of woman was her work and her being. She turned her eyes from God to behold this man.
And it was well for her that Lenore was not near enough to see her face in the wan, ghostly radiance of the Northern Lights. Her woman's intuition would have been quick to lay bare the secret of the girl's wildly leaping heart. ”