IX. UNITY AND JACQUELINE
XL. THE WAY OF THE TRANSGRESSOR

ILLUSTRATIONS

I will make court to you in a court some day (Frontispiece)

You are a scoundrel

Cary saw and flung out his arm, swerving his horse, but too late

Drink to me only with thine eyes

CHAPTER I

THE ROAD TO RICHMOND

The tobacco-roller and his son pitched their camp beneath a gum tree
upon the edge of the wood. It was October, and the gum was the colour of
blood. Behind it rolled the autumn forest; before it stretched a level
of broom-sedge, bright ochre in the light of the setting sun. The road
ran across this golden plain, and disappeared in a league-deep wood of
pine. From an invisible clearing came a cawing of crows. The sky was
cloudless, and the evening wind had not begun to blow. The small,
shining leaves of the gum did not stir, and the flame of the camp-fire
rose straight as a lance. The tobacco cask, transfixed by the trunk of a
young oak and drawn by strong horses, had come to rest upon the turf by
the roadside. Gideon Rand unharnessed the team, and from the platform
built in the front of the cask took fodder for the horses, then tossed
upon the grass a bag of meal, a piece of bacon, and a frying-pan. The
boy collected the dry wood with which the earth was strewn, then struck
flint and steel, guarded the spark within the tinder, fanned the flame,
and with a sigh of satisfaction stood back from the leaping fire. His
father tossed him a bucket, and with it swinging from his hand, he made
through the wood towards a music of water. Goldenrod and farewell-summer
and the red plumes of the sumach lined his path, while far overhead the
hickories and maples reared a fretted, red-gold roof. Underfoot were
moss and coloured leaves, and to the right and left the squirrels
watched him with bright eyes. He found the stream where it rippled
between banks of fern and mint. As he knelt to fill the pail, the red
haw and the purple ironweed met above his head.

Below him was a little mirror-like pool, and it gave him back himself
with such distinctness that, startled, he dropped the pail, and bending
nearer, began to study the image in the water. Back in Albemarle, in his
dead mother's room, there hung a looking-glass, but it was cracked and
blurred, and he seldom gazed within it. This chance mirror of the woods
was more to the purpose. The moments slipped away while he studied the
stranger and familiar in the pool below him