The Choir Invisible
by
James Lane Allen
Part 1 out of 4
Project Gutenburg/Make A Difference Day Project 1999.
THE CHOIR INVISIBLE
by James Lane Allen
"O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence. . .
. . . feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused
And in diffusion evermore intense.
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world."
GEORGE ELIOT
THE middle of a fragrant afternoon of May in the green wilderness of
Kentucky: the year 1795.
High overhead ridges of many-peaked cloud--the gleaming, wandering Alps of
the blue ether; outstretched far below, the warming bosom of the earth,
throbbing with the hope of maternity. Two spirits abroad in the air,
encountering each other and passing into one: the spirit of scentless spring
left by melting snows and the spirit of scented summer born with the
earliest buds. The road through the forest one of those wagon-tracks that
were being opened from the clearings of the settlers, and that wound along
beneath trees of which those now seen in Kentucky are the unworthy
survivors--oaks and walnuts, maples and elms, centuries old, gnarled,
massive, drooping, majestic, through whose arches the sun hurled down only
some solitary spear of gold, and over whose gray-mossed roots some cold
brook crept in silence; with here and there billowy open spaces of wild rye,
buffalo grass, and clover on which the light fell in sheets of radiance;
with other spots so dim that for ages no shoot had sprung from the deep
black mould; blown to and fro across this wagon-road, odours of ivy,
pennyroyal and mint, mingled with the fragrance of the wild grape; flitting
to and fro across it, as low as the violet-beds, as high as the sycamores,
unnumbered kinds of birds, some of which like the paroquet are long since
vanished.
Down it now there came in a drowsy amble an old white bob-tail horse, his
polished coat shining like silver when he crossed an expanse of sunlight,
fading into spectral paleness when he passed under the rayless trees; his
foretop floating like a snowy plume in the light wind, his unshod feet,
half-covered by the fetlocks, stepping noiselessly over the loamy earth; the
rims of his nostrils expanding like flexible ebony; and in his eyes that
look of peace which is never seen but in those of petted animals.
He had on an old bridle with knots of blue violets hanging, down at his
ears; over his broad back was spread a blanket of buffalo-skin; on this
rested a worn black side-saddle, and sitting in the saddle was a girl, whom
every young man of the town not far away knew to be Amy Falconer, and whom
many an old pioneer dreamed of when he fell asleep beside his rifle and his
hunting-knife in his lonely cabin of the wilderness. She was perhaps the
first beautiful girl of aristocratic birth ever seen in Kentucky, and the
first of the famous train of those who for a hundred years since have
wrecked or saved the lives of the men.
Her pink calico dress, newly starched and ironed, had looked so pretty to
her when she had started from home, that she had not been able to bear the
thought of wearing over it this lovely afternoon her faded, mud-stained
riding-skirt; and it was so short that it showed, resting against the
saddle-skirt, her little feet loosely fitted into new bronze morocco shoes.
On her hands she had drawn white half-hand mittens of home-knit; and on her
head she wore an enormous white scoop-bonnet, lined with pink and tied under
her chin in a huge muslin bow. Her face, hidden away under the
pink-and-white shadow, showed such hints of pearl and rose that it seemed
carved from the inner surface of a sea-shell. Her eyes were gray, almond
shaped, rather wide apart, with an expression changeful and playful, but
withal rather shrewd and hard; her light brown hair, as fine as unspun silk,
was parted over her brow and drawn simply back behind her ears; and the lips
of her little mouth curved against each other, fresh, velvet-like, smiling.
On she rode down the avenue of the primeval woods; and Nature seemed
arranged to salute her as some imperial presence; with the waving of a
hundred green boughs above on each side; with a hundred floating odours;
with the swift play of nimble forms up and down the boles of trees; and all
the sweet confusion of innumerable melodies.
Then one of those trifles happened that contain the history of our lives, as
a drop of dew draws into itself the majesty and solemnity of the heavens.
>From the pommel of the side-saddle there dangled a heavy roll of home-spun
linen, which she was taking to town to her aunt's merchant as barter for
queen's-ware pitchers; and behind this roll of linen, fastened to a ring
under the seat of the saddle, was swung a bundle tied up in a large
blue-and-white checked cotton neckkerchief. Whenever she fidgeted in the
saddle, or whenever the horse stumbled as he often did because he was clumsy
and because the road was obstructed by stumps and roots, the string by which
this bundle was tied slipped a little through the lossening knot and the
bundle hung a little lower down. Just where the wagon-trail passed out into
the broader public road leading from Lexington to Frankfort and the
travelling began to be really good, the horse caught one of his forefeet
against the loop of a root, was thrown violently forward, and the bundle
slipped noiselessly from the saddle to the earth.
She did not see it. She indignantly gathered the reins more tightly in her
hand, pushed back her bonnet, which now hung down over her eyes like the
bill of a pelican, and applied her little switch of wild cherry to the
horse's flank with such vehemence that a fly which was about to alight on
that spot went to the other side. The old horse himself--he bore the
peaceable name of William Penn--merely gave one of the comforting switches
of his bob-tail with which he brushed away the thought of any small
annoyance, and stopped a moment to nibble at the wayside cane mixed with
purple blossoming peavine.
Out of the lengthening shadows of the woods the girl and the horse passed on
toward the little town; and far behind them in the public road lay the lost
bundle.
II
IN the open square on Cheapside in Lexington there is now a bronze statue of
John Breckinridge. Not far from where it stands the pioneers a hundred years
ago had built the first log school-house of the town.
Poor old school-house, long since become scattered ashes! Poor little
backwoods academicians, driven in about sunrise, driven out toward dusk!
Poor little tired backs with nothing to lean against! Poor little bare feet
that could never reach the floor! Poor little droop-headed figures, so
sleepy in the long summer days, so afraid to fall asleep! Long, long since,
little children of the past, your backs have become straight enough,
measured on the same cool bed; sooner or later your feet, wherever
wandering, have found their resting-places in the soft earth; and all your
drooping heads have gone to sleep on the same dreamless pillow and there are
sleeping. And the young schoolmaster, who seemed exempt from frailty while
he guarded like a sentinel that lone outpost of the alphabet--he too has
long since joined the choir invisible of the immortal dead. But there is
something left of him though more than a century has passed away: something
that has wandered far down the course of time to us like the faint summer
fragrance of a young tree long since fallen dead in its wintered
forest--like a dim radiance yet travelling onward into space from an orb
turned black and cold--like an old melody, surviving on and on in the air
without any instrument, without any strings.
John Gray, the school-master. At four o'clock that afternoon and therefore
earlier than usual, he was standing on the hickory block which formed the
doorstep of the school-house, having just closed the door behind him for the
day. Down at his side, between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, hung
his big black hat, which was decorated with a tricoloured cockade, to show
that he was a member of the Democratic Society of Lexington, modelled after
the Democratic Society of Philadelphia and the Jacobin clubs of France. In
the open palm of the other lay his big silver English lever watch with a
glass case and broad black silk fob.
A young fellow of powerful build, lean, muscular; wearing simply but with
gentlemanly care a suit of black, which was relieved around his wrists and
neck by linen, snow-white and of the finest quality. In contrast with his
dress, a complexion fresh, pure, brilliant--the complexion of health and
innocence; in contrast with this complexion from above a mass of coarse
dark-red hair, cut short and loosely curling. Much physical beauty in the
head, the shape being noble, the pose full of dignity and of strength;
almost no beauty in the face itself except in the gray eyes which were
sincere, modest, grave. Yet a face not without moral loftiness and
intellectual power; rugged as a rock, but as a rock is made less rugged by a
little vine creeping over it, so his was softened by a fine network of
nerves that wrought out upon it a look of kindness; betraying the first
nature of passion, but disciplined to the higher nature of control;
youthful, but wearing those unmistakable marks of maturity which mean a
fierce early struggle against the rougher forces of the world. On the whole,
with the calm, self respecting air of one who, having thus far won in the
battle of life, has a fiercer longing for larger conflict, and whose entire
character rests on the noiseless conviction that he is a man and a
gentleman.
Deeper insight would have been needed to discover how true and earnest a
soul he was; how high a value he set on what the future had in store for him
and on what his life would be worth to himself and to others; and how,
liking rather to help himself than to be helped, he liked less to be trifled
with and least of all to be seriously thwarted.
He was thinking, as his eyes rested on the watch, that if this were one of
his ordinary days he would pursue his ordinary duties; he would go up street
to the office of Marshall and for the next hour read as many pages of law as
possible; then get his supper at his favourite tavern--the Sign of the
Spinning, Wheel--near the two locust trees; then walk out into the country
for an hour or more; then back to his room and more law until midnight by
the light of his tallow dip.
But this was not an ordinary day--being one that he had long waited for and
was destined never to forget. At dusk the evening before, the post-rider, so
tired that he had scarce strength of wind to blow his horn, had ridden into
town bringing the mail from Philadelphia; and in this mail there was great
news for him. It had kept him awake nearly all of the night before; it had
been uppermost in his mind the entire day in school. At the thought of it
now he thrust his watch into his pocket, pulled his hat resolutely over his
brow, and started toward Main Street, meaning to turn thence toward Cross
Street, now known as Broadway. On the outskirts of the town in that
direction lay the wilderness, undulating away for hundreds of miles like a
vast green robe with scarce a rift of human making.
He failed to urge his way through the throng as speedily as he may have
expected, being withheld at moments by passing acquaintances, and at others
pausing of his own choice to watch some spectacle of the street.
The feeling lay fresh upon him this afternoon that not many years back the
spot over which the town was spread had been but a hidden glade in the heart
of the beautiful, awful wilderness, with a bountiful spring bubbling up out
of the turf, and a stream winding away through the green, valley-bottom to
the bright, shady Elkhorn: a glade that for ages had been thronged by
stately-headed elk and heavy-headed bison, and therefore sought also by
unreckoned generations of soft-footed, hard eyed red hunters. Then had come
the beginning of the end when one summer day, toward sunset, a few tired,
rugged backwoodsmen of the Anglo-Saxon race, wandering fearless and far into
the wilderness from the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge and the
Alleghanies, had made their camp by the margin of the spring; and always
afterwards, whether by day or by night, they had dreamed of this as the land
they must conquer for their homes. Now they had conquered it already; and
now this was the town that had been built there, with its wide streets under
big trees of the primeval woods; with a long stretch of turf on one side of
the stream for a town common; with inns and taverns in the style of those of
country England or of Virginia in the reign of George the Third; with shops
displaying the costliest merchandise of Philadelphia; with rude dwellings of
logs now giving way to others of frame and of brick; and, stretching away
from the town toward the encompassing wilderness, orderly gardens and
orchards now pink with the blossom of the peach, and fields of young maize
and wheat and flax and hemp.
As the mighty stream of migration of the Anglo-Saxon race had burst through
the jagged channels of the Alleghanies and rushed onward to the unknown,
illimitable West, it was this little town that had received one of the main
streams, whence it flowed more gently dispersed over the rich lands of the
newly created State, or passed on to the Ohio and the southern fringes of
the Lakes. It was this that received also a vast return current of the
fearful, the disappointed, the weak, as they recoiled from the awful
frontier of backwood life and resought the peaceful Atlantic seaboard--one
of the defeated Anglo-Saxon armies of civilization.
These two far-clashing tides of the aroused, migrating race--the one flowing
westward, the other ebbing eastward--John Gray found himself noting with
deep interest as he moved through the town that afternoon a hundred years
ago; and not less keenly the unlike groups and characters thrown
dramatically together upon this crowded stage of border history.
At one point his attention was arrested by the tearful voices of women and
the weeping of little children: a company of travellers with
pack-horses--one of the caravans across the desert of the Western woods--was
moving off to return by the Wilderness Road to the old abandoned homes in
Virginia and North Carolina. Farther on, his passage was blocked by a joyous
crowd that had gathered about another caravan newly arrived--not one
traveller having perished on the way. Seated on the roots of an oak were a
group of young backwoodsmen--swarthy, lean, tall, wild and reckless of
bearing--their long rifles propped against the tree or held fondly across
the knees; the gray smoke of their pipes mingling with the gray of their
jauntily worn raccoon-skin caps; the rifts of yellow sunlight blending with
the yellow of their huntingshirts and tunics; their knives and powder-horns
fastened in the belts that girt in their gaunt waists: the heroic youthful
sinew of the old border folk. One among them, larger and handsomer than the
others, had pleased his fancy by donning more nearly the Indian dress. His
breech-clout was of dappled fawn-skin; his long thigh boots of thin
deer-hide were open at the hips, leaving exposed the clear whiteness of his
flesh; below the knees they were ornamented by a scarlet fringe tipped with
the hoofs of fawns and the spurs of the wild turkey; and in his cap he wore
the intertwined wings of the hawk and the scarlet tanager.
Under another tree in front of a tavern bearing the sign of the Virginia
arms, a group of students of William and Mary, the new aristocrats of the
West, were singing, gambling, drinking; while at intervals one of them, who
had lying open before him a copy of Tom Paine's "Age of Reason," pounded on
the table and apostrophied the liberties of Man. Once Gray paused beside a
tall pole that had been planted at a street corner and surmounted with a
liberty cap. Two young men, each wearing the tricolour cockade as he did,
were standing, there engaged in secret conversation. As he joined them,
three other young men--Federalists--sauntered past, wearing black cockades,
with an eagle button on the left side. The six men saluted coolly.
Many another group and solitary figure he saw to remind him of the turbulent
history of the time and place. A parson, who had been the calmest of Indian
fighters, had lost all self-control as he contended out in the road with
another parson for the use of Dr. Watts' hymns instead of the Psalms of
David. Near by, listening to them, and with a wondering eye on all he saw in
the street, stood a French priest of Bordeaux, an exile from the fury of the
avenging jacobins. There were brown flatboatmen, in weather-beaten felt
hats, just returned by the long overland trip from New Orleans and
discussing with tobacco merchants the open navigation of the Mississippi;
and as they talked, up to them hurried the inventor Edward West, who said
with excitement that if they would but step across the common to the town
branch, he would demonstrate by his own model that some day navigation would
be by steam: whereat they all laughed kindly at him for a dreamer, and went
to laugh at the action of his mimic boat, moving hither and thither over the
dammed water of the stream. Sitting on a stump apart from every one, his dog
at his feet, his rifle across his lap, an aged backwoodsman surveyed in
sorrow the civilization that had already destroyed his hunting and that was
about sending him farther west to the depths of Missouri--along with the
buffalo. His glance fell with disgust upon two old gentlemen in
knee-breeches who met and offered each other their snuff-boxes, with a deep
bow. He looked much more kindly at a crave, proud Chickasaw hunter, who
strode by with inward grief and shame, wounded by the robbery of his people.
Puritans from New England; cavaliers from Virginia; Scotch-Irish from
Pennsylvania; mild-eyed trappers and bargemen from the French hamlets of
Kaskaskia and Cahokia; wood-choppers; scouts; surveyors; swaggering
adventurers; land-lawyers; colonial burgesses,--all these mingled and
jostled, plotted and bartered, in the shops, in the streets, under the
trees.
And everywhere soldiers and officers of the Revolution--come West with their
families to search for homes, or to take possession of the grants made them
by the Government. In the course of a short walk John Gray passed men who
had been wounded in the battle of Point Pleasant; men who had waded behind
Clark through the freezing marshes of the Illinois to the storming of
Vincennes; men who had charged through flame and smoke up the side of King's
Mountain against Ferguson's Carolina loyalists; men who with chilled ardour
had let themselves be led into the massacre of the Wabash by blundering St.
Clair; men who with wild thrilling pulses had rushed to victory behind mad
Antony Wayne.
And the women! Some--the terrible lioness-mothers of the Western jungles who
had been used like men to fight with rifle, knife, and axe--now sat silent
in the doorways of their rough cabins, wrinkled, scarred, fierce, silent,
scornful of all advancing luxury and refinement. Flitting gaily past them,
on their way to the dry goods stores--supplied by trains of pack-horses from
over the Alleghanies, or by pack-horse and boat down the Ohio--hurried the
wives of the officers, daintily choosing satins and ribands for a coming
ball. All this and more he noted as he passed lingeringly on. The deep
vibrations of history swept through him, arousing him as the marshalling
storm cloud, the rush of winds, and sunlight flickering into gloom kindle
the sense of the high, the mighty, the sublime.
As he was crossing the common, a number of young fellows stripped and girt
for racing--for speed greater than an Indian's saved many a life in those
days, and running was part of the regular training of the young--bounded up
to him like deer, giving a challenge: he too was very swift. But he named
another day, impatient of the many interruptions that had already delayed
him, and with long, rapid strides he had soon passed beyond the last fields
and ranges of the town. Then he slackened his pace. Before him, a living
wall, rose the edge of the wilderness. Noting the position of the sun and
searching for a point of least resistance, he plunged in.
Soon he had to make his way through a thicket of cane some twelve feet high;
then through a jungle of wild rye, buffalo grass and briars; beyond which he
struck a narrow deertrace and followed that in its westward winding through
thinner undergrowth under the dark trees.
He was unarmed. He did not even wear a knife. But the thought rose in his
mind of how rapidly the forest also was changing its character. The Indians
were gone. Two years had passed since they had for the last time flecked the
tender green with tender blood. And the deadly wild creatures--the native
people of earth and tree--they likewise had fled from the slaughter and
starvation of their kind. A little while back and a maddened buffalo or a
wounded elk might have trodden him down and gored him to death in that
thicket and no one have ever learned his fate--as happened to many a
solitary hunter. He could not feel sure that hiding in the leaves of the
branches against which his hat sometimes brushed there did not lie the
panther, the hungrier for the fawns that had been driven from the near
coverts. A swift lowering of its head, a tense noiseless spring, its fangs
buried in his neck,--with no knife the contest would not have gone well with
him. But of deadly big game he saw no sign that day. Once from a distant
brake he was surprised to hear the gobble of the wild turkey; and more
surprised still--and delighted--when the trail led to a twilight gloom and
coolness, and at the green margin of a little spring he saw a stag drinking.
It turned its terrified eyes upon him for an instant and then bounded away
like a gray shadow.
When he had gone about two miles, keeping his face steadily toward the sun,
he came upon evidences of a clearing: burnt and fallen timber; a field of
sprouting maize; another of young wheat; a peach orchard flushing all the
green around with its clouds of pink; beyond this a garden of vegetables;
and yet farther on, a log house.
He was hurrying on toward the house; but as he passed the garden he saw
standing in one corner, with a rake in her hand, a beautifully formed woman
in homespun, and near by a negro lad dropping garden-seed. His eyes lighted
up with pleasure; and changing his course at once, he approached and leaned
on the picket fence.
"How do you do, Mrs. Falconer?"
She turned with a cry, dropping her rake and pushing her sun-bonnet back
from her eyes.
"How unkind to frighten me!" she said, laughing as she recognized him; and
then she came over to the fence and gave him her hand--beautiful, but
hardened by work. A faint colour had spread over her face.
"I didn't mean to frighten you," he replied, smiling at her fondly. "But I
had rapped on the fence twice. I suppose you took me for a flicker. Or you
were too busy with your gardening to hear me. Or, may be you were too deep
in your own thoughts."
"How do you happen to be out of school so early?" she asked, avoiding the
subject.
"I was through with the lessons."
"You must have hurried."
"I did."
"And is that the way you treat people's children?"
"That's the way I treated them to-day."
"And then you came straight out here?"
"As straight and fast as my legs could carry me--with a good many
interruptions."
She searched his face eagerly for a moment. Then her eyes fell and she
turned back to the seed-planting. He stood leaning over the fence with his
hat in his hand, glancing impatiently at the house.
"How can you respect yourself, to stand there idling and see me hard at
work?" she said at length, without looking, at him.
"But you do the work so well--better than I could! Besides, you are obeying
a Divine law. I have no right to keep you from doing the will of God. I
observe you as one of the daughters of Eve--under the curse of toil."
"There's no Divine command that I should plant beans. But it is my command
that Amy shall. And this is Amy's work. Aren't you willing to work for her?"
she asked, slowly raising her eyes to his face.
"I am willing to work for her, but I am not willing to do her work!" he
replied." If the queen sits quietly in the parlour, eating bread and
honey"--and he nodded, protesting, toward the house.
"The queen's not in the parlour, eating bread and honey. She has gone to
town to stay with Kitty Poythress till after the ball."
She noted how his expression instantly changed, and how, unconscious of his
own action, he shifted his face back to the direction of the town.
"Her uncle was to take her in to-morrow," she went on, still watching him,
"but no! she and Kitty must see each other to-night; and her uncle must be
sure to bring her party finery in the gig to-morrow. I'm sorry you had your
walk for nothing; but you'll stay to supper?"
"Thank you; I must go back presently."
"Didn't you expect to stay when you came?"
He flushed and laughed in confusion.
"If you'll stay, I'll make you a johnny-cake on a new ash shingle with my
own hands."
"Thank you, I really must go back. But if there's a johnny-cake already
made, I could easily take it along."
"My johnny-cakes do not bear transportation."
"I wouldn't transport it far, you know."
"Do stay! Major Falconer will be so disappointed. He said at dinner there
were so many things he wanted to talk to you about. He has been looking for
you to come out. And, then, we have had no news for weeks. The major has
been too busy to go to town; and I!--I am as dry as one of the gourds of
Confucius."
His thoughts settled contentedly upon her once more and his face cleared.
"I can't stay to supper, but I'll keep the Indians away till the major
comes," he said. "What were you thinking of when I surprised you?"
"What was I thinking of?" She stopped working while she repeated his words
and folded her hands about the handle of the rake as if to rest awhile. A
band of her soft, shining hair, loosened by its own weight when she had bent
over to thin some seed carelessly scattered in the furrow, now fell across
her forehead. She pushed her bonnet back and stood gathering it a little
absently into its place with the tips of her fingers. Meanwhile he could see
that her eyes rested upon the edge of the wilderness. It seemed to him that
she must be thinking of that; and he noted with pain, as often before, the
contrast between her and her surroundings. From every direction the forest
appeared to be rushing in upon that perilous little reef of a clearing--that
unsheltered island of human life, newly displaying itself amid the ancient,
blood-flecked, horror-haunted sea of woods. And shipwrecked on this island,
tossed to it by one of the long tidal waves of history, there to remain in
exile from the manners, the refinement, the ease, the society to which she
had always been accustomed, this remarkable gentlewoman.
III
HE had learned a great deal about her past, and held it mirrored in his
memory. The general picture of it rose before his eyes now, as he leaned on
the fence this pleasant afternoon in May and watched her restoring to its
place, with delicate strokes of her finger-tips, the lock of her soft,
shining hair.How could any one so fine have thriven amid conditions so
exhausting? Those hard toiling fingers, now grasping the heavy hoe, once
used to tinkle over the spinet; the small, sensitive feet, now covered with
coarse shoe-packs tied with leather thongs, once shone in rainbow hues of
satin slippers and silken hose. A sunbonnet for the tiara of osprey plumes;
a dress spun and woven by her own hand out of her own flax, instead of the
stiff brocade; log hut for manor-house; one negro boy instead of troops of
servants: to have possessed all that, to have been brought down to all this,
and not to have been ruined by it, never to have lost distinction or been
coarsened by coarseness never to have parted with grace of manner or grace
of spirit, or been bent or broken or overclouded in character and
ideals,--it was all this that made her in his eyes a great woman, a great
lady.
He held her in such reverence that, as he caught the serious look in her
eyes at his impulsive question, he was sorry he had asked it: the last thing
he could ever have thought of doing would have been to intrude upon the
privacy of her reflections.
"What was I thinking of?"
There was a short silence and then she turned to him eagerly, brightly, with
an entire change of voice and expression--
"But the news from town--you haven't told me the news."
"Oh, there is any amount of news!" he cried, glad of a chance to retreat
from his intrusion. And he began lightly, recklessly:
"A bookbinder has opened a shop on Cross Street--a capital hand at the
business, by the name of Leischman--and he will bind books at the regular
market prices in exchange for linen rags, maple sugar, and goose-quills. I
advise you to keep an eye on your geese, if the major once takes a notion to
have his old Shakespeare and his other volumes, that had their bindings
knocked off in crossing the Alleghanies, elegantly rebound. You can tell him
also that after a squirrel-hunt in Bourbon County the farmers counted
scalps, and they numbered five thousand five hundred and eighty-nine; so
that he is not the only one who has trouble with his corn. And then you can
tell him that on the common the other day Nelson Tapp and Willis Tandy had a
fearful fight over a land-suit. Now it was Tandy and Tapp; now it was Tapp
and Tandy; but they went off at last and drowned themselves and the memory
of the suit in a bowl of sagamity.""And there is no news for me, I suppose?"
"Oh yes! I am happy to inform you that at McIllvain's you can now buy the
finest Dutch and English letter-paper, gilt, embossed, or marbled."
"That is not very important; I have no correspondents."
"Well, a saddlery has been opened by two fellows from London, England, and
you can now buy Amy a new side-saddle. She needs one."
"Nor is that! The major buys the saddles for the family."
"Well, then, as I came out on Alain Street, I passed some ladies who accused
me of being on my way here, and who impressed it upon me that I must tell
you of the last displays of women-wear: painted and velvet ribbons, I think
they said, and crepe scarfs, and chintzes and nankeens and moreens and
sarcenets, and--oh yes!-some muslinette jackets tamboured with gold and
silver. They said we were becoming civilized--that the town would soon be
as good as Williamsburg, or Annapolis, or Philadelphia for such things. You
see I am like my children: I remember what I don't understand."
"I understand what I must not remember! Don't tell me of those things," she
added. "They remind me of the past; they make me think of Virginia. I wear
homespun now, and am a Kentuckian.""Well, then, the Indians fired on the
Ohio packet-boat near Three Islands and killed--"
"Oh!" she said, with pain and terror, "don't tell me of that, either! It
reminds me of the present.""Well, in Holland two thousand cats have been put
into the corn-stores, to check the ravages of rats and mice," he said,
laughing.
"What is the news from France? Do be serious!"
"In New York some Frenchmen, seeing their flag insulted by Englishmen who
took it down from the liberty-cap, went upstairs to the room of an English
officer named Codd, seized his regimental coat and tore it to pieces."
"I'm glad of it! It was a very proper action!"
"But, madam, the man Codd was perfectly innocent!"
"No matter! His coat was guilty. They didn't tear him to pieces; they tore
his coat. Are there any new books at the stores?"
"A great many! I have spent part of the last three days in looking over
them. You can have new copies of your old favourites, Joseph Andrews, or
Roderick Random, or Humphrey Clinker. You can have Goldsmith and Young, and
Chesterfield and Addison. There is Don Quixote and Hudibras, Gulliver and
Hume, Paley and Butler, Hervey and Watts, Lavater and Trenck, Seneca and
Gregory, Nepos and even Aspasia Vindicated--to say nothing of Abelard and
He1oise and Thomas a Kempis. All the Voltaires have been sold, however, and
the Tom Paines went off at a rattling gait. By the way, while on the subject
of books, tell the major that we have raised five hundred dollars toward
buying books for the Transylvania Library, and that as soon as my school is
out I am to go East as a purchasing committee. What particularly interests
me is that I am going to Mount Vernon, to ask a subscription from President
Washington. Think of that! Think of my presenting myself there with my
tricoloured cockade --a Kentucky Jacobin!"
"The President may be so occupied with the plots of you Kentucky jacobins,"
she said, "that he will not feel much like supplying you with more
literature." Then she added, looking at him anxiously, " And so you are
going away?"
"I'm going, and I'm glad I'm going. I have never set eyes on a great man. It
makes my heart beat to think of it. I feel as a young Gaul might who was
going to Rome to ask Caesar for gold with which to overthrow him. Seriously,
it would be a dreadful thing for the country if a treaty should be ratified
with England. There is not a democratic society from Boston to Charleston
that will not feel enraged with the President. You may be sure that every
patriot in Kentucky will be outraged, and that the Governor will denounce it
to the House."
"There is news from France, then--serious news?""Much, much! The National
Convention has agreed to carry into full effect the treaty of commerce
between the two Republics, and the French and American flags have been
united and suspended in the hall. The Dutch have declared the sovereignty of
the French, and French and Dutch patriots have taken St. Martin's. The
English have declared war against the Dutch and granted letters of marque
and reprisals. There has been a complete change in the Spanish Ministry.
There has been a treaty made between France and the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
The French fleet is in the West Indies and has taken possession of
Guadeloupe. All French emigrants in Switzerland have been ordered to remove
ten leagues from the borders of France. A hundred and fifty thousand
Austrians are hurrying down toward the Rhine, to be reinforced by fifty
thousand more."
He had run over these items with the rapidity of one who has his eye on the
map of the world, noting, the slightest change in the situation of affairs
that could affect Kentucky; and she listened eagerly like one no less
interested.
"But the treaty! The treaty! The open navigation of the Mississippi!" she
cried impatiently.
"The last news is that the treaty will certainly be concluded and the open
navigation of the Mississippi assured to us forever. The major will load his
flatboats, drift down to New Orleans, sell those Spanish fops his tobacco
for its weight in gems, buy a mustang to ride home on, and if not robbed and
murdered by the land-pirates on the way, come back to you like an enormous
bumblebee from a clover-field, his thighs literally packed with gold."
"I am so glad, so glad, so glad!"
He drew from his pockets a roll.
"Here are papers for two months back. And now I've something else to tell
you. That is one of the things I came for"
As he said this, his manner, hitherto full of humour and vivacity, turned
grave, and his voice, sinking to a lower tone, became charged with
sweetness. It was the voice in which one refined and sincere soul confides
to another refined and sincere soul the secret of some new happiness that
has come to it.
But noticing the negro lad, who had paused in his work several paces off and
stood watching them, he said to her:
"May I have a drink?"
She turned to the negro:"Go to the spring-house and bring some water."The
lad moved away, smiling to himself and shaking his head.
"He has broken all my pitchers," she added. "To-day I had to send my last
roll of linen to town by Amy to buy more queen's-ware. The moss will grow on
the bucket before he gets back."
When the boy was out of hearing, she turned again to him:
"What is it? Tell me quickly."
"I have had news from Philadelphia. The case is at last decided in favour of
the heirs, and I come at once into possession of my share. It may be eight
or ten thousand dollars." His voice trembled a little despite himself.
She took his hands in hers with a warm, close pressure, and tears of joy
sprang to her eyes.
The whole of his bare, bleak life was known to her; its half-starved
beginning; its early merciless buffeting; the upheaval of vast circumstance
in the revolutionary history of the times by which he had again and again
been thrown back upon his own undefended strength; and stealthily following
him from place to place, always closing around him, always seeking to
strangle him, or to poison him in some vital spot, that most silent, subtle
serpent of life--Poverty. Knowing this, and knowing also the man he had
become, she would in secret sometimes liken him to one of those rare unions
of delicacy and hardihood which in the world of wild flowers Nature refuses
to bring forth except from the cranny of a cold rock. Its home is the
battle-field of black roaring tempests; the red lightnings play among its
roots ; all night seamless snow-drifts are woven around its heart; no bee
ever rises to it from the valley below where the green spring is kneeling;
no morning bird ever soars past it with observant song; but in due time,
with unswerving obedience to a law of beauty unfolding from within, it sets
forth its perfect leaves and strains its steadfast face toward the sun.
These paltry thousands! She realized that they would lift from him the
burden of debts that he had assumed, and give him, without further waiting,
the libertyof his powers and the opportunities of the world."God bless you!"
She said with trembling lips. "It makes me happier than it does you. No one
else in the whole world is as glad as I am."Silence fell upon them. Both
were thinking, but in very different ways--of the changes that would now
take place in his life.
"Do you know," he said at length, looking into her face with the quietest
smile, that if this lawsuit had gone against me it would have been the first
great defeat of my life? Sorely as I have struggled, I have yet to encounter
that common myth of weak men, an insurmountable barrier. The imperfection of
our lives-- what is it but the imperfection of our planning and doing?
Shattered ideals--what hand shatters them but one's own? I declare to you at
this moment, standing here in the clear light of my own past, that I firmly
believe I shall be what I will, that I shall have what I want, and that I
shall now go on rearing the structure of my life, to the last detail, just
as I have long planned it."She did not answer, but stood looking at him with
a new pity in her eyes. After all, was he so young, so untaught by the
world? Had a little prosperity already puffed him up?
"There will be this difference, of course," he added. "Hitherto I have had
to build slowly; henceforth there will be no delay, now that I am free to
lay hold upon the material. But, my dear friend, I cannot bear to think of
my life as a structure to be successfully reared without settling at once
how it is to be lighted from within. And, therefore, I have come to speak to
you about--the lamp."
As he said this a solemn beauty flashed out upon his face. As though the
outer curtain of his nature had been drawn up, she now gazed into the depths
and confidences.
Her head dropped quickly on her bosom; and she drew slightly back, as though
to escape pain or danger."You must know how long I have loved Amy," he
continued in a tone of calmness. "I have not spoken sooner, because the
circumstances of my life made it necessary for me to wait; and now I wish to
ask her to become my wife, and I am here to beg your consent first."
For some time she did not answer. The slip of an elm grew beside the picket
fence, and she stood passing her fingers over the topmost leaves, with her
head lowered so that he could not see her face. At length she said in a
voice he could hardly hear:
"I have feared for a long time that this would come; but I have never been
able to get ready for it, and I am not ready now."
Neither spoke for some time longer; only his expression changed, and he
looked over at her with a compassionate, amused gravity, as though he meant
to be very patient with her opposition. On her part, she was thinking--Is it
possible that the first use he will make of his new liberty is to forge the
chain of a new slavery? Is this some weak spot now to be fully revealed in
his character? Is this the drain in the bottom of the lake that will in the
end bring its high, clear level down to mud and stagnant shallows and a
swarm of stinging insects? At last she spoke, but with difficulty:"I have
known for a year that you were interested in Amy. You could not have been
here so much without our seeing that. But let me ask you one question: Have
you ever thought that I wished you to marry her?"
"I have always beheld in you an unmasked enemy," he replied, smiling.
"Then I can go on," she said. "But I feel as though never in my life have I
done a thing that is as near being familiar and unwomanly. Nevertheless, for
your sake--for hers--for ours--it is my plain, hard duty to ask you whether
you are sure--even if you should have her consent--that my niece is the
woman you ought to marry." And she lifted to him her clear, calm eyes,
prematurely old in the experience of life.
"I am sure," he answered with the readiness of one who has foreseen the
question.
The negro boy approached with a bucket of cold crystal water, and he drank a
big gourd full of it gratefully.
"You can go and kindle the fire in the kitchen," she said to the negro. "It
is nearly time to be getting supper. I will be in by and by."
"You have been with her so much!" she continued to Gray after another
interval of embarrassment. "And you know, or you ought to know, her
disposition, her tastes, her ways and views of life. Is she the companion
you need now? will always need?"
"I have been much with her," he replied, taking up her words with humorous
gravity. "But I have never studied her as I have studied law. I have never
cross-examined her for a witness, or prosecuted her as an attorney, or
pronounced sentence on her is a judge. I am her advocate--and I am ready to
defend her now--even to you!"
"John!--""I love her--that is all there is of it!"
"Suppose you wait a little longer."
"I have waited too long already from necessity." It was on his lips to add:
"I have gone too far with her; it is too late to retreat;" but he checked
himself.
"If I should feel, then, that I must withhold my consent?"
He grew serious, and after the silence of a few moments, he said with great
respect:"I should be sorry; but--" and then he forbore.
"If Major Falconer should withhold his?"
He shook his head, and set his lips, turning his face away through courtesy.
"It would make no difference! Nothing would make any difference!" and then
another silence followed.
"I suppose all this would be considered the proof that you loved her," she
began at length, despairingly, "but even love is not enough to begin with;
much less is it enough to live by."
"You don't appreciate her! You don't do her justice!" he cried rudely. "But
perhaps no woman can ever understand why a man loves any other woman!"
"I am not thinking of why you love my niece," she replied, with a curl of
pride in her nostril and a flash of anger in her eyes. "I am thinking of why
you will cease to love her, and why you will both be unhappy if you marry
her. It is not my duty to analyze your affections; it is my duty to take
care of her welfare.""My dear friend," he cried, his face aglow with
impatient enthusiasm --"my dear friend" and he suddenly lifted her hand to
his lips, "I have but one anxiety in the whole matter: will you cease to be
my friend if I act in opposition to your wishes?"
"Should I cease to be your friend because you had made a mistake? It is not
to me you are unkind," she answered, quickly withdrawing her hand. Spots of
the palest rose appeared on her cheeks, and she bent over and picked up the
rake, and began to work.
"I must be going," he said awkwardly; "it is getting late."
"Yes," she said; "it is getting late."
Still he lingered, swinging his hat in his hand, ill at case, with his face
set hard away.
"Is that all you have to say to me?" he asked at length, wheeling and
looking her steadily and fondly in the eyes.
"That is all," she replied, controlling the quiver in her voice; but then
letting herself go a little, she added with slow distinctness:
"You might remember this: some women in marrying demand all and give all:
with good men they are the happy; with base men they are the brokenhearted.
Some demand everything and give little: with weak men they are tyrants; with
strong men they are the divorced. Some demand little and give all: with
congenial souls they are already in heaven; with uncongenial they are soon
in their graves. Some give little and demand little: they are the heartless,
and they bring neither the joy of life nor the peace of death."
"And which of these is Amy?" he said, after a minute of reflection. "And
which of the men am I?"
"Don't ask her to marry you until you find out both," she answered.
She watched him as he strode away from her across the clearing, with a look
in her eyes that she knew nothing of--watched him, motionless, until his
tall, black figure passed from sight behind the green sunlit wall of the
wilderness. What undisciplined, unawakened strength there was in him! how
far such a stride as that would carry him on in life! It was like the tread
of one of his own forefathers in Cromwell's unconquer-able, hymn-singing
armies. She loved to think of him as holding his descent from a line so
pious and so grim: it served to account to her for the quality of stern,
spiritual soldiership that still seemed to be the mastering trait of his
nature. How long would it remain so, was the question that she had often
asked of herself. A fighter in the world he would always be--she felt sure
of that; nor was it necessary to look into his past to obtain this
assurance; one had but to look into his eyes. Moreover, she had little doubt
that with a temper so steadily bent on conflict, he would never suffer
defeat where his own utmost strength was all that was needed to conquer. But
as he grew older, and the world in part conquered him as it conquers so many
of us, would he go into his later battles as he had entered his earlier
ones--to the measure of a sacred chant? Beneath the sweat and wounds of all
his victories would he carry the white lustre of conscience, burning
untarnished in him to the end?
It was this religious purity of his nature and his life, resting upon him as
a mantle visible to all eyes but invisible to him, that had, as she
believed, attracted her to him so powerfully. On that uncouth border of
Western civilization, to which they had both been cast, he was a little
lonely in his way, she in hers; and this fact had drawn them somewhat
together. He was a scholar, she a reader; that too had formed a bond. He had
been much at their home as lover of her niece, and this intimacy had given
her a good chance to take his wearing measure as a man. But over and above
all other things, it was the effect of the unfallen in him, of the highest
keeping itself above assault, of his first youth never yet brushed away as a
bloom, that constituted to her his distinction among the men that she had
known. It served to place him in contrast with the colonial Virginia society
of her remembrance--a society in which even the minds of the clergy were not
like a lawn scentless with the dew on it, but like a lawn parched by the
afternoon sun and full of hot odours. It kept him aloof from the loose ways
of the young backwoodsmen and aristocrats of the town, with whom otherwise
he closely mingled. It gave her the right, she thought, to indulge a
friendship for him such as she had never felt for any other man; and in this
friendship it made it easier for her to overlook a great deal that was rude
in him, headstrong, overbearing.
When, this afternoon, he had asked her what she was thinking of when he
surprised her with his visit, she had not replied: she could not have avowed
even to herself that she was thinking of such things as these: that having,
for some years, drawn out a hard, dull life in that settlement of
pathfinders, trappers, woodchoppers, hunters, Indian fighters, surveyors;
having afterwards, with little interest, watched them, one by one, as the
earliest types of civilization followed,--the merchant, the lawyer, the
priest, the preacher of the Gospel, the soldiers and officers of the
Revolution,--at last, through all the wilderness, as it now fondly seemed to
her, she saw shining the white light of his long absent figure, bringing a
new melody to the woods, a new meaning to her life, and putting an end to
all her desire ever to return to the old society beyond the mountains.
His figure passed out of sight, and she turned and walked sorrowfully to the
cabin, from the low rugged chimney of which a pale blue smoke now rose into
the twilight air. She chid herself that she had confronted the declaration
of his purpose to marry her niece with so little spirit, such faulty tact.
She had long known that he would ask this; she had long gotten ready what
she would say; but in the struggle between their wills, she had been
unaccountably embarrassed, she had blundered, and he had left rather
strengthened than weakened in his determination.
But she must prevent the marriage; her mind was more resolute than ever as
to that.
Slowly she reached the doorstep of the cabin, a roughly hewn log, and
turning, stood there with her bonnet in her hand, her white figure outlined
before the doorway, slender and still.
The sun had set. Night was rushing on over the awful land. The wolf-dog, in
his kennel behind the house, rose, shook himself at his chain, and uttered a
long howl that reached away to the dark woods--the darker for the vast
pulsing yellow light that waved behind them in the west like a gorgeous soft
aerial fan. As the echoes died out from the peach orchard came the song of a
robin, calling for love and rest.
Then from another direction across the clearing another sound reached her:
the careless whistle of the major, returning from his day's work in the
field. When she heard that, her face took on the expression that a woman
sometimes comes to wear when she has accepted what life has brought her
although it has brought her nothing for which she cares; and her lips opened
with an unconscious sigh of weariness--the weariness that has been gathering
weariness for years and that runs on in weariness through the future.
Later, she was kneeling before the red logs of the fireplace with one hand
shielding her delicate face from the blistering heat; in the other holding
the shingle on which richly made and carefully shaped was the bread of
Indian maize that he liked. She did not rise until she had placed it where
it would be perfectly browned; otherwise he would have been disappointed and
the evening would have been spoiled.
IV
JOHN GRAY did not return to town by his straight course through the forest,
but followed the winding wagon-road at a slow, meditative gait. He was
always thoughtful after he had been with Mrs. Falconer; he was unusually
thoughtful now; and the gathering hush of night, the holy expectancy of
stars, a flock of white clouds lying at rest low on the green sky like sheep
in some far uplifted meadow, the freshness of the woods soon to be hung with
dew,--all these melted into his mood as notes from many instruments blend in
the ear.
But he was soon aroused in an unexpected way. When he reached the place
where the wagon-road passed out into the broader public road leading from
Lexington to Frankfort, he came near stumbling over a large, loose bundle,
tied in a blue and white neckerchief.
Plainly it had been lost and plainly it was his duty to discover if possible
to whom it belonged. He carried it to one side of the road and began to
examine its contents: a wide, white lace tucker, two fine cambric
handkerchiefs, two pairs of India cotton hose, two pairs of silk hose, two
thin muslin handkerchiefs, a pair of long kid gloves,--straw colour,--a pair
of white kid shoes, a pale-blue silk coat, a thin, white striped muslin
dress.The articles were not marked. Whose could they be? Not Amy's: Mrs.
Falconer had expressly said that the major was to bring her finery to town
in the gig the next day. They might have been dropped by some girl or by
some family servant, riding into town; he knew several young ladies, to any
one of whom they might belong. He would inquire in the morning; and
meantime, he would leave the bundle at the office of the printer, where lost
articles were commonly kept until they could be advertised in the paper, and
called for by their owners.
He replaced the things, and carefully retied the ends of the kerchief. It
was dark when he reached town, and he went straight to his room and locked
the bundle in his closet. Then he hurried to his tavern, where his supper
had to be especially cooked for him, it being past the early hour of the
pioneer evening meal. While he sat out under the tree at the door, waiting
and impatiently thinking that he would go to see Amy as soon as he could
despatch it, the tavern-keeper came out to say that some members of the
Democratic Society had been looking for him. Later on, these returned. A
meeting of the Society had been called for that night, to consider news
brought by the postrider the day previous and to prepare advices for the
Philadelphia Society against the postrider's return: as secretary, he was
wanted at the proceedings. He begged hard to be excused, but he was the
scholar, the scribe; no one would take his place.
When the meeting ended, the hour was past for seeing Amy. He went to his
room and read law with flickering concentration of mind till near midnight.
Then he snuffed out his candle, undressed, and stretched himself along the
edge of his bed.
It was hard and coarse. The room itself was the single one that formed the
ruder sort of pioneer cabin. The floor was the earth itself, covered here
and there with the skins of wild animals; the walls but logs, poorly
plastered. From a row of pegs driven into one of these hung his clothes--not
many. The antlers of a stag over the doorway held his rifle, his
hunting-belt, and his hat. A swinging shelf displayed a few books, being
eagerly added to as he could bitterly afford it--with a copy of Paley, lent
by the Reverend James Moore, the dreamy, saintlike, flute-playing Episcopal
parson of the town. In the middle of the room a round table of his own
vigorous carpentry stood on a panther skin; and on this lay some copy books
in which he had just set new copies for his children; a handful of
goosequills to be fashioned into pens for them; the proceedings of the
Democratic Society, freshly added to this evening; copies of the Kentucky
Gazette containing essays by the political leaders of the day on the
separation of Kentucky from the Union and the opening of the Mississippi to
its growing commerce--among them some of his own, stately and academic,
signed "Cato the Younger." Lying open on the table lay his Bible; after law,
he always read a little in that; and to-night he had reread one of his
favourite chapters of St.Paul: that wherein the great, calm, victorious
soldier of the spirit surveys the history of his trials, imprisonments,
beatings. In one corner was set a three-cornered cupboard containing his
underwear, his new cossack boots, and a few precious things that had been
his mother's: her teacup and saucer, her prayer-book. It was in this closet
that he had put the lost bundle.
He had hardly stretched himself along the edge of his bed before he began to
think of this.
Every complete man embraces some of the qualities of a woman, for Nature
does not mean that sex shall be more than a partial separation of one common
humanity; otherwise we should be too much divided to be companionable. And
it is these womanly qualities that not only endow a man with his insight
into the other sex, but that enable him to bestow a certain feminine
supervision upon his own affairs when no actual female has them in charge.
If he marries, this inner helpmeet behaves in unlike ways toward the newly
reigning usurper; sometimes giving up peaceably, at others remaining her
life-long critic--reluctant but irremovable. If many a wife did but realize
that she is perpetually observed not only by the eyes of a pardoning husband
but by the eyes of another woman hidden away in the depths of his being, she
would do many things differently and not do some things at all.
The invisible slip of a woman in Gray now began to question him regarding
the bundle. Would not those delicate, beautiful things be ruined, thus put
away in his closet? He got up, took the bundle out, laid it on his table,
untied the kerchief, lifted carefully off the white muslin dress and the
blue silk coat, and started with them toward two empty pegs on the wall. He
never closed the door of his cabin if the night was fine. It stood open now
and a light wind blew the soft fabrics against his body and limbs, so that
they seemed to fold themselves about him, to cling to him. He disengaged
them reluctantly--apologetically.
Then he lay down again. But now the dress on the wall fascinated him. The
moonlight bathed it, the wind swayed it. This was the first time that a
woman's garments had ever hung in his room. He welcomed the mere accident of
their presence as though it possessed a forerunning intelligence, as though
it were the annunciation of his approaching change of life. And so laughing
to himself, and under the spell of a growing fancy, he got up again and took
the little white shoes and set them on the table in the moonlight--on the
open Bible and the speech of St.Paul--and then went back, and lay looking at
them and dreaming--looking at them and dreaming.
His thoughts passed meantime like a shining flock of white doves to Amy,
hovering about her. They stole onward to the time when she would be his
wife; when lying thus, he would wake in the night and see her dress on the
wall and feel her head on his bosom; when her little shoes might stand on
his open Bible, if they chose, and the satin instep of her bare foot be
folded in the hard hollow of his.
He uttered a deep, voiceless, impassioned outcry that she might not die
young nor he die young; that the struggles and hardships of life, now
seeming to be ended, might never begirt him or her so closely again; that
they might grow peacefully old together.
To-morrow then, he would see her; no, not tomorrow; it was long past
midnight now.
He got down on his bare knees beside the bed with his face buried in his
hands and said his prayers.
And then lying outstretched with his head resting on his folded hands, the
moonlight streaming through the window and lighting up his dark-red curls
and falling on his face and neck and chest, the cool south wind blowing down
his warm limbs, his eyes opening and closing in religious purity on the
dress, and his mind opening and closing on the visions of his future, he
fell asleep.
V
WHEN he awoke late, he stretched his big arms drowsily out before his face
with a gesture like that of a swimmer parting the water: he was in truth
making his way out of a fathomless, moonlit sea of dreams to the shores of
reality. Broad daylight startled him with its sheer blinding revelation of
the material world, as the foot of a swimmer, long used to the yielding
pavements of the ocean, touches with surprise the first rock and sand.
He sprang up, bathed, dressed, and stepped out into the crystalline
freshness of the morning. He was glowing with his exercise, at peace with
himself and with all men, and so strong in the exuberance of his manhood
that he felt he could have leaped over into the east, shouldered the sun,
and run gaily, impatiently, with it up the sky. How could he wait to see Amy
until it went up its long slow way and then down again to its setting? A
powerful young lion may some time have appeared thus at daybreak on the edge
of a jungle and measured the stretches of sand to be crossed before he could
reach an oasis where memory told him was the lurking-place of love.
It was still early. The first smoke curled upward from the chimneys of the
town; the melodious tinkle of bells reached his ear as the cows passed from
the milking to the outlying ranges deep in their wild verdure. Even as he
stood surveying the scene, along the path which ran close to his cabin came
a bare-headed, nutbrown pioneer girl, whose close-fitting dress of white
homespun revealed the rounded outlines of her figure. She had gathered up
the skirt which was short, to keep it from the tops of the wet weeds. Her
bare, beautiful feet were pink with the cold dew. Forgotten, her slow fat
cows had passed on far ahead; for at her side, wooing her with drooping
lashes while the earth was still flushed with the morn, strolled a young
Indian fighter, swarthy, lean tall, wild. His long thigh boots of thin
deer-hide, open at the hips, were ornamented with a scarlet fringe and
rattled musically with the hoofs of fawns and the spurs of the wild turkey;
his gray racoonskin cap was adorned with the wings of the hawk and the
scarlet tanager.
The magnificent young, warrior lifted his cap to the school-master with a
quiet laugh; and the girl smiled at him and shook a warning finger to remind
him he was not to betray them. He smiled back with a deprecating gesture to
signify that he could be trusted. He would have liked it better if he could
have said more plainly that he too had the same occupation now; and as he
gazed after them, lingering along the path side by side, the long-stifled
cravings of his heart rose to his unworldly, passionate eyes: he all but
wished that Amy also milked the cows at early morning and drove them out to
pasture.
When he went to his breakfast at the tavern, one of the young Williamsburg
aristocrats was already there, pretending to eat; and hovering about the
table, brisk to appease his demands, the daughter of the taverner: she as
ruddy as a hollyhock and gaily flaunting her head from side to side with the
pleasure of denying him everything but his food, yet meaning to kiss him
when twilight came--once, and then to run.
Truly, it seemed that this day was to be given up to much pairing: as be
thought it rightly should be and that without delay. When he took his seat
in the school-room and looked out upon the children, they had never seemed
so small, so pitiful. It struck him that Nature is cruel not to fit us for
love and marriage as soon as we are born--cruel to make us wait twenty or
thirty years before she lets us really begin to live. He looked with eyes
more full of pity than usual at blear-eyed, delicate little Jennie, as to
whom he could never tell whether it was the multiplication-table that made
her deathly sick, or sickness that kept her from multiplying. His eye lit
upon a wee, chubby-cheeked urchin on the end of a high, hard bench, and he
fell to counting how many ages must pass before that unsuspicious grub would
grow his palpitating wings of flame. He felt like making them a little
speech and telling them how happy he was, and how happy they would all be
when they got old enough to deserve it.
And as for the lessons that day, what difference could it make whether ideas
sprouted or did not sprout in those useless brains? He answered all the hard
questions himself; and, indeed, so sunny and exhilarating was the weather of
his discipline that little Jennie, seeing how the rays fell and the wind
lay, gave up the multiplication-table altogether and fell to drawing
tomahawks.
A remarkable mixture of human life there was in Gray's school. There were
the native little Kentuckians, born in the wilderness--the first wild, hardy
generation of the new people; and there were little folks from Virginia,
from Tennessee, from North Carolina, and from Pennsylvania and other
sources, huddled together, some uncouth, some gentle-born, and all starting
out to be formed into the men and women of Kentucky.
They had their strange, sad, heroic games and pastimes under his guidance.
Two little girls would be driving the cows home about dusk; three little
boys would play Indian and capture them and carry them off; the husbands of
the little girls would form a party to the rescue; the prisoners would drop
pieces of their dresses along the way; and then at a certain point of the
woods--it being the dead of night now and the little girls being bound to a
tree, and the Indians having fallen asleep beside their smouldering
campfires--the rescuers would rush in and there would be whoops and shrieks
and the taking of scalps and a happy return. Or some settlers would be shut
up in their fort. The only water to be had was from a spring outside the
walls, and around this the enemy skulked in the corn and grass. But their
husbands and sweethearts must not perish of thirst. So, with a prayer, a
tear, a final embrace, the little women marched out through the gates to the
spring in the very teeth of death and brought back water in their wooden
dinner-buckets.
Or, when the boys would become men with contests of running and pitching
quoits and wrestling, the girls would play wives and have a quilting, in a
house of green alder-bushes, or be capped and wrinkled grandmothers sitting
beside imaginary spinning-wheels and smoking imaginary pipes.
Sometimes it was not Indian warfare but civil strife. One morning as many
as three Daniel Boones appeared on the playground at the same moment; and at
once there was a dreadful fight to ascertain which was the genuine Daniel.
This being decided, the spurious Daniels submitted to be: the one, Simon
Kenton; the other, General George Rogers Clark.
And there was another game of history--more practical in its bearings--which
he had not taught them, but which they had taught him; they had played it
with him that very morning.
When he had stepped across the open to the school, he found that the older
boys, having formed themselves into a garrison for the defence of the
smaller boys and girls, had barricaded the door and barred and manned the
wooden windows: the schoolhouse had suddenly become a frontier station; they
were the pioneers; he was the invading Indians--let him attack them if he
dared! He did dare and that at once; for he knew that otherwise there would
be no school that day or as long as the white race on the inside remained
unconquered. So had ensued a rough-and-tumble scrimmage for fifteen minutes,
during which the babies within wailed aloud with real terror of the battle,
and he received some real knocks and whacks and punches through the
loop-holes of the stockade: the end being arrived at when the schoolhouse
door, by a terrible wrench from the outside, was torn entirely off its
wooden hinges; and the victory being attributed--as an Indian victory always
was in those days--to the overwhelming numbers of the enemy.
With such an opening of the day, the academic influence over childhood may
soon be restored to forcible supremacy but will awaken little zest. Gray was
glad therefore on all accounts that this happened to be the day on which he
had promised to tell them of the battle of the Blue Licks. Thirteen years
before and forty miles away that most dreadful of all massacres had taken
place; and in the town were many mothers who still wept for their sons, many
widows who still dreamed of their young husbands, fallen that beautiful,
fatal August day beneath the oaks and the cedars, or floating down the
red-dyed river. All the morning he could see the expectation of this story
in their faces: a pair of distant, clearest eyes would be furtively lifted
to his, then quickly dropped; or another pair more steadily directed at him
through the backwoods loop-hole of two stockade fingers.
At noon, then, having dismissed the smaller ones for their big recess, he
was standing amid the eager upturned faces of the others--bareheaded under
the brilliant sky of May. He had chosen the bank of the Town Fork, where it
crossed the common, as a place in which he should be freest from
interruption and best able to make his description of the battle-field well
understood. This stream flows unseen beneath the streets of the city now
with scarce rent enough to wash out its grimy channel; but then it flashed
broad and clear through the long valley of scattered cabins and orchards and
cornfields and patches of cane.
It was a hazardous experiment with the rough jewels of those little minds.
They were still rather like diamonds rolling about on the bottom of
barbarian rivers than steadily set and mounted for the uses of civilization.
He fixed his eyes upon a lad in his fifteenth year, the commandant of the
fort of the morning, who now stood at the water edge, watching him with
breathless attention. A brave, sunny face;--a big shaggy head holding a
mind in it as clear as a sphere of rock-crystal; already heated with vast
ambition--a leader in the school, afterwards to be a leader in the
nation--Richard Johnson.
"Listen!" he cried; and when he spoke in, that tone he reduced everything
turbulent to peace. "I have brought you here to tell you of the battle of
the Blue Licks not because it was the last time, as you know, that an Indian
army ever invaded Kentucky; not because a hundred years from now or a
thousand years from now other school-boys and other teachers will be talking
of it still; not because the Kentuckians will some day assemble on the field
and set up a monument to their forefathers, your fathers and brothers; but
because there is a lesson in it for you to learn now while you are children.
A few years more and some of you boys will be old enough to fight for
Kentucky or for your country. Some of you will be common soldiers who will
have to obey the orders of your generals; some of you may be generals with
soldiers under you at the mercy of your commands. It may be worth your own
lives, it may save the lives of your soldiers, to heed this lesson now and
to remember it then. And all of you--whether you go into battles of that
sort or not--will have others; for the world has many kinds of fighting to
be done in it and each of you will have to do his share. And whatever that
share may be, you will need the same character, the same virtues, to
encounter it victorious; for all battles are won in the same way, all
conquerors are alike. This lesson, then, will help each of you to win, none
of you to lose.
"Do you know what it was that brought about the awful massacre of the Blue
Licks? It was the folly of one officer.
"Let the creek here be the Licking River. The Kentuckians, some on foot and
some on horse, but all tired and disordered and hurrying along, had just
reached the bank. Over on the other side--some distance back--the Indians
were hiding in the woods and waiting. No one knew exactly where they were;
every one knew they counted from seven hundred to a thousand. The
Kentuckians were a hundred and eighty-two. There was Boone with the famous
Boonsborough men, the very name of whom was a terror; there was Trigg with
men just as good from Harrodsburg; there was Todd, as good as either, with
the men from Lexington. More than a fourth of the whole were commissioned
officers, and more fearless men never faced an enemy. There was but one
among them whose courage had ever been doubted, and do you know what that
man did?
"After the Kentuckians had crossed the river to attack, been overpowered,
forced back to the river again, and were being shot down or cut down in the
water like helpless cattle, that man--his name was Benjamin Netherland--did
this: He was finely mounted. He had quickly recrossed the river and had
before him the open buffalo trace leading back home. About twenty other men
had crossed as quickly as he and were urging their horses toward this road.
But Netherland, having reached the opposite bank, wheeled his horse's head
toward the front of the battle, shouted and rallied the others, and sitting
there in full view and easy reach of the Indian army across the narrow
river, poured his volley into the foremost of the pursuers, who were cutting
down the Kentuckians in the river. He covered their retreat. He saved
their lives.
"There was another soldier among them named Aaron Reynolds. He had had a
quarrel some days before with Colonel Patterson and there was bad blood
between them. During the retreat, he was galloping toward the ford. The
Indians were close behind. But as he ran, he came upon Colonel Patterson,
who had been wounded and, now exhausted, had fallen behind his comrades.
Reynolds sprang from his horse, helped the officer to mount, saw him escape,
and took his poor chance on foot. For this he fell into the hands of the
Indians.
"That is the kind of men of whom that little army of a hundred and
eighty-two was made up--the oak forest of Kentucky.
"And yet, when they had reached the river in this pursuit and some twenty of
the officers had come out before the ranks to hold a council of war and the
wisest and the oldest were urging caution or delay, one of
them--McGary--suddenly waved his hat in the air, spurred his horse into the
river, and shouted:
"'Let all who are not cowards follow me!'
"They all followed; and then followed also the shame of defeat, the awful
massacre, the sorrow that lasts among us still, and the loss to Kentucky of
many a gallant young life that had helped to shape her destiny in the
nation.
"Some day perhaps some historian will write it down that the Kentuckians
followed McGary because no man among them could endure such a taunt. Do not
believe him. No man among them even thought of the taunt: it had no meaning.
They followed him because they were too loyal to desert him and those who
went with him in his folly. Your fathers always stood together and fought
together as one man, or Kentucky would never have been conquered; and in no
battle of all the many that they ever fought did they ever leave a comrade
to perish because he had made a mistake or was in the wrong.
"This, then, is your lesson from the battle of Blue Licks: Never go into a
battle merely to show that you are not a coward: that of itself shows what a
coward you are.
"Do not misunderstand me! whether you be men or women, you will never do
anything in the world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the
mind--next to honor. It is your king. But the king must always have a good
cause. Many a good king has perished in a bad one; and this noblest virtue
of courage has perhaps ruined more of us than any other that we possess. You
know what character the old kings used always to have at their courts. I
have told you a great deal about him. It was the Fool. Do you know what
personage it is that Courage, the King, is so apt to have in the Court of
the Mind? It is the Fool also. Lay these words away; you will understand
them better when you are older and you will need to understand them very
well. Then also you will know what I mean when I say to you this morning
that the battle of the Blue Licks was the work of the Fool, jesting with the
King."
He had gone to the field himself one Saturday not long before, walking
thoughtfully over it. He had had with him two of the Lexington militia who,
in the battle, had been near poor Todd, their colonel, while fighting like a
lion to the last and bleeding from many wounds. The recollection of it all
was very clear now, very poignant: the bright winding river, there
broadening at its ford; the wild and lonely aspect of the country round
about. On the farther bank the long lofty ridge of rock, trodden and licked
bare of vegetation for ages by the countless passing buffalo; blackened by
rain and sun; only the more desolate for a few dwarfish cedars and other
timber scant and dreary to the eye. Encircling this hill in somewhat the
shape of a horseshoe, a deep ravine heavily wooded and rank with grass and
underbrush. The Kentuckians, disorderly foot and horse, rushing in
foolhardiness to the top of this uncovered expanse of rock; the Indians,
twice, thrice, their number, engirdling its base, ringing them round with
hidden death. The whole tragedy repossessed his imagination and his
emotions. His face had grown pale, his voice took the measure and cadence of
an old-time minstrel's chant, his nervous fingers should have been able to
reach out and strike the chords of a harp.With uplifted finger he was going
on to impress them with another lesson: that in the battles which would be
sure to await them, they must be warned by this error of their fathers never
to be over-hasty or over-confident, never to go forward without knowing the
nature of the ground they were to tread, or throw themselves into a struggle
without measuring the force of the enemy. He was doing this when a child
came skipping joyously across the common, and pushing her way up to him
through the circle of his listeners, handed him a note. He read it, and in
an instant the great battle, hills, river, horse, rider, shrieks, groans,
all vanished from his mind as silently as a puff of white smoke from a
distant cannon.
For a while he stood with his eyes fixed upon the paper, so absorbed as not
to note the surprise that had fallen upon the children. At length merely
saying, "I shall have to tell you the rest some other day," he walked
rapidly across the common in the direction from which the little messenger
had come.
A few minutes later he stood at the door of Father Poythress, the Methodist
minister, asking for Amy. But she and Kitty had ridden away and would not
return till night. Leaving word that he would come to see her in the
evening, he turned away.
The children were scattered: there could be no more of the battle that day.
But it was half an hour yet before his duties would recommence at the
school. As he walked slowly along debating with himself how he should employ
the time, a thought struck him; he hastened to the office of one of many
agents for the locating and selling of Kentucky lands, and spent the
interval in determining the titles to several tracts near town--an intricate
matter in those times. But he found one farm, the part of an older military
grant of the French and Indian wars, to which the title was unmistakably
direct.
As soon as his school was out, he went to look at this property again, now
that he was thinking of buying it. He knew it very well already, his walks
having often brought him into its deep majestic woods; and he penetrated at
once to an open knoll sloping toward the west and threw himself down on the
deep green turf with the freedom of ownership.
VI
YES, this property would suit him; it would suit Amy. It was near town; it
was not far from Major Falconer's. He could build his house on the hill-top
where he was lying. At the foot of it, out of its limestone caverns, swelled
a bountiful spring. As he listened he could hear the water of the branch
that ran winding away from it toward the Elkhorn. That would be a pleasant
sound when he sat with her in their doorway of summer evenings. On that
southern slope he would plant his peach orchard, and he would have a
vineyard. On this side Amy could have her garden, have her flowers. Sloping
down from the front of the house to the branch would be their lawn, after he
had cleared away everything but a few of the noblest old trees: under one of
them, covered with a vine that fell in long green cascades from its summit
to the ground, he would arrange a wild-grape swing for her, to make good the
loss of the one she now had a" Major Falconer's.
Thus, out of one detail after another, he constructed the whole vision of
the future, with the swiftness of desire, the unerring thoughtfulness of
love; and, having transformed the wilderness into his home, he feasted on
his banquet of ideas, his rich red wine of hopes and plans.
One of the subtlest, most saddening effects of the entire absence of
possessions is the inevitable shrinkage of nature that must be undergone by
those who have nothing to own. When a man, by some misfortune, has suddenly
suffered the loss of his hands, much of the bewilderment and consternation
that quickly follow have their origin in the thought that he never again
shall be able to grasp. To his astonishment, he finds that no small part of
his range of mental activity and sense of power was involved in that
exercise alone. He has not lost merely his hands; much of his inner being
has been stricken into disuse.
But the hand itself is only the rudest type of the universal necessity that
pervades us to take hold. The body is furnished with two; the mind, the
heart, the spirit--who shall number the invisible, the countless hands of
these? All growth, all strength, all uplift, all power to rise in the world
and to remain arisen, comes from the myriad hold we have taken upon higher
surrounding realities.
Some time, wandering in a thinned wood, you may have happened upon an old
vine, the seed of which had long ago been dropped and had sprouted in an
open spot where there was no timber. Every May, in response to Nature's
joyful bidding that it yet shall rise, the vine has loosed the thousand
tendrils of its hope, those long, green, delicate fingers searching the
empty air. Every December you may see these turned stiff and brown, and
wound about themselves like spirals or knotted like the claw of a frozen
bird. Year after year the vine has grown only at the head, remaining
empty-handed; and the head itself, not being lifted always higher by
anything the hands have seized, has but moved hither and thither, back and
forth, like the head of a wounded snake in a path. Thus every summer you may
see the vine, fallen back and coiled upon itself, and piled up before you
like a low green mound, its own tomb; in winter a black heap, its own ruins.
So, it often is with the poorest, who live on at the head, remaining
empty-handed; fallen in and coiled back upon themselves, their own
inescapable tombs, their own unavertible ruins.
The prospect of having what to him was wealth had instantly bestowed upon
John Gray the liberation of his strength. It had untied the hands of his
idle powers; and the first thing he had reached fiercely out to grasp was
Amy--his share in the possession of women; the second thing was land--his
share in the possession of the earth. With these at the start, the one
unshakable under his foot, the other inseparable from his side, he had no
doubt that he should rise in the world and lay hold by steady degrees upon
all that he should care to have. Naturally now these two blent far on and
inseparably in the thoughts of one whose temperament doomed him always to be
planning and striving for the future.
The last rays of the sun touched the summit of the knoll where he was lying.
Its setting was with great majesty and repose, depth after depth of cloud
opening inward as toward the presence of the infinite peace. The boughs of
the trees overhead were in blossom; there were blue and white wild-flowers
at his feet. As he looked about him, he said to himself in his solemn way
that the long hard winter of his youth had ended; the springtime of his
manhood was turning green like the woods.
With this night came his betrothal. For years he had looked forward to that
as the highest white mountain peak of his life. As he drew near it now, his
thoughts made a pathway for his feet, covering it as with a fresh fall of
snow. Complete tenderness overcame him as he beheld Amy in this new sacred
relation; a look of religious reverence for her filled his eyes. He asked
himself what he had ever done to deserve all this.Perhaps it is the
instinctive trait of most of us to seek an explanation for any great
happiness as we are always prone to discuss the causes of our adversity.
Accordingly, and in accord with our differing points of view of the
universe, we declare of our joy that it is the gift of God to us despite our
shortcomings and our transgressions; or that it is our blind share of things
tossed out impersonally to us by the blind operation of the chances of life;
or that it is the clearest strictest logic of our own being and doing--the
natural vintage of our own grapes.
Of all these, the one that most deeply touches the heart is the faith, that
a God above who alone knows and judges aright, still loves and has sent a
blessing. To such a believer the heavens seem to have opened above his head,
the Divine to have descended and returned; and left alone in the possession
of his joy, he lifts his softened eyes to the Light, the Life, the Love,
that has always guided him, always filled him, never forgotten him.
This stark audacity of faith was the schoolmaster's. It belonged to him
through the Covenanter blood of his English forefathers and through his
Scotch mother; but it had surrounded him also in the burning spiritual
heroism of the time, when men wandered through the Western wilderness, girt
as with camel's hair and fed as on locusts, but carrying from cabin to
cabin, from post to post, through darkness and snow and storm the lonely
banner of the Christ and preaching the gospel of everlasting peace to those
who had never known any peace on earth. So that all his thoughts were linked
with the eternal; he had threaded the labyrinth of life, evermore awestruck
with its immensities and its mysteries; in his ear, he could plainly hear
immortality sounding like a muffled bell across a sea, now near, now farther
away, according as he was in danger or in safety. Therefore, his sudden
prosperity--Amy--marriage--happiness--all these meant to him that Providence
was blessing him.
In the depth of the wood it had grown dark. With all his thoughts of her
sounding like the low notes of a cathedral organ, he rose and walked slowly
back to town. He did not care for his supper; he did not wish to speak with
any other person; the rude, coarse banter of the taverns and the streets
would in some way throw a stain on her. Luckily he reached his room
unaccosted; and then with care but without vanity having dressed himself in
his best, he took his way to the house of Father Poythress.
VII
HE was kept waiting for some time. More than once he heard in the next room
the sounds of smothered laughter and two voices, pitched in a confidential
tone: the one with persistent appeal, the other with persistent refusal. At
last there reached him the laughter of a merry agreement, and Amy entered
the room, holding Kitty Poythress by the hand.
She had been looking all day for her lost bundle. Now she was tired; worried
over the loss of her things which had been bought by her aunt at great cost
and self-sacrifice; and disappointed that she should not be able to go to
the ball on Thursday evening. It was to be the most brilliant assemblage of
the aristocratic families of the town that had ever been known in the
wilderness and the first endeavour to transplant beyond the mountains the
old social elegance of Williamsburg, Annapolis, and Richmond. Not to be seen
in the dress that Mrs. Falconer, dreaming of her own past, had deftly
made--not to have her beauty reign absolute in that scene of lights and
dance and music--it was the long, slow crucifixion of all the impulses of
her gaiety and youth.
She did not wish to see any one to-night, least of all John Gray with whom
she had had an engagement to go. No doubt he had come to ask why she had
broken it in the note which she had sent him that morning. She had not
given him any reason in the note; she did not intend to give him the reason
now. He would merely look at her in his grave, reproachful, exasperating way
and ask what was the difference: could she not wear some other dress? or
what great difference did it make whether she went at all? He was always
ready to take this manner of patient forbearance toward her, as though she
were one of his school children. To-night she was in no mood to have her
troubles treated as trifles or herself soothed like an infant that was
crying to be rocked.
She walked slowly into the room, dragging Kitty behind her. She let him
press the tips of her unbending fingers, pouted, smiled faintly, dropped
upon a divan by Kitty's side, strengthened her hold on Kitty's hand, and
fixed her eyes on Kitty's hair.
"Aren't you tired?" she said, giving it an absorbed caressing stroke, with a
low laugh. "I am."
"I am going to look again to-morrow, Kitty," she continued, brightening up
with a decisive air, "and the next day and the next." She kept her face
turned aside from John and did not include him in the conversation. Women
who imagine themselves far finer ladies than this child was treat a man in
this way--rarely--very rarely--say, once in the same man's lifetime.
"We are both so tired," she drowsily remarked at length, turning to John
after some further parley which he did not understand and tapping her mouth
prettily with the palm of her hand to fight away a yawn. "You know we've
been riding all day. And William Penn is at death's door with hunger. Poor
William Penn! I'm afraid he'll suffer to-night at the tavern stable. They
never take care of him and feed him as I do at home. He is so unhappy when
be is hungry; and when he is unhappy, I am. And he has to be rubbed down so
beautifully, or he doesn't shine."
The tallow candles, which had been lighted when he came, needed snuffing by
this time. The light was so dim that she could not see his face--blanched
with bewilderment and pain and anger. What she did see as she looked across
the room at him was his large black figure in an absent-minded awkward
posture and his big head held very straight and high as though it were
momentarily getting higher. He had remained simply silent. His silence
irritated her; and she knew she was treating him badly and that irritated
her with him all the more. She sent one of her light arrows at him barbed
with further mischief.
"I wish, as you go back, you would stop at the stable and see whether they
have mistreated him in any way. He takes things so hard when they don't go
to suit him," and she turned to Kitty and laughed significantly.
Then she heard him clear his throat, and in a voice shaking with passion, he
said:
"Give your orders to a servant."
A moment of awkward silence followed. She did not recognize that voice as
his or such rude, unreasonable words.
"I suppose you want to know why I broke my engagement with you," she said,
turning toward him aggrievedly and as though the subject could no longer be
waived. "But I don't think you ought to ask for the reason. You ought to
accept it without knowing it."
"I do accept it. I had never meant to ask."
He spoke as though the whole affair were not worth recalling. She could not
agree with him in this, and furthermore his manner administered a rebuke.
"Oh, don't be too indifferent," she said sarcastically, looking to Kitty for
approval. If you cared to go to the party with me, you are supposed to be
disappointed."
"I am disappointed," he replied briefly, but still with the tone of wishing
to be done with the subject. Amy rose and snuffed the candles.
"And you really don't care to know why I broke my engagement?" she
persisted, returning to her seat and seeing that she worried him.
"Not unless you should wish to tell me."
"But you should wish to know, whether I tell you or not. Suppose it were not
a good reason?"
"I hadn't supposed you'd give me a poor one."
"At least, it's serious, Kitty."
"I had never doubted it."
"It might be amusing to you."
"It could hardly be both."
"Yes; it is both. It is serious and it is amusing."
He made no reply but by an impatient gesture.
"And you really don't wish to know?"He sat silent and still.
"Then, I'll tell you: I lost the only reason I had for going," and she and
Kitty exchanged a good deal of laughter of an innocent kind.
The mood and the motive with which he had sought her made him feel that he
was being unendurably trifled with and he rose. But at the same moment Kitty
effected an escape and he and Amy were left alone.
She looked quickly at the door through which Kitty had vanished, dropped her
arms at her sides and uttered a little sigh of inexpressible relief.
"Sit down," she said, repeating her grimace at absent Kitty.
"You are not going! I want to talk to you. Isn't Kitty dreadful?"
Her voice and manner had changed. There was no one now before whom she could
act--no one to whom she could show that she could slight him, play with him.
Furthermore, she had gotten some relief from the tension of her ill humour
by what she had already said; and now she really wanted to see him. The ill
humour had not been very deep; nothing in her was very deep. And she was
perfectly sincere again--for the moment. What does one expect?
"Don't look so solemn," she said with mock ruefulness. "You make me feel as
though you had come to baptize me, as though you had to wash away my sins.
Come here!" and she laid her hand invitingly on the chair that Kitty had
vacated at her side.
He stood bolt upright in the middle of the room, looking down at her in
silence. Then he walked slowly over and took the seat. She folded her hands
over the back of her own chair, laid her cheek softly down on them and
looked up with a smile--subdued, submissive, fond, absolutely his.
"Don't be cross!" she pleaded, with a low laugh full of maddening music to
him.
He could not speak to her or look at her for anger and shame and
disappointment; so she withdrew one hand from under her cheek and folded it
softly over the back of his--his was pressed hard down on the cap of his
knee--and took hold of his big finders one by one, caressing them.
"Don't be cross!" she pleaded. "Be good to me! I'm tired and unhappy!"
Still he would not speak, or look at her; so she put her hand back under her
cheek again, and with a patient little sigh closed her eyes as though she
had done all she could. The next moment she leaned over and let her forehead
rest on the back of his hand."You are so cross!" she said. "I don't like
you!"
"Amy!" he cried, turning fiercely on her and catching her hand cruelly in
his, "before I say anything else to you, you've got to promise me--"And then
he broke down and then went on again foolishly--,you've got to promise me
one thing now. You sha'n't treat me in one way when we are by ourselves and
go in another way when other people are present. If you love me, as you
always make me believe you do when we are alone, you must make the whole
world believe it!"
"What right would I have to make the whole world believe I loved you?" she
asked, looking at him quizzically.
"I'll give you the right!"
The rattle of china at the cupboard in the next room was heard. Amy started
up and skipped across the room to the candle on the mantelpiece.
"If Kitty does come back in here--" she said, in a disappointed undertone;
and with the snuffers between her thumb and forefinger, she snipped them
bitingly several times at the door.
The door was opened slightly, a plate was thrust through, and a laughing
voice called apologetically:
"Amy!"
"Come in here! Come in!" commanded Amy, delightedly; and as Kitty
reluctantly entered, she fixed upon her a telling look. "Upon my word," she
said, "what do you mean by treating me this way?" and catching Kitty's eye,
she made a grimace at John.
Kitty offered the candy to John with the assurance that it was made out of
that year's maple sugar in their own camp.
"He never eats sweet things and he doesn't care for trifles: bring it here!"
And the girls seated themselves busily side by side on the opposite side of
the room. Amy bent over the plate and chose the largest, beautiful white
plait."Now there'll be a long silence," she said, holding it up between her
dainty fingers and settling herself back in her chair. "But, Kitty, you
talk. And if you do leave your company again!--" She threatened Kitty
charmingly.
He was in his room again, thinking it all over. She had not known why he had
come: how could she know? To her it meant simply an ordinary call at an
unfortunate hour; for she was tired--he could see that--and worried--he
could see that also. And he!--had he ever been so solemn, so implacably in
earnest, so impatient of the playfulness which at another time he would have
found merely amusing? Why was he all at once growing so petty with her and
exacting? Little by little he went over the circumstances judicially, in an
effort to restore her to lovable supremacy over his imagination.
His imagination--for his heart was not in it. He wrought out her entire
acquittal, but it did no good. Who at any time sounds the depths of the mind
which, unlike the sea, can regain calm on the surface and remain troubled by
a tempest at the bottom? What is the name of that imperial faculty dwelling
within it which can annul the decisions of the other associated powers?
After he had taken the entire blame upon himself, his rage and
disappointment were greater than ever.
Was it nothing for her to break her engagement with him and then to follow
it up with treatment like that? Was it nothing to force Kitty into the
parlour despite the silent understanding reached by all three long ago that
whenever he called at the Poythress home, he would see her alone? Was it
nothing to take advantage of his faithfulness to her, and treat him as
though he had no spirit? Was it nothing to be shallow and silly herself?
Was it nothing--and ah! here was the trouble at the bottom of it all! Here
was the strain of conviction pressing sorely, steadily in upon him through
the tumult of his thoughts--was it nothing for her to be insincere? Did she
even know what sincerity was? Would he marry an insincere woman? Insincerity
was a growth not only ineradicable, but sure to spread over the nature as
one grew older. He knew young people over whose minds it had begun to creep
like the mere slip of a plant up a wall; old ones over whose minds it lay
like a poisonous creeper hiding a rotting ruin. To be married and sit
helplessly by and see this growth slowly sprouting outward from within,
enveloping the woman he loved, concealing her, dragging her down--an
unarrestable disease--was that to be his fate?
Was it already taking palpable possession of Amy? Could he hide his eyes any
longer to the fact that he had felt its presence in her all the time--in its
barely discoverable stages? What else could explain her conduct in allowing
him, whenever they were alone, to think that she was fond of him, and then
scattering this belief to the winds whenever others were present? Was this
what Mrs. Falconer had meant? He could never feel any doubt of Mrs.
Falconer. Merely to think of her now had the effect of instantly clearing
the whole atmosphere for his baffled, bewildered mind.So the day ended. He
had been beaten, routed, and by forces how insignificant! Bitterly he
recalled his lesson to the children that morning. What a McGary he had
been--reckless, overconfident, knowing neither theplan nor the resources of
the enemy! He recalled his boast to Mrs. Falconer the day before, that he
had never been defeated and that now he would proceed to carry out the plans
of his life without interruption.
But to-morrow evening, Amy would not be going to the ball. She would be
alone. Then he would not go. He must find out all that he wished to know--or
all that he did not.
VIII
THE evening of the ball had come at last.Not far from John's school on the
square stood another log cabin, from which another and much more splendid
light streamed out across the wilderness: this being the printing room and
book-bindery of the great Mr. John Bradford. His portrait, scrutinized now
from the distance and at the disadvantage of a hundred years, hands him down
to posterity as a bald-headed man with a seedy growth of hair sprouting
laterally from his temples, so that his ears look like little flat-boats
half hidden in little canebrakes; with mutton-chop whiskers growing far up
on the overhanging ledges of his cheek-bones and suggesting rather a daring
variety of lichen; with a long arched nose, running on its own hook in a
southwesterly direction; one eye a little higher than the other; a
protruding upper lip, as though he had behind it a set of the false teeth of
the time, which were fixed into the jaws by springs and hinges, all but
compelling a man to keep his mouth shut by main force; and a very short neck
with an overflowing jowl which weighed too heavily on his high shirt collar.
Despite his maligning portrait a foremost personage of his day, of
indispensable substance, of invaluable port: Revolutionary soldier, Indian
warrior; editor and proprietor of the Kentucky Gazette, the first newspaper
in the wilderness; binder of its first books--some of his volumes still
surviving on musty, forgotten shelves; senatorial elector; almanac-maker,
taking his ideas from the greater Mr. Franklin of Philadelphia, as Mr.
Franklin may have derived his from the still greater Mr. Jonathan Swift of
London; appointed as chairman of the board of trustees to meet the first
governor of the State when he had ridden into the town three years before
and in behalf of the people of the new commonwealth which had been carried
at last triumphantly into the Union, to bid his excellency welcome in an
address conceived in the most sonorous English of the period; and afterwards
for many years author of the now famous "Notes," which will perhaps make his
name immortal among American historians.
On this evening of the ball at the home of General James Wilkinson, the
great Mr. Bradford was out of town, and that most unluckily; for the
occasion--in addition to all the pleasure that it would furnish to the
ladies--was designed as a means of calling together the leaders of the
movement to separate Kentucky from the Union; and the idea may have been,
that the great Mr. Bradford, having written one fine speech to celebrate her
entrance, could as easily turn out a finer one to celebrate her withdrawal.
It must not be inferred that his absence had any political significance. He
had merely gone a few days previous to the little settlement at
Georgetown--named for the great George--to lay in a supply of paper for his
Weekly, and had been detained there by heavy local rains, not risking so dry
an article of merchandise either by pack-horse or open wagon under the
dripping trees. Paper was very scarce in the wilderness and no man could
afford to let a single piece get wet.
In setting out on his journey, he had instructed his sole assistant--a young
man by the name of Charles O'Bannon--as to his duties in the meantime: he
was to cut some new capital letters out of a block of dog-wood in the
office, and also some small letters where the type fell short; to collect if
possible some unpaid subscriptions--this being one of the advantages that an
editor always takes of his own absence--in particular to call upon certain
merchants for arrears in advertisements; and he was to receive any lost
articles that might be sent in to be advertised, or return such as should be
called for by their owners: with other details appertaining to the
establishment.
O'Bannon had performed his duties as he had been told--reserving for
himself, as always, the right of a personal construction. He had addressed a
written appeal to the nonpaying subscribers, declaring that the Gazette had
now become a Try-Weekly, since Mr. Bradford had to try hard every week to
get it out by the end; he had collected from several delinquent advertisers;
whittled out three new capital letters, and also the face of Mr. Bradford
and one of his legs; taken charge with especial interest of the department
of Lost and Found and was now ready for other duties.
On this evening of the ball he was sitting in the office.
In one corner of the room stood a worn handpress with two dog-skin
inking-balls. Between the logs of the wall near another corner a horizontal
iron bar had been driven, and from the end of this bar hung a saucer-shaped
iron lamp filled with bear-oil. Out of this oil stuck the end of a cotton
rag for a wick; which, being set on fire, filled the room with a strong
smell and a feeble, murky, flickering light. Under the lamp stood a plain
oak slab on two pairs of crosslegs; and on the slab were papers and letters,
a black ink-horn, some leaves of native tobacco, and a large gray-horn
drinking-cup--empty. Under the table was a lately emptied bottle.O'Bannon
sat in a rough chair before this drinking-cup, smoking a long tomahawk-pipe.
His head was tilted backward, his eyes followed the flight of smoke upward.
That he expected to be at the party might have been inferred from his dress:
a blue broadcloth coat with yellow gilt buttons; a swan's-down waistcoat
with broad stripes of red and white; a pair of dove-coloured corded-velvet
pantaloons with three large yellow buttons on the hips; and a neckcloth of
fine white cam- bric.His figure was thickset, strong, cumbrous; his hair
black, curly, shining. His eyes, bold, vivacious, and now inflamed, were of
that rarely beautiful blue which is seen only in members of the Irish race.
His complexion was a blending of the lily and the rose. His lips were thick
and red under his short fuzzy moustache. His hands also were thick and soft,
always warm, and not very clean--on account of the dog-skin inking-balls.
He had two ruling passions: the influence he thought himself entitled to
exert over women; and his disposition to play practical jokes on men. Both
the first and the second of these weaknesses grew out of his confidence that
he had nothing to fear from either sex. Nevertheless he had felt forced to
admit that his charms had never prevailed with Amy Falconer. He had often
wondered how she could resist; but she had resisted without the least
effort. Still, he pursued, and he had once told her with smiling candour
that if she did not mind the pursuit, he did not mind the chase. Only, he
never urged it into the presence of Mrs. Falconer, of whom alone he stood in
speechless, easily comprehensible awe. Perhaps to-night--as Amy had never
seen him in ball-dress--she might begin to succumb; he had just placed her
under obligation to him by an unexpected stroke of good fortune; and finally
he had executed one neat stratagem at the expense of Mr. Bradford and
another at the expense of John Gray. So that esteeming himself in a fair way
to gratify one passion and having already gratified the other, he leaned
back in his chair, smiling, smoking, drinking.
He had just risen to pinch the wick in the lamp overhead when a knock
sounded on the door, and to his surprise and displeasure--for he thought he
had bolted it--there entered without waiting to be bidden a low,
broadchested, barefooted, blond fellow, his brown-tow breeches rolled up to
his knees, showing a pair of fine white calves; a clean shirt thrown open at
the neck and rolled up to the elbows, displaying a noble pair of arms; a
ruddy shine on his good-humoured face; a drenched look about his short,
thick, whitish hair; and a comfortable smell of soap emanating from his
entire person.
Seeing him, O'Bannon looked less displeased; but keeping his seat and merely
taking the pipe from his lips, he said, with an air of sarcasm, "I would
have invited you to come in, Peter, but I see you have not waited for the
invitation."
Peter deigned no reply; but walking forward, he clapped down on the oak slab
a round handful of shillings and pence. "Count it, and see if it's all
there," he said, taking a short cob pipe out of his mouth and planting his
other hand stoutly on his hip.
"What's this for?" O'Bannon spoke in a tone of wounded astonishment.
"What do you suppose it's for? Didn't I hear you've been out collecting?"
"Well, you have had an advertisement running in the paper for some time."
"That's what it's for then! And what's more, I've got the money to pay for a
better one, whenever you'll write it."
"Sit down, sit down, sit down!" O'Bannon jumped from his chair, hurried
across the room--a little unsteadily--emptied a pile of things on the floor,
and dragged back a heavy oak stool. "Sit down. And Peter?" he added
inquiringly, tapping his empty drinking-cup.
Peter nodded his willingness. O'Bannoli drew a key from his pocket and shook
it temptingly under Peter's nose. Then he bolted the door and unlocked the
cupboard, displaying a shelf filled with bottles.
"All for advertisements!" he said, waving his hand at the collection. "And a
joke on Mr. Bradford. Fourth-proof French brandy, Jamaica rum, Holland gin,
cherry bounce, Martinique cordial, Madeira, port, sherry, cider. All for
advertisements! Two or three of these dealers have been running bills up,
and to-day I stepped in and told them we'd submit to be paid in merchandise
of this kind. And here's the merchandise. What brand of merchandise will
you take?"
"We had better take what you have been taking."
"As you please." He brought forward another drinking-cup and a bottle.
"Hold on!" cried Peter, laying a hand on his arm. "My advertisement first!"
"As you please."
"About twice as long as the other one," instructed Peter.
"As you please." O'Bannon set the bottle down, took up a goose-quill, and
drew a sheet of paper before him.
"My business is increasing," prompted Peter still further, with a puzzled
look as to what should come next. "Put that in!"
"Of course," said O'Bannon. "I always put that in."
He was thinking impatiently about the ball and he wrote out something
quickly and read it aloud with a thick, unsteady utterance:
"'Mr. Peter Springle continues to carry on the blacksmith business opposite
the Sign of the Indian Queen. Mr. Springle cannot be rivalled in his shoeing
of horses. He keeps on hand a constant supply of axes, chains, and hoes,
which he will sell at prices usually asked--'"
"Stop," interrupted Peter who had sniffed a strange, delicious odour of
personal praise in the second sentence. "You might say something more about
me, before you bring in the axes."
"As you please."
"'Mr. Peter Springle executes his work with satisfaction and despatch; his
work is second to none in Kentucky; no one surpasses him; he is a noted
horseshoer; he does nothing but shoe horses.'" He looked at Peter
inquiringly.
"That sounds more like it," admitted Peter.
"Is that enough?"
"Oh, if that's all you can say!""'Mr. Springle devotes himself entirely to
the shoeing of fine horses; fine horses are often injured by neglect in
shoeing; Mr. Springle does not injure fine horses, but shoes them all around
with new shoes at one dollar for each horse.'"
"Better," said Peter." Only, don't say so much about the horses! Say more
about--"
"'Mr. Springle is the greatest blacksmith that ever left New Jersey--'""Or
that ever lived I'll New Jersey."
O'Bannon rose and pinched the cotton wick, seized the bottle, and poured out
more liquor.
"Peter," he said, squaring himself, "I'm going to let you into a secret. If
you were not drunk, I wouldn't tell you. You'll forget it by morning."
"If I were half as drunk as you are, I couldn't listen," retorted Peter. "I
don't want to know any secrets. I tell everything I know."
"You don't know any secrets? You don't know that last week Horatio Turpin
sold a ten dollar horse in front of your shop for a hundred because he
had--"
"Oh, I know some secrets about horses," admitted Peter, carelessly.
"It's a secret about a horse I'm going to tell you," said O'Bannon.
"Here is an advertisement that has been left to be inserted in the next
paper: 'Lost, on Tuesday evening, on the road between Frankfort and
Lexington, a bundle of clothes tied up in a blue-and-white checked cotton
neckerchief, and containing one white muslin dress, a pale-blue silk coat,
two thin white muslin handkerchiefs, one pair long kid gloves--straw
colour--one pair white kid shoes, two cambric handkerchiefs, and some other
things. Whoever will deliver said clothes to the printer, or give
information so that they can be got, will be liberally rewarded on
application to him.'
"And here, Peter, is another advertisement. Found, on Tuesday evening, on
the road between Lexington and Frankfort, a bundle of clothes tied in a
blue-and-white neckerchief. The owner can recover property by calling on the
printer.'"
He pushed the papers away from him.
"Yesterday morning who should slip around here but Amy Falconer. And then,
in such a voice, she began. How she had come to town the day before, and had
brought her party dress. How the bundle was lost. How she had come to
inquire whether any one had left the clothes to be advertised; or whether I
wouldn't put an advertisement in the paper; or, if they were left at my
office before Thursday evening, whether I wouldn't send them to her at
once."
"Ahem!" said Peter drily, but with moisture in his eyes.
"She hadn't more than gone before who should come in here but a boy bringing
this same bundle of clothes with a note from John Gray, saying that he had
found them in the public road yesterday, and asking me to send them at once
to the owner, if I should hear who she was; if not, to advertise them."
"That's no secret," said Peter contemptuously.
"I might have sent that bundle straight to the owner of it. But, when I have
anything against a man, I always forgive him, only I get even with him
first."
"What are you hammering at?" cried Peter, bringing his fist down on the
table. "Hit the nail on the head."
"Now I've got no grudge against her," continued O'Bannon. "I'd hate her if I
could. I've tried hard enough, but I can't. She may treat me as she pleases:
it's all the same to me as soon as she smiles. But as for this redheaded
Scotch-Irishman--"
"Stop!" said Peter. "Not a word against him!" O'Bannon stared.
"He's no friend of yours," said he, reflectively.
"He is!"
"Oh, is he? Well, only the other day I heard him say that he thought a good
deal more of your shoes than he did of you," cried O'Bannon, laughing
sarcastically.
Peter made no reply, but his neck seemed to swell and his face to be getting
purple.
"And he's a friend of yours? I can't even play a little joke on him."
"Play your joke on him!" exclaimed Peter, "and when my time comes, I'll play
mine."
"When he sent the bundle here yesterday morning I could have returned it
straight to her. I locked it in that closet! 'You'll never go to the ball
with her,' I said, 'if I have to keep her away.' I set my trap. To-day I
hunted up Joseph Holden. 'Come by the office, as you are on your way to the
party to-night,' I said. 'I want to talk to you about a piece of land. Come
early; then we can go together.' When he came--just before you did--I said,
'Look here, did you know that Amy wouldn't be at the ball? She lost her
clothes as she was coming to town the other day, and somebody has just sent
them here to be advertised. I think I'd better take them around to her yet:
it's not too late.' 'I'll take them! I'll go with her myself!' he
cried,jumping up.
"So she'll be there, he'll be there, I'll be there, we'll all be there--but
your John can hear about it in the morning." And O'Bannon arose slowly, but
unexpectedly sat down again.
"You think I won't be there," he said threateningly to Peter.
"You think I'm drunk. I'll show you! I'll show you that I can walk--that I
can dance--dance by myself --do it all--by myself--furnish the music and do
the dancing."
He began whistling "Sir Roger de Coverley," and stood up, but sank down
again and reached for the bottle.
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