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Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks · English · Gutenberg #35239 · 623,890 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

Author: Nancy Huston Banks


        
Release date: February 11, 2011 [eBook #35239]

Language: English

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                              OLDFIELD

                 A KENTUCKY TALE OF THE LAST CENTURY

                        BY NANCY HUSTON BANKS


    New York
    THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
    LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
    1902

    _All rights reserved_

    COPYRIGHT, 1902,
    BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

    Set up and electrotyped May, 1902.

    Norwood Press
    J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
    Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

    To My Father




CONTENTS


I. THE LITTLE SISTERS

II. THE OLDFIELD PEOPLE

III. PHASES OF VILLAGE LIFE

IV. THE CHILD OF MISS JUDY'S HEART

V. AN UNCONSCIOUS PHILOSOPHER

VI. LYNN GORDON

VII. THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

VIII. AT OLD LADY GORDON'S

IX. A ROMANTIC REGION

X. RELIGION IN OLDFIELD

XI. BODY OR SOUL

XII. MISS JUDY'S LITTLE WAYS

XIII. THE DANCING LESSON

XIV. MAKING PEACE

XV. SIDNEY DOES HER DUTY

XVI. THE SHOCK AND THE FRIGHT

XVII. LOVE'S AWAKENING

XVIII. AN EMBARRASSING ACCIDENT

XIX. INVOKING THE LAW

XX. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN FAITH AND LOVE

XXI. WHAT OLDFIELD THOUGHT AND SAID

XXII. THE UPAS TREE

XXIII. THE BEGINNING OF THE END

XXIV. OLD LADY GORDON'S ANGER

XXV. THE REVELATION OF THE TRUTH

XXVI. THE TRAGEDY

XXVII. THE LAST ARTFULNESS OF MISS JUDY




OLDFIELD




I

THE LITTLE SISTERS


The old white curtain was slightly too short. Its quaint border of
little cotton snowballs swung clear of the window ledge, letting in the
sunbeams. The flood of light streaming far across the faded carpet
reached the high bed, and awakened Miss Judy earlier than usual on that
bright March morning, in the Pennyroyal Region of Kentucky, a half
century ago.

Miss Judy was always awake early, and usually arose while her sister lay
still fast asleep on the other side of the big bed. She had learned,
however, to creep so softly from beneath the covers, and to climb so
quietly down the bed's steep incline, that Miss Sophia was hardly ever
in the least disturbed. Moreover, Miss Judy always kept a split-bottomed
chair standing near her pillow at night. This served not only as a stand
for the candlestick and matches,--so that the candle need not be blown
out before Miss Sophia was comfortably cuddled down and Miss Judy was in
bed,--but it also furnished a dignified and comparatively easy means of
ascending the bed's heights. On descending, Miss Judy had but to step
decorously from the mound of feathers to the chair and to drop
delicately from the chair to the floor.

To have seen Miss Judy doing this must have been a sight well worth
seeing. She was so very pretty, so small, so slight, so exquisite
altogether. Old as she was, she had still the movements of a bird. Her
sweet old face was as fair as any girl's, and as ready with its delicate
blushes. Her soft hair, white as falling snowflakes and as curly as a
child's, was burnished by a silver gloss lovelier than the sheen of
youth. And her beautiful eyes were still the blue of the flax flowers.

Lifting her shining, curly head on that sunny morning, Miss Judy cast a
glance of dismay at the ruthless sunbeams lying on the carpet, and she
could not help a slight start. Then she held her breath for a moment,
turning her blue eyes on the back of Miss Sophia's nightcap, in a look
of anxious love. It always gave Miss Sophia a headache to be aroused
suddenly. Miss Judy was afraid that the involuntary movement might have
startled her. They were very tender of each other, these two poor little
sisters. And they were very, very polite to one another; more polite to
one another than they were to others, if that were possible. Miss
Sophia, who could not always remember the smaller matters of fine
breeding where other people were concerned, never forgot the smallest
courtesy toward her sister. Miss Judy, who was ever the pink--the
sweetest, old-fashioned clovepink--of politeness to everybody, always
treated Miss Sophia with such distinguished consideration as was a
lesson in manners to see. And no one ever smiled: it was too lovely to
be laughed at--too sincere to be absurd. Lying down side by side every
night of their long and blameless lives, they formally wished each other
pleasant dreams, and bade one another a ceremonious good night. Rising
every morning--separately, with delicate regard for the simple mysteries
of one another's toilet--they greeted each other at breakfast as two
high-bred strangers might meet in some grand drawing-room.

Leaning upon her elbow, Miss Judy now listened for a space to her
sister's breathing. She could always tell when all was well with Miss
Sophia's slumbers, by a mild little puffing sound, which did no harm,
but which nothing would ever have induced Miss Judy to mention to Miss
Sophia or to any one. The puffs continuing peacefully, Miss Judy smiled
lovingly and, laying the cover back with no more noise than a mouse
makes, she flitted birdlike from the mound of feathers to the chair and
thence to the home-made rug. She was always careful to stand on the rug
while dressing, in order to save the carpet. Miss Sophia also always
meant to stand on it, but she sometimes forgot that as she did many
other things. The carpet was long past saving, as it was long past
further fading; but neither Miss Judy nor Miss Sophia had begun to
suspect the fact. To them it was still the elegant all-wool three-ply
which their mother had spun and woven and sewed with her own hands.
Accordingly, Miss Judy now hastened to spread a strip of rag carpet in
the sun's path, before commencing to dress. The big, bare room was cold,
the handful of chips, which had made a cheerful blaze at bedtime, having
died out during the night. But Miss Judy did not know that she was
shivering. She was not in the habit of thinking of her own comfort, and
it did not occur to her to kindle a fire with the chips which were in
the basket beside the hearth, until such time as Miss Sophia should need
the warmth. She merely dressed as fast as she could, lingering only over
the last look in the mirror lying along the top of the tall chest of
drawers. Such a queer old mirror! Long and narrow in its frame of
tarnished gilt, with a faded landscape painted on each dim end, which
was divided from the rest of the glass by a solemn little column. The
chest stood so high and Miss Judy was so small that it was not easy for
her to get a good look at her straight little back. But there was no
other way of making sure that the point of her white muslin kerchief was
precisely on a line with the bow of her black silk apron strings. And
any irregularity in this matter would have shocked Miss Judy as being
positively immodest. She managed, however, by standing on the very tips
of her toes, to see that all was as it should be. Settling her cap, she
bent down, and noiselessly taking the basket of chips, kindled a fire in
one corner of the wide, empty fireplace, thinking with a loving glance
at the bed that the room would be comfortably warm when Miss Sophia got
up. Finally, she went into the passage to open the front door.

All the Oldfield front doors were set open in the morning and left open
all day, whenever the weather was reasonably mild; except during the
summer, when very few of them were closed at any time, either night or
day. Miss Judy alone, of the whole village, always closed hers at
bedtime all the year round. And she did not do it because she was
afraid, though everybody knew how timid she was. It never occurred to
her, during the whole of her gentle, innocent life, that there could be
in the world a living creature who would wish to do her any harm. There
was really nothing for the most timid to fear in that quiet, peaceful,
pastoral country. To be sure, Alvarado, The Terrible, sometimes dashed
into the village--unexpected, dazzling, fascinating, bewildering--and
out again like a lightning flash. Then most of the men did indeed
disappear as suddenly as though the earth had opened and swallowed them
up. But Alvarado never noticed the women, and he never came at night.
That is, no one ever claimed to have _seen_ him galloping by after
nightfall. Late watchers with the sick, who were the only late watchers
in Oldfield, sometimes told fearsome tales of thunderous hoofs at
midnight and of sparks that flew blue through the darkness. But Miss
Judy had never seen or heard anything of the kind. She had never seen
Alvarado at all, except in the distance and surrounded as he always was
by a cloud of dust and mystery. She was ever slow to believe evil of any
one and she rather leaned to Alvarado's side. It was unchristian, she
thought, to ascribe all sorts of wickedness to a man about whom no one
actually knew anything beyond the fact that he was a stranger and a
foreigner and had been most unfortunate. Moreover, he had been and was
still very unhappy, and the unfortunate and the unhappy had always a
friend in Miss Judy. Then the romance of his marriage appealed strongly
to her imagination. It was, of course, very wrong, and even very wicked,
for him to have tricked and frightened poor Alice Fielding into marrying
him, but he could hardly have known that she loved another man. Nobody
seemed to have known it until too late,--not even John Stanley whom she
loved,--and Alvarado also had loved her. There was never any doubt of
that. He had not been quite in his right mind since her death, many
years before. In Miss Judy's tender judgment he was much more to be
pitied than to be feared. No, Alvarado had nothing to do with Miss
Judy's closing her door at bedtime. She had closed it long before he had
ever been heard of in that country. She closed it simply and solely
because she considered it the _proper_ thing to do, on account of there
being no men-folks about the house. The other lone women of Oldfield
closed theirs too--when they remembered to do it--without a murmur, no
matter how hot the nights were, simply and solely because Miss Judy
closed hers; for no right-minded member of the whole community ever
needed a better reason for doing, or not doing anything, than to know
that Miss Judy deemed it proper or improper.

This quality of leadership is always interesting, wherever found, and it
is nearly always hard to explain. In Miss Judy's case it was even harder
to make out than it commonly is. The singularity of her supremacy had
nothing to do with her poverty. Neither poverty nor riches would appear
ever to have anything to do with the quality of leadership in any part
of the earth, and none of Miss Judy's neighbors could be considered
either very poor or more than well-to-do. The most utterly
incomprehensible feature of Miss Judy's long and absolute reign was,
perhaps, her total lack of every personal characteristic of the
autocrat. It is certainly not the usual qualification for autocracy to
be as gentle and shy as Miss Judy was--or as distrustful of self and as
trustful of others--or as self-forgetful and as thoughtful of every one
else. The little lady was far too timid and soft of spirit knowingly to
lay down laws for any one: she was only strong and firm enough to cling
timidly to her own gentle convictions through a hard life of privation,
as a dove clings to its nest through the fiercest storms.

She never dreamt that she _was_ an autocrat. When she noticed the
universal and marked deference with which she was always treated, she
thought it was because her father had been greatly respected, and her
mother much beloved. It was quite natural that they should have been,
Miss Judy thought in justification of her own shining by a reflected
light. They had been justly prominent among the earliest settlers of the
Pennyroyal Region, coming with their two infant daughters when
Virginia--like a rich and generous queen--first began giving away the
county of Kentucky, to the sons who had served her in the Revolution.
Those were glorious days! To tell about them now sounds like a fairy
tale. And yet they were sad days as well. For, great though the honor
was and dazzling as was the reward, the officers so honored and rewarded
must have known that the claiming of these lands meant lifelong exile
for their families and for themselves. It would appear so, at all
events, since few came who could stay nearer to civilization. The more
fortunate ones stayed on in the old Virginia homes, content with holding
cloudy titles to vast estates lying in this unknown wilderness of
Kentucky; and with rearing there splendid castles in the air. So very
cloudy, indeed, were many of these titles sent to Virginia by
irresponsible agents, that litigation over them has only recently ceased
in the local courts. Other officers were too poor to employ agents
either good or bad, and these were consequently compelled to go in
person, or to lose the grant of land. Among those reduced to this sore
strait was Major John Bramwell, Miss Judy's father, who had won
distinction as a captain of horse in the War for Independence. The
home-coming found him utterly stranded. His small patrimony was long
since spent, and his wife's ample fortune had shrunk to a mere pittance.
He knew no means of earning a livelihood, knowing even less of the
business of peace than most soldiers know. Hopelessly in debt, he knew
not where to turn for relief; he knew not how to find bare bread for his
family. The new home and the fresh start in the far-off county of
Kentucky offered the only refuge. The young wife consented to go, as she
would have consented to anything he wished or thought best; for she was
the gentlest of women, and her faith in her husband was absolute. Thus
it was that they gathered up the few fragments of the old happy life,
and, taking their two little ones, rode sadly away into exile.

Sad indeed and heavy-hearted must have been all those first
gentle-people who thus rode away from their old homes in Virginia over
the Alleghanies into the wilderness of Kentucky, bearing tender little
children in their arms. Miss Judy was much too young to remember that
terrible journey, and Miss Sophia was only a baby, but they both knew
all about it as soon as they were old enough to understand. They always
wept when they heard how tired the delicate little mother was before the
awful mountains were crossed--no matter how often they heard the story.
They always smiled when they heard how glad all the weary pilgrims were
to find a broad-horn waiting to bear the little band down the
Ohio--though they heard the story over and over again. And they always
followed the broad-horn with ever new interest, on and on down that
long, long river through the primeval forest growing to the water's
edge. Forest, forest, forest everywhere for hundreds of miles, till they
came--with the travellers--almost to the vast mouth of the mighty river
near which the Pennyroyal Region lies.

Miss Judy was not sure that it was called so when she entered it, an
infant in her father's arms. She always thought it more likely that the
whole of Kentucky may still have been known as The Dark and Bloody
Ground, so great were still the sufferings of the brave men and braver
women who were still giving their lives to redeem it from darkness and
blood. But there never was the slightest doubt in Miss Judy's mind that
these gentle-people coming now were braver than any who had come
before--the bravest because they were the gentlest. It always made her
own gentle heart beat, as if to strains of martial music, to be told in
the little mother's soft voice of the leaving of the broad-horn's frail
protection, and of the undaunted plunge into the depths of the
wilderness. Yet there were dangers there to be met which courage itself
must flee from. These fearless Virginians who did not shrink from facing
savages, nor from encountering wild beasts, shrank and fled appalled
before the more frightful dangers then lurking all along the banks of
the lower Ohio. There, hidden under the beauty of the almost tropical
vegetation, was the hideous rack of the fever and ague, waiting ready to
torture the strength out of the men, the heart out of the women, and the
very lives out of the children. There, beneath the noble trees and above
the wide open spaces, rolling like gentle prairies--sunlit, flower
filled, so richly covered with wild strawberries that the horses' hoofs
were dyed rosy-red--there the deadly mystery of "the milk-sickness" was
already spreading its invisible shroud over the whole beautiful land.

Fleeing from these perils more to be feared than the cruelest savages,
and more to be dreaded than the fiercest wild beasts, the travellers
went further into the heart of the wilderness, seeking the safety of
higher ground; on and on, following the buffalo tracks which still
traversed the country from end to end like broad, hard-beaten highways.
One of these led them along a range of hills and into a fertile little
valley, and it was here that the Virginians finally found a
resting-place. It was here in this vale of rest, folded between these
quiet hills, that the village of Oldfield grew out of that settlement,
and here that it stands to-day scarcely altered from its beginning. Over
the hills--there on the east where tender green of the crowning trees
melts into the tenderer blue of the arching clouds--there still lies the
untouched strip of broad brown earth, which the people of to-day call
the Wilderness Road, just as those wandering Virginians called it when
they first found it.

The forest crowded close to the valley, but the sun shone bright where
the giant trees stood farther apart. Then the skies of Kentucky were as
blue as the skies of Italy, just as they are now, so that the sunshine
and the peace of the spot, and the pure air of the wooded hills, gave
the wayfarers heart to believe themselves safe from the terrors of the
Ohio. The homes which they built were all humble enough, the merest
cabins of rough logs, since they had nothing else wherewith to build.
Major Bramwell's house was no better than the rest. Like most of the
settlers' cabins it had two low, large rooms with a closed passage
between and a loft above. But it is the mistress who makes the real
home,--wherever reared; the mere building of it has little to do with
its making. And the softest little woman, who is neither very brilliant
nor very wise, can work miracles for her husband and her children, no
matter where her wings may rest upon the earth. This one, softer and
less wise than many, not only made a real home of perfect refinement out
of that log hut in the wilderness, but she reared her daughters--amongst
white men rougher than the wild beasts, and near red men infinitely
fiercer--as gently as any royal princesses were ever trained in any old
palace for the gracing of courts.

It was easy enough to train Miss Judy, whose nature responded to
exquisiteness as an aeolian harp responds to the breeze. Miss Sophia was
different, but the little mother did not live long enough to find it
out. Perhaps no true mother ever lives long enough to find anything
lacking in her child. Miss Sophia was standing on the threshold of
womanhood, and Miss Judy had barely crossed it, when the little mother
died, worn out by hardship and broken-hearted by exile, but cheerful and
uncomplaining to the last, as such mothers always are.

Is it not amazing that a small, soft woman can leave such a large, hard
void in the world? Is it not bewildering to learn, as most of us do,
sooner or later, that those whom we have always believed we were taking
care of, were really stronger than ourselves, and that we have always
leaned on them. The very foundations of life seem falling away, when the
truth first comes home to the heart. No one knew what Major Bramwell
felt or thought when the gentle wife who had yielded in everything first
left him to stand alone. He was naturally a silent, reserved man, and
misfortune had embittered him. Within the year following her death he
returned to Virginia for a visit, apparently unable to endure the exile
without her. His daughters were lonely too, but they were glad to have
him go. That is, Miss Judy was glad, and Miss Sophia was always pleased
with anything that pleased Miss Judy. They were still content, believing
him to be happier, when the visit went on into the second year, and even
into the third. But as the fourth and the fifth passed, they grew
anxious, and the neighbors wondered, and gradually began to shake their
heads. News travelled slowly over the Alleghanies even yet, but it was
whispered at last that the major would never come back,--that he could
not,--because he had been arrested for old debts left unpaid when he
came to Kentucky, and that he was thus held "within prison bounds."

The Oldfield people could never tell whether the sisters were aware of
the truth. The neighbors noticed that as the years went by Miss Judy
said less and less about his coming back, though she spoke of him as
often and as proudly as ever, and that Miss Sophia, who never had much
to say about anything, now rarely mentioned her father at all. They
heard from him, however, at long intervals. The neighbors were sure of
so much concerning the major, by reason of Miss Judy's being sometimes
compelled to borrow the two bits to pay the postage on the letter.
Nothing else ever forced her to borrow, though she had not a penny to
call her own for weeks together, and Miss Sophia--poor soul--never had
one. Everybody in Oldfield knew when anybody got a letter. The stage
carrying the mail came twice a week. The postmaster, who was also a
tailor, always locked the door of his little shop as soon as he had
taken the mail-bag inside. He could not read writing very readily, and
he did not wish to be hurried. The villagers fumed outside as they
looked through the one smoky, broken window, and saw him deliberately
spelling out his own letters, sitting down with his feet on the stove.
In the winter when the days were short, and it began to grow dark early,
they used to stuff something into the stovepipe which came out of a
broken pane, so that the smoke soon compelled him to open the door. In
the summer the heat prevented the postmaster's keeping the door closed
for any great length of time; but no matter what the season most of the
Oldfield people were waiting when the mail came; consequently, everybody
knew what everybody else received. And then Miss Judy used to give out
kind messages to the neighbors from her father's letters; messages which
did not sound at all like the major. But Miss Judy was wholly
unconscious that her own sweetness colored whatever it may have been
that her father had really written. She was as unconscious of this as of
any reason that she herself might have had for growing sour, as her
lovely youth faded, neglected like the wild flowers blooming unseen in
the shadowy woods.

The quiet lives of the little sisters thus went on uneventfully from
youth to maturity. They were as utterly alone, so far as association
with their own class was concerned, as if they had lived on a desert
island. Only the occasional letter from their father marked the passing
of the years. They were sheltered by the old log house, and they
subsisted somehow on what grew from its bit of ground. It was the same
now that it had always been; it was still the same, except that the
little sisters had passed unawares into middle age, when they heard that
their father was dead.

No one ever knew whether the daughters were told the whole sad truth:
that this gallant old soldier of the Revolution, who had done much for
the winning of Independence, had died in prison bounds for debts which
he was never able to pay. Miss Judy's beautiful eyes were dim with
weeping for a long time. Miss Sophia was sad for many months through
sympathy with her sister's grief. Miss Judy took the purple bow off Miss
Sophia's cap and a blue one off her own and dyed them black. Their
Sunday coats, as they called two thread-bare bombazines, were black
already, and their everyday coats had also been black before turning
brown. So that those two poor little bits of lutestring ribbon were the
only outward signs of new bereavement.




II

THE OLDFIELD PEOPLE


Living was leisurely down in the Pennyroyal Region of those old days.
About the middle of the last century, some twenty years after the
major's death, the weeks and months and years went by so quietly that
his daughters grew old without knowing it.

No one indeed ever thought of Miss Judy as old. Charm so purely
spiritual as hers has never any age. And then it would seem as if an
element of perpetual youth often lingers to the last around a lovable
unmarried woman as it rarely does around the married. The rose keeps its
beauty and sweetness longest when left to fade ungathered.

Possibly Miss Judy may have been a shade slighter than she had been
twenty years before, although she was never much stouter than a willow
twig. Her hair can hardly have been whiter than it had been ever since
anybody could remember, and it was just as curly, too, notwithstanding
that she tried harder every day to brush it till it was prim and smooth,
as she thought white hair should be.

Miss Sophia had never seemed very young, and she now appeared little if
at all older. Her dark hair never whitened, and if the gray streaks over
her placid temples had broadened slightly, it was no more trouble than
it used to be to reach up the chimney and get a bit of soot on the tip
of her finger--while Miss Judy was out of the room or looking the other
way. It was an innocent artifice, but it remained always the darkest
secret between the sisters. And this was probably not quite so dark a
secret as Miss Sophia supposed it to be, since she, being so very plump,
could not stand on tiptoe to look in the mirror, as Miss Judy did.
Consequently, it was perhaps inevitable that the touching up intended
for the gray streaks over Miss Sophia's placid temples, sometimes fell
unawares on her honest little cheeks, or her guileless little ears.

Almost unaltered as the sisters were, their environment was, if
possible, even less changed by the quiet passing of the uneventful
years. For all outward changes, this March morning on which Miss Judy
looked out over the sleeping village might have been the first morning
after the first settlers had made their homes in this vale of peace. The
folding hills were yet covered by the primeval forest. The log houses
built by the Virginians still straggled beside a single thoroughfare.
The highway, too, was the same buffalo track which they had followed
through the wilderness--just as crooked in its direction, just as
irregular in its width, just as muddy in winter and dusty in summer, and
it was called the "big road" now, just as it had been in the beginning.
And the sleepers in the still darkened houses were, with scarcely an
exception, the descendants of the sounder sleepers in the graveyard on
the furthest, highest hilltop. For the people of that far-off Pennyroyal
Region came and went in those old days only with the coming and the
going of the generations.

The night's shadows still lingered among the great, black tree-trunks
draping the leafless boughs, but the sun's radiant lances were already
lifting the white mists from the lowlands. Soft sounds coming up from
the silent fields echoed the gentle awakening of flocks and herds,
deepening, as the light brightened, into the eternal matin appeal of the
dumb creature to human brotherhood. The birds alone were all wide awake
and vividly astir. Flocks of plovers wheeled white-winged across the
low-hung sky. A lonely sparrow-hawk swung high on seemingly motionless
pinions. There were redbirds, too, and bluebirds and blackbirds--pewees,
thrushes, vireos, kingfishers--all flocking in with the red and gold of
the sunrise, making the dun meadows bright and melodious with their
plumage and song. Miss Judy saw and heard them in pleased surprise. She
could not recall having seen any of them that season, save two or three
melancholy robins, drooping in the cold rain of the previous day. But
here they all were, and singing as if _they_ had no doubt that spring
had come, however doubtful mere mortals might be.

It was light enough now to see the tavern which stood on the edge of the
village. The sign of the tavern, a big rusty bell hung in a rough,
rickety wooden frame, stood clear against the gray horizon, dangling its
rotting rope, which few travellers ever came to pull.

The court-house and the jail faced the tavern from the other side of the
big road. The court-house, with its stately little pillars and its queer
little cupola, looked like some small and shabby old gentleman in a very
high, very tight stock. There were two terms of circuit court, lasting
about a month, one in the spring and one in the fall. The quarterly and
the county courts convened at stated periods. The magistrate's court,
which was also in the court-house, was held usually and almost
exclusively as the peace of the colored population might require.
Fortunately, the magistrate was regarded with a good deal of wholesome
awe, and it was fortunate that he lived in the village, inasmuch as his
pacific services were likely to be needed at irregular and unexpected
times. The county judge, however, found it entirely convenient to live
in the country, on a farm near Oldfield, though he rode into the village
and spent an hour or so in his office nearly every day. Judge John
Stanley of the higher court lived a long way off, quite on the other
side of the district, coming and going twice a year with the convening
and adjournment of the spring and fall terms. He had lived in Oldfield
when a young man, and up to the time that a terrible thing had happened.
He was not to blame, yet it had blighted his whole life; it had driven
him in horror away from the place which he had loved. It was a great
loss to him to be separated from Miss Judy, the only mother he had
known. But he used to return to Oldfield now and then until another
misfortune made the place forever unendurable to him. After this only
the drag of his duty and his fondness for Miss Judy ever brought him
back, and he went away again as soon as he could. He always called upon
her when he came, and always went to bid her good-by before going away;
but he visited no one else and knew nothing of the village outside the
strict line of his official duties.

Adjoining the court-house was the county jail, a tumble-down pile of
mossy brick. Only the bars across the window indicated the character of
the building. A prisoner was occasionally enterprising enough to pull
out the bars, but they were always put in again sooner or later. There
were two rooms, one above and one below, with a movable ladder between.
When, at long and rare intervals a stranger was brought to the jail as a
prisoner, he was put in the upper room and--as an extreme measure of
precaution--the ladder was taken away during the night. Both the rooms
were apt to be chilly in cold weather on account of the broken
window-panes, yet the jail was on the whole more comfortable than many
of the cabins in which the negroes lived, and any one--no matter what
the color of his skin--can endure a good deal of cold without great
discomfort, when abundantly and richly fed. The jailer, Colonel
Fielding, and his family never thought of taking so much trouble or of
being so mean and selfish as to make any difference in the food sent to
the jail and that which was served on their own table. Now and then in
the winter the turkey and the pudding would, it is true, get rather cold
in transit, the jail and the jailer's residence being some distance
apart; but the prisoners did not mind that. They used to stand at the
windows good-humoredly hailing the passers-by to kill time; and waiting
with such patience as they could muster for the coming of the good
dinner, especially when they knew that there was more "quality" company
than usual in the jailer's house. The colonel, a beautiful old
man--tall, stately, clear-eyed, clean and upright in heart and mind and
body--was a gentleman of the old school who had never earned a penny in
all the days of his blameless life. Such a picture as he was to look at,
with his long silver hair curling on his shoulders and his tall erect
form draped in the long cloak which he wore like a Roman toga!

"By the o'wars!" he used to declare, "the older I am the faster and
thicker my hair grows. As for my cloak--it's the only suitable thing,
sir, for a gentleman's wear."

His house had always been the social centre of Oldfield. When his
friends elected him to the office of jailer, deeming that the best and
easiest way of providing for him, since it was the nearest to a sinecure
afforded by county politics, his family became still more active leaders
of society. In those good old days of the Pennyroyal Region, a gentleman
of birth and breeding might engage in any honest avocation, without the
slightest injury to his social position. The only difference that the
colonel's election to the office of jailer made to his family and his
neighbors was, that the salary enabled him to indulge his hospitable and
generous inclinations more fully. The salary was small, to be sure, but
it was more than he had ever had before. About this time, too, the
colonel's five beautiful daughters--all famous beauties--were in the
perfection of bloom, and none of them had yet married, thus beginning
the breaking up of the happy home. Such dinners, such suppers, such
dances as there were in that plain old house! The colonel's handsome,
indolent, sweet-tempered wife used to say that they were always ready
for company, because they had the best they could get every day. Usually
there was not the slightest conflict between the colonel's large social
obligations and his small official duties. On the contrary, the more
fine dinners and suppers he gave the higher the prisoners lived, and the
happier everybody was. In fact, the colored vagrant who managed to get
into the jail when winter was near--when there were no vegetables in
anybody's garden, no fruit in anybody's orchard, no green corn in
anybody's field--was regarded by his fellows as very fortunate indeed.

It chanced, however, that a wandering stranger was one day locked in
among the prisoners who were otherwise all home-folks. On that very
evening the Fielding girls were giving a grand ball and supper, to which
the whole fashion of the county was invited. The prisoners, with the
exception of the stranger, were as deeply interested in what they saw
and heard of the great stir of preparation as the guests could possibly
have been. The stranger probably knew nothing of his companions' glowing
and confident expectation of a generous share of the feast. If they told
him anything of the feasting which the next day was sure to bring, he
either did not believe it, naturally enough--having had most likely some
experience with jails and jailers--or he preferred liberty to luxury. At
all events on that eventful evening the colonel, whose mind was full of
the ball, incidentally forgot to lock the door of the jail. The strange
prisoner had, therefore, nothing to do but to open the door as soon as
the jailer's back was turned; and this he did at once, disappearing in
the darkness, never to be seen or heard of again. The other prisoners
had tried to prevent his going, and they now did their utmost to give
the alarm. They hallooed long and loud at the top of their strong lungs.
But the wind was blowing hard in the wrong direction, the jail was too
far from the house, and they could not make themselves heard above the
music and dancing and laughter and drinking of toasts. Finally one of
them, who was a sort of leader because he wintered regularly in the
jail, offered to go to the colonel's house in order to let him know what
had occurred. And he did go--willingly too--although the night was very
cold and very dark, and the mud so deep that the very bottom seemed to
have dropped out of the big road. The colonel himself with his youngest
daughter was leading the Virginia reel, and just going down the middle
to the tune of _Old Dan Tucker_; so that the bearer of the evil tidings
had to wait a few moments looking in on the ball before he found a
chance to tell his story. It was a cruel blow to come at such a time,
and the colonel felt it sorely. The prisoner reported to his companions,
after his return alone to the jail, that he thought "Marse Joe was about
to swear" then and there. It was in vain that the colonel's guests
hastened to reassure him; to tell him that it would be a great saving to
the county--so all the gentlemen said--if every one of the lazy black
rascals could be induced to run away. But the colonel felt the wound to
his pride. It was a matter touching his honor. And finally, finding him
inflexible in his determination to do his duty under the circumstances,
the men present offered--almost to a man--to go with him when he went to
search for the fugitive; and they kept their word on the following day
about noon when the sun was warmest, just to please the colonel,
although they knew beforehand how futile the pursuit would be with vast
canebrakes near by and the Cypress Swamp just beyond the hills.

That memorable night of the ball was long, long past when this March
morning dawned. The colonel was very old now and very feeble, with
dimmed memories and utterly alone. He had lost his wife years before.
His five beautiful daughters were married and gone. Alice, the most
beautiful of all, the youngest, the brightest, the highest spirited, was
dead after the wrecking of her young life. The old man had aged and
failed rapidly since Alice's death. He, who used to be so cheerful, sat
brooding at first, turning his aching memories this way and that way,
trying to see whether he might not have done something to prevent the
soft-hearted child from being frightened into marrying a man whom she
feared almost as much as she disliked. He was always thinking about it
in those early days after her death in the bloom of youth and beauty,
but he rarely spoke of it even then, and after a time he was allowed to
forget. Mercifully memory faded as weakness increased. The gentle,
unhappy old man became ere long again a gentle, happy child, and
yet--even to the last--when aroused to glimmering consciousness the
gallant manner of the courtly gentleman of the old school came back.
Miss Judy thought she had never seen so polished a bearing as the
colonel's had been and would be--in a way--as long as he lived. She
wondered uneasily that morning, as she looked toward his house, whether
the servants took good care of him; and she made up her mind to be more
watchful of him herself. She was much afraid that the rain might make
his rheumatism worse.

Next to the colonel's, coming down the big road, was the Gordon place,
the largest and best kept in the village. The house was a low rambling
structure of logs, whitewashed inside and out. The rooms had been added
at random as suited the comfort and convenience of the family. It was
not the habit of the Oldfield people to consider appearances. It was not
the habit of the widow Gordon to consider anything but her own wishes.
It may have been on account of this imperiousness, this open and
scornful disregard of everything and everybody except herself and her
own comfort, that she was always called "old lady Gordon" behind her
back. She lived alone with a large retinue of servants in the
comfortable old house, spending her days in a state of mental and
physical semi-coma from over-eating and over-sleeping, using both like
lethean drugs. Miss Judy alone sometimes thought that old lady Gordon so
used them and pitied her. Old lady Gordon, who had a strong keen sense
of humor, almost masculine in its robustness, would have laughed at the
idea of Miss Judy's pity. She was the richest member of that community
in which all living was simple, and in which the extremes of riches and
poverty were not known as they are known to the greater world. Most of
the Oldfield people dwelt contentedly in the middle estate which the
wisest of men prayed for. None was poorer than Miss Judy, who had only a
pittance of a pension, the old house, and the scrap of earth; none, that
is, except Sidney Wendall, who, although she owned the log cabin which
sheltered her family and the bit of garden lying by its side, had not a
penny of income for the support of her three children, her husband's
brother, and herself. Yet Miss Judy managed to provide for Miss
Sophia--and herself also as an afterthought; and Sidney provided for her
family without difficulty, though in both cases a steady, strenuous
effort was required.

Among the few who were really well-to-do, were Tom Watson and Anne his
wife. Their house, facing Miss Judy's across the big road, was rather
more modern than the rest of the Oldfield houses, and it was better
furnished. And yet as Miss Judy looked at its closed blinds she sighed,
thinking how little money had to do with happiness, when it could give
no relief from pain of mind or body. More than a year had dragged by
since the master of that darkened household had been brought home after
the accident which had crushed the great, strong, passionate,
undisciplined, good-hearted giant into a helpless, hopeless
paralytic--as the lightning fells the mighty oak in fullest leaf. The
mistress of the stricken home had always been what the Oldfield people
called a "still-tongued" woman, and she was now become more silent than
ever. The house had never been a cheerful one, save as the noisy master
blustered in and out. Now it was sad indeed: now that both husband and
wife knew that he could never be any better, never otherwise than he
was, although he might live for years.

Miss Judy wondered as she gazed, whether Doctor Alexander, living a
little further along the big road, had yet told Anne the whole truth.
After a moment she was sure that he had not. He was the kindest of
bluff-spoken men. And what would be the use--since neither Anne nor the
doctor nor the power of the whole world of sympathy or science could do
anything more? She was glad to see the doctor's curtains still drawn. He
needed all the rest he could get; he was always overworked in his
practice for twenty miles around. And Mrs. Alexander, the doctor's wife,
was one of the rare kind, who are always ready to sleep when other
people are sleepy and to breakfast when other people are hungry: a much
rarer kind, as even Miss Judy knew, unworldly as she was, than the kind
who always expect others to be sleepy when _they_ wish to sleep and to
be ready to eat when _they_ are hungry.

In the unpainted, tumble-down house next to the doctor's, somebody was
awake and stirring. Miss Judy guessed it to be Kitty Mills, and she knew
it was more than likely that the poor woman had not been in bed at all.
It was nothing uncommon for old man Mills, Kitty's father-in-law, to
keep her busy in waiting upon him the whole night through. It was
utterly impossible for Kitty, or anybody else, to please him, but Kitty
never seemed to mind in the least; she merely laughed and tried
again--over and over with untiring kindness and unflagging patience.
Miss Judy never knew quite what to make of Kitty Mills, though she had
lived just across the big road from her through all these years. Miss
Judy could understand submission without resistance easily enough; she
had submitted to a good many hard things herself, without a murmur. But
she could not comprehend the acceptance of unkindness and injustice and
ingratitude and endless toil and hardship with actual hilarity, as Kitty
Mills accepted all of these things, day in and day out, year after year.
And there she was now singing, blithe as a lark! Well, such a
disposition as Kitty's was a good gift, Miss Judy thought almost
enviously, as though her own disposition were very bad indeed. Then she
began to reproach herself for uncharitable thoughts of old man Mills's
daughters. They may have had their reasons for bringing their father to
Kitty's house to be nursed by her, instead of nursing him themselves.
Perhaps they had brought him because they believed Kitty would take
better care of him than they could, knowing how faithfully she had
nursed their mother who had been unable to leave her bed for years, and,
indeed, up to her death, only a few months before. We cannot look into
one another's hearts, so Miss Judy reminded herself. No doubt we should
judge more justly if we could. And Sam, Kitty's husband, was really a
good, kind man, and maybe he _would_ work sometimes were it not for the
misery in his back, which always grew worse whenever work was even
mentioned in his presence. Still Miss Judy could not see, try as she
might, how Kitty Mills could laugh till she cried, when old man Mills
snatched up the dinner which she had cooked on a hot day and flung it
out the window--dishes and all.

Looking farther along the big road, Miss Judy saw that the Pettuses also
were awake and stirring about. The bachelor brother and the maiden
sister were both early risers. Mr. Pettus kept the general store, and he
liked to have it open and ready for trade when the farmers taking grain
and tobacco to market drove the big-wheeled wagons with their swaying
ox-teams through the village on the way to the river. Miss Pettus arose
with the first chicken that took its head from under its wing, her main
interest in life being concentrated in the poultry-yard. She always held
that any one having to do with hens must be up before the sun; and she
used to tell Miss Judy a great deal about the Individuality of Hens, the
subject with which she was best acquainted and upon which she discoursed
most entertainingly and instructively. Miss Judy always listened with
much interest and entire seriousness. Gentle Miss Judy had not a very
keen sense of humor; it is doubtful if any really sweet woman ever had.

"The folks who think all hens are alike except the difference that the
feathers make outside, don't know what they are talking about!" Miss
Pettus once said, in her excited way. "Hens are as different inside as
folks are. Some hens are silly and some have got plenty of sense, only
they're stubborn. There's that yellow-legged pullet of mine. _She's_ so
silly that she is just as liable to lay in the horse-trough as in her
nice, clean nest. Every blessed morning, rain or shine, unless I'm up
and on the spot before she can get into the trough, old Baldy eats an
egg with his hay, and I'm expecting every day that he'll eat her. And
there's that old dorminica, the one that Kitty Mills cheated me with
when we swapped hens that time. Well, the old dorminica ain't a _bit_
silly. She's just out and out contrary. The great, lazy, fat thing! Set
she _won't_--do what I will! And Kitty Mills _knew_ she wouldn't--knew
it just as well when we swapped as I know it this minute. There's no use
trying to persuade me that she didn't. It's awful aggravating, because
the dorminica's the heaviest hen I've got. Well, night before last I
made up my mind that I'd _make_ her set, whether she wanted to or not.
When it began to get dark and she sauntered off to go to roost, I caught
her and put her down on a nest full of fine, fresh eggs--set her down
real firm and determined, like _that_--as much as to say 'we'll _see_
whether you don't stay there,' and then I turned a box over her so that
she couldn't get out if she tried. But I couldn't help feeling kind of
uneasy, with fresh eggs gone up so high, clear to ten cents a dozen. The
next morning at break o' day, cold and rainy as it was, I put on my
overshoes and threw my shawl over my head, and went to take a peep under
the box. And there--you'll hardly believe it, Miss Judy, but I give you
my word as a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church--there was that
old dorminica _a-standing up_!"

Miss Judy had said at the time what a shame it was to waste nice eggs
so, and she had spoken with sincere feeling. She had been cherishing a
secret hope that she might get a few eggs from Miss Pettus to complete a
setting for Speckle. Miss Judy had saved ten eggs with great care,
keeping them wrapped in a flannel petticoat; but Speckle, the docile and
industrious, could easily cover fifteen and was quite willing to do it.
Now, Miss Judy's hope was lost through the dorminica's contrariness. She
thought about this again with a pang of disappointment, as she heard the
cackling and confusion going on in the Pettus poultry-yard, which told
the whole neighborhood that Miss Pettus was wide awake and actively
pursuing her chosen walk in life.

Sidney Wendall, the widow, was another early riser, as one needs be when
earning a living for a whole family by one's wits. Sidney's house, the
poorest and smallest of all the village, was the last at that end of the
big road, and stood higher than the others, far up on the hillside. As
Miss Judy looked toward it that morning, she was not thinking of Sidney
but of Doris, her daughter, whom Miss Judy loved as her own child. At
the very thought of Doris a new light came into her blue eyes and a
lovelier flush overspread her fair cheeks. She stood still for a moment,
gazing wistfully, waiting and longing for the far-off glimpse of Doris,
which nearly always sweetened the beginning of the day. On that wet
March morning there was no flutter of a little white apron, no sign of a
wafted kiss. Miss Judy sighed gently as her gaze came back to her own
yard. There were two japonica bushes, one standing on either side of the
front gate, and as Miss Judy now glanced at them she was startled to see
what seemed to be a roseate mist floating among the bare, brown
branches, still dripping and shining with the night's rain.




III

PHASES OF VILLAGE LIFE


A rosy mist often floated between Miss Judy and the bare, brown things
of life. She knew it, realizing fully how many mistakes she made in
seldom seeing things as they actually were. She had never been able to
trust her own eyes, and now they were not even as strong as they used to
be, although they were as blue as ever. The japonica bushes were only a
few paces distant, the front yard being but the merest strip of earth;
yet the ground was very wet, and Miss Judy was wearing prunella gaiters.
They were the only shoes she had; they were also the only kind she had
ever known a lady to wear. Shoes made of leather, however fine, would
have seemed to Miss Judy--had she known anything about them--as much too
heavy, too stiff, and altogether too clumsy for the delicate, soundless
step of a gentlewoman.

Moving out on the sunken stone of the door-step, she was still unable to
tell with certainty whether the japonicas were actually budding. She
stood peering helplessly, almost frowning in her effort to see. It was
really important that she should know as soon as possible. The coming of
spring was important to everybody in the Pennyroyal Region, where every
man was a farmer--the merchant, the lawyer, the doctor, and even the
minister; and where every woman had a garden, large and rich like old
lady Gordon's, or small and poor as Miss Judy's was. And the buds of the
japonica were the gay little heralds of the spring, coming clad all in
scarlet satin, while the rest of nature wore dull and sombre robes.
Flashing out from their dark hiding-places at the first touch of the
sun, the sight of them stirred the ladies of Oldfield as nothing else
ever did. The men, too, always noticed this first sign of spring's
approach. But it was the burning of the tobacco-beds on the wooded
hillsides, the floating of long, thin banners of pale blue smoke across
a wintry sky, which moved the men. It was only in the breasts of the
gentle gardeners of Oldfield that the bursting forth of the japonica
buds, these vivid points of flame, always fired a perennial ambition.
For the housewife who could send a neighbor the earliest cool, green
lettuce, or the first warm, red radishes might well be a proud woman,
and was a personage to be looked up to and to be envied during all the
rest of the year. And was it not rather a pretty ambition and even a
laudable one? Have not most of us noted pettier ambitions and far less
laudable ones in a much larger world?

Aside from this public and universal interest and anxiety concerning
gardening time, Miss Judy had good private reasons for wishing to get an
early start. Early vegetables were more profitable than late ones in
Oldfield as elsewhere. Of course Miss Judy never thought of selling any
of the things that grew in her little garden. She would have been
shocked at the suggestion. No one in Oldfield ever sold anything, except
Mr. Pettus, who kept the general store, and who sold everything that the
Oldfield people needed. It is true that Miss Judy had a regular
engagement with Mr. Pettus to exchange green stuff for sugar or knitting
materials, or a yard of white muslin to make Miss Sophia a tucker, or a
bit of net to freshen her cap, and occasionally even some trifle for
herself. _That_, however, was an entirely different matter from vulgarly
selling things. Mr. Pettus understood the difference quite as clearly as
Miss Judy did, and he always took the greatest pains to show his
appreciation of her thoughtful condescension in letting him have the
vegetables. He was always most generous too in these delicate and
complicated transactions. It upset Miss Judy somewhat, at first, to find
him willing to give more sugar for onions than for genteeler vegetables,
especially in the spring. But it was never hard for Miss Judy to give up
when no real principle was involved; and necessity makes most of us do
certain things which we disapprove of. So that, sighing gently, Miss
Judy squeezed her heartsease and mignonette into a smaller space, and
planted more onion-sets.

She was thinking about those onion-sets as she looked at the japonica
bushes, trying to see whether they were actually budding. She could not,
as a lady, admit even to herself how largely her sister's living
depended upon the ignoble bulbs even more than upon the refined produce
of the little garden. Her own living also depended upon this bit of
earth; but that was not nearly so important, from her point of view.
Miss Sophia came first in everything, even in the annual consideration
of the problem of the onion-sets. Miss Judy, thinking that the house in
which gentlewomen lived should never smell of anything but dried rose
leaves, asked Miss Sophia if she did not think the same. Miss Sophia,
who had thought nothing about it, and who objected to the odor of onions
only because it made her very hungry, answered "Just so, sister Judy,"
very promptly and very decisively, as she always answered everything
that Miss Judy said. Consequently the tidy calico bag containing the
onion-sets was banished to the kitchen for the winter, to become a
source of secret uneasiness to Miss Judy the whole season through.
Merica, the cook, was not so dependable a personage as Miss Judy could
have wished her to be. There was indeed something disturbingly uncertain
in her very name. Miss Judy always thought it must be _A_-merica, but
Merica always stoutly insisted that her whole real true name was
Mericus-Ves-Pat-rick-One-of-the-Earliest-Settlers-of-Kentucky, and Miss
Judy gave up all further discussion of the subject simply because she
was overwhelmed, not because she was convinced.

Remembering that the onion-sets had been quite safe when she last looked
at them, Miss Judy felt a renewed anxiety to know certainly whether the
japonicas were budding. And the only way to know was to get her fathers
far-off spectacles. These were privately used by both the little sisters
upon great emergencies, such as this was. But they had never been put on
by either in public; and Miss Judy was much startled at the thought of
putting them on at the front door. Moreover, they were always kept
carefully hidden in the left-hand corner, at the very back of the top
drawer of the chest of drawers in the little sisters' room, and Miss
Sophia was still asleep. Miss Judy could tell by the way the sun touched
the sunken stone of the door-step that it wanted two or three minutes of
the time when she always rolled the cannon-ball which held the door
open, as a polite hint to Miss Sophia to get up. Under the unusual
circumstances, however, Miss Judy felt justified in rolling it at once.
It was a big ball weighing twenty-five pounds, and it was a good deal
battered by distinguished service. It had come indeed from the
battle-field at New Orleans, and there was a tradition that it was the
identical cannon-ball which had killed the British general. Miss Judy,
however, could never be brought to entertain any such dreadful belief.
She was quite content and very, very proud to know beyond a shadow of a
doubt that many of those gallant Kentuckians who rushed in at the last
desperate moment--travel-worn, starving, ragged, and armed only with
hunters' rifles--to do such valiant service in turning the tide of that
momentous battle, were true sons of the Pennyroyal Region. Miss Judy was
aware of the strange and unaccountable misstatement concerning the
conduct of the Kentuckians, made by General Jackson in his report of the
battle. But she was also aware that the general--who was not as a rule
very quick to take things back--had corrected that misstatement so
promptly and so thoroughly, that it had not been necessary for General
Adair to ride from Kentucky to New Orleans to fight a duel with him
about the slander, although that gallant Kentuckian was all ready and
eager to go.

And was there not also that remarkable song, celebrating the part taken
by "The Hunters of Kentucky" in the battle of New Orleans? Everybody was
singing it when Miss Judy was a girl; and although she could not sing
she had often hummed the ringing chorus:--

    "Oh, dear Kentucky,
    The Hunters of Kentucky;
    Dear old Kentucky,
    The Hunters of Kentucky."

And she had even repeated the five stirring verses without making a
single mistake:--

    "You've read I reckon, in the prints,
      How Pakenham attempted
    To make Old Hickory wince
      But soon his scheme repented;
    For we with rifles ready cocked,
      Thought such occasion lucky;
    And soon around our general flocked
      The Hunters of Kentucky.

    "The British felt so very sure
      The battle they would win it,
    Americans could not endure
      The battle not a minute;
    And Pakenham he made his brag
      If he in fight was lucky,
    He'd have the girls and cotton bags
      In spite of old Kentucky.

    "But Jackson he was wide awake
      And not scared at trifles,
    For well he knew what aim to take
      With our Kentucky rifles;
    He led us to the cypress swamp,
      The ground was low and mucky,
    There stood John Bull in martial pomp
      And here was old Kentucky.

    "A bank was raised to hide our breast--
      Not that we thought of dying--
    But we liked firing from a rest
      Unless the game was flying;
    Behind it stood our little force,
      None wished that it were greater,
    For every man was half a horse
      And half an alligator.

    "They did not our patience tire,
      Before they showed their faces,
    We did not choose to waste our fire,
      So snugly kept our places;
    But when no more we saw them blink
      We thought it time to stop 'em--
    It would have done you good, I think,
      To see Kentucky drop 'em."

Then gentle Miss Judy, repeating these lines, used to grow almost
bloodthirsty in trying to repeat the things which she had heard her
father say about this,--the part played by the hunters of Kentucky at
the battle of New Orleans,--as having been the first recognition of
marksmanship in warfare. Miss Judy had no clear understanding of what
her father had meant, but she usually repeated what he had said about
the sharpshooting of the hunters whenever she spoke of the battle. She
thrilled with patriotism every time she touched the cannon-ball. It was
so big that both her little hands were required to roll it into the
hollow which it had worn in the floor of the passage.

Miss Sophia obeyed the solemn rumble of the cannon-ball as she always
obeyed everything that she understood--docile little soul. She was
almost as slow of mind as of body. A round, heavy, dark, uninteresting
old woman, utterly unlike her sister, except in gentleness and goodness.
On Miss Sophia's side of the bed were three stout steps, forming a sort
of dwarf stairway, and down this she now came slowly, backwards and in
perfect safety. But Miss Sophia's getting to the floor was yet a long
way from being ready for breakfast. It was hard to see how so small a
body, so simply clothed, could get into such an intricate tangle of
strings and hooks and buttons on every morning of her life. Miss Judy's
sweet patience never wavered. She never knew that she was called upon to
exercise any toward Miss Sophia. The possibility of hurrying Miss Sophia
did not enter her mind even on that urgent occasion, when her need of
the far-off spectacles made it uncommonly hard to wait. Finally, there
being no indication of Miss Sophia's progress, other than the subdued
sounds of the struggle through which she was passing, Miss Judy timidly
approached the door of the bedroom. It was open, but she delicately
turned her head away as she tapped upon it to attract Miss Sophia's
attention, before asking permission to come in. Miss Sophia invited her
to enter, giving the permission as formally as Miss Judy had asked it.
Miss Judy apologized as she accepted the invitation, saying that she
hoped Miss Sophia would pardon her for keeping her back turned, which
she was very, very careful to continue to do. She did not say what it
was that she wanted to get out of the top drawer. The far-off spectacles
were rarely mentioned between the sisters, and Miss Sophia never
questioned anything that her sister wished to do.

Still scrupulously averting her gaze, Miss Judy found what she wanted,
and sidled softly from the room, thanking Miss Sophia and holding the
spectacles down at her side, hidden in the folds of her skirt. Stepping
out on the door-stone, she looked cautiously up and down the big road.
It was still deserted, not a human being was in sight. Only a solitary
cow went soberly past, with her bell clanging not unmusically on the
stillness. Nevertheless, Miss Judy gave another glance of precaution,
surveying the highway from end to end from the tavern on the north to
Sidney Wendall's on the south. As the little lady's eyes rested for a
moment upon the house on the hillside, a girl came out as though the
wistful gaze had drawn her forth. Miss Judy's blue eyes could barely
make out the slender young figure standing in the dazzling sunlight; but
she knew that it was Doris, and she did not need the sight of her sweet
old eyes to see the wafting of the kiss which the girl threw. Miss
Judy's own little hands flew up to throw two kisses in return. She
straightway forgot all about the spectacles. She no longer cared how
large the huge frames might look on her small face, nor how old they
might make her appear.

It was always so. At the sight of Doris, Miss Judy always ceased to be
an old maid and became a young mother. For there is a motherhood of the
spirit as well as the motherhood of the flesh, and the one may be truer
than the other.




IV

THE CHILD OF MISS JUDY'S HEART


It is among the sad things of many good lives, that those who love each
other most often understand each other least.

No mother was ever truer than Sidney Wendall, so far as her light led.
None ever tried harder to do her whole duty by her children, and none,
perhaps, could have come nearer doing it by Billy and Kate, given no
better opportunities than Sidney had.

It was Doris, the eldest child, and the one whom she loved best and was
proudest of--the darling of her heart, the very apple of her eye--that
Sidney never knew what to do with. From the very cradle she had found
Doris utterly unmanageable. Not that the child was unruly or
self-willed; she was ever the gentlest and most obedient of the three
children. It was only that the mother and the child could not understand
one another. That was all; but it was enough to send Sidney, whom few
difficulties daunted, to Miss Judy, almost in tears and quite in
despair, while Doris was hardly beyond babyhood.

"You can always tell a body in trouble what to do," she appealed to Miss
Judy. "Maybe you can even tell me what to do with that child. I know how
rough I am, but I don't know how to help it. I'm bound to bounce around
and make a noise. I don't know any other way of getting along. And then
there are Billy and Kate. They won't do a thing they're told unless
they're stormed at. Yet if I shout at them, there's Doris turning white,
and shaking, and looking as if she'd surely die. I tell you, Miss Judy,
I feel as if I'd been given a fine china cup to tote and might break it
any minute."

Miss Judy, the comforter of all the afflicted and the adviser of all the
troubled, said what she could to help Sidney. Doris _was_ different from
other children. There was no doubt about that and about its being
difficult to know how to deal with such a sensitive nature. Miss Judy
said that she did not believe, however, that any other mother would have
done any better than Sidney had--which comforted Sidney inexpressibly.
The little body could not think of anything to advise. She did not know
much about children, and she had not much confidence in her own judgment
in matters concerning them. So that, at last, after a long talk and for
lack of a clearer plan, Miss Judy proposed that Sidney should bring
Doris the next morning when setting out on her professional round, and
should leave the little one with Miss Sophia and herself. Miss Sophia
might think of the very thing to do; without living in the house with
Miss Sophia it was impossible to know how sound and practical her
judgment was--so Miss Judy told Sidney. The kind proposal lightened
Sidney's heart and she accepted it at once. She had her own opinion as
to the value of Miss Sophia's ideas, but she responded as she knew would
please Miss Judy; and she was sure at all events that Miss Judy, who was
just such another sensitive plant, would know what to do with Doris.

Miss Judy on her side was not nearly so confident. When Sidney had gone
and she began to realize what she had undertaken, she was a good deal
frightened. She not only knew almost nothing about children, as she had
confessed to this troubled poor mother; but she had always been rather
afraid of them. It had always seemed to her an appalling responsibility
to assume the forming of one of these impressionable little souls; she
had often wondered tremblingly at the lightness with which many mothers
assumed it. And here _she_ was--rushing voluntarily into the very
responsibility which she had always regarded with awe--almost with
terror. More and more disturbed and perplexed as she thought of her
foolish rashness, she nevertheless mechanically set about getting ready
for taking charge of Doris during the next day, and perhaps for many
other days, until she had at least tried to see what she could do for
the child. As a first step in the preparation she climbed the steep
stairs to the loft, which she had not entered for years, and brought
down an old doll of Miss Sophia's, and dusted it and straightened its
antiquated clothes; putting it in readiness for the ordeal of Doris on
the following morning.

"She can sit on the home-made rug, you know, sister Sophia," said Miss
Judy, nervously.

"Just so, sister Judy," promptly and firmly responded Miss Sophia, who
never noticed where anybody sat.

"And don't you think it would be a good idea to have Merica make a pig
and a kitten out of gingerbread? They might perhaps amuse the child, and
keep her from crying. A half pint of flour would be quite enough, and we
_have_ to have the fire anyway because it's ironing day. Then Merica
picked up a big basket of chips behind the cabinet-maker's shop this
morning."

"Just so, sister Judy," answered Miss Sophia, who left all provision for
fire and for everything else wholly to her sister. "And she might make
_us_ some gingerbread too, while she's about it."

"To be sure!" exclaimed Miss Judy, looking at Miss Sophia in loving
admiration. "So she can. How quick you are to see the right way, sister
Sophia. I never seem to think of things as you do."

But even as she spoke, a thought flashed uneasily across her mind,
causing her sweet old face to beam less brightly. What if the child
would _not_ sit on the home-made rug? She had never been used to
carpets--poor little thing. What if she crumbled the gingerbread all
over everything, as Miss Judy had seen children do, time and again! The
thought of such desecration of the carpet that her mother had made, for
which she had carded the wool and spun the warp and woven the woof, all
with her own dear little hands, made Miss Judy feel almost faint. The
risk of such danger threw her into more and more of a panic. She hardly
slept that night, troubled by dread of what she had so thoughtfully
undertaken. She was pale and trembling with fright when Sidney brought
Doris and left her early on the following day.

But the child sat quite still on the rug where her mother had placed
her; and she did not cry when Sidney went away, as Miss Judy feared she
would, although her lips quivered. She soon turned to look at the doll,
which Miss Judy hastened to give her to divert her attention,--looking
at it as tender little mothers look at afflicted babies. Then she gave
her attention to the gingerbread kitten, and, later, to the gingerbread
pig; and Miss Judy was pleased, though she could hardly have told why,
to notice that Doris ate the pig first and hesitated some time before
eating the kitten.

Miss Judy gave an involuntary sigh of relief when both the pig and the
kitten had disappeared without leaving a crumb. She instinctively turned
toward Miss Sophia with a pardonable little air of triumph, and was
disappointed to find her asleep in her chair. Thus Miss Judy and Doris
were left alone together, and presently the quiet child lifted her grave
brown eyes to the little lady's anxious blue ones and they exchanged a
first long, bashful look. Doris was not old enough to remember what she
thought of Miss Judy at that time; but Miss Judy always remembered how
Doris looked--such a wonderfully beautiful, gentle little creature--as
she sat there so gravely, looking up with her mites of hands folded on
her lap. After a time, as Miss Sophia slumbered peacefully on, the shy
child and the shyer old lady began to make timid advances to one
another. Doris undressed the forlorn old doll with cautious delight, and
Miss Judy dressed it again with exquisite care while Doris leaned on her
knee, hardly knowing what she did, so intense was her breathless
interest in what Miss Judy was doing. The shyest are always the most
trusting, if they trust at all. When Sidney, returning from her rounds,
came by at nightfall to take Doris home, the child was no longer in the
least afraid of Miss Judy; and Miss Judy was not nearly so much
frightened as she had been at first.

Yet it was, after all, surprising, considering how timid they both were,
that they should so soon have become tenderly and deeply attached to
each other. But every day that Sidney brought Doris and left her, she
was happier to come and more willing to stay; and erelong the day on
which she had not come would have been an empty one and dull indeed for
Miss Judy. One bright morning they had been very, very happy together.
Miss Sophia nodded as usual in her low rocking-chair, and Miss Judy was
darning her sister's stockings while Doris played at her feet.

"Miss Dudy," the child said suddenly, raising her large, serious eyes to
Miss Judy's sweet face with a puzzled look; "was it you or my mammy that
borned me?"

Miss Judy started,--blushing, smiling, looking like a beautiful
girl,--and bending down she gathered the little one in her arms and held
her for a long time very, very close. From that moment her love for
Doris assumed a different character.

It was a love which grew with the child's growth; which watched and
fostered every new beauty of character as the girl blossomed into early
womanhood, beautiful and sweet as a tall white flower. Gradually Doris
became as the sun and the moon to Miss Judy, the first object when she
arose in the morning, her last thought when she lay down at night. Yet
this devotion to Doris, and absorption in the girl's interests and
future, did not lessen in the least her devotion to Miss Sophia, her
ceaseless watchfulness over her welfare, her tender care for her
happiness. Her love for Doris never touched her love for her sister at
any point. The two loves were so distinct, so unlike, so widely apart
that there could be no conflict. It is true that Miss Judy's love for
Miss Sophia was also strongly and tenderly maternal. But Miss Judy's
gentle heart was so full of this mother-love--single and simple--that
some of it might have been given to the whole human race. Her love for
Doris was something much more exclusive, something infinitely more
subtle than this, which is shared in a measure by every womanly woman.
It was the romantic, poetic love which is given by loving age to lovable
youth when it recalls life's dawn-light to the twilight of a life which
has never known the full sunrise.

With ineffable tenderness Miss Judy yearned to lead Doris toward the
best, the finest, the highest, toward all that she herself had reached,
and toward much which she had missed. The quaint, the antiquated, the
absurd, the enchanting things that the little lady taught the little
child, the young maiden! There was nothing so coarse as Shakespeare and
nothing so commonplace as the musical glasses. Shakespeare seemed to
Miss Judy, who knew him only by hearsay, as being a little too decided,
a little too distinctively masculine. It was her theory of manners that
girls should learn only purely feminine things. The musical glasses she
would have deemed rather undesirable as being less modish than the
guitar, and consequently not so well adapted to the high polishing of a
young lady of quality, of such fine breeding as she had determined that
Doris's should be. The guitar which led Miss Judy to this conclusion had
belonged to her mother. Its faded blue ribbon, tied in an old-fashioned
bow, still bore the imprint of her vanished fingers. The ribbon smelt of
dried rose leaves, as the old music-books did too, when Miss Judy got
them out of the cabinet in the darkened parlor, and gave them to Doris,
smiling a little sadly, as she always smiled when thinking of her
mother. Miss Judy preferred Tom Moore's songs, because they were very
sentimental, and also because they were the only ones that she knew. She
had never been able to sing, but she had very high ideals of what she
called "expression," and she could play the guitar after a pretty, airy,
tinkling old fashion. So that Doris, having a low, sweet voice of much
natural music and some real talent for the art, learned easily enough
through even Miss Judy's methods of teaching; and came erelong to sing
of "Those endearing young charms" and "The heart that has truly loved"
in a bewitchingly heart-broken way; while the faded blue ribbon fell
round her lovely young shoulders.

It was really a pity that no one except Miss Sophia saw or heard those
lessons--which must have been so well worth seeing and hearing. Miss
Judy and Doris were both so entirely in earnest in all that they were
doing. Both were so thoroughly convinced that the things being taught
and learned were precisely the things which a young gentlewoman should
know. Yet nobody but poor Miss Sophia, who was asleep most of the time,
ever had so much as a glimpse of all that was constantly going on in
this forming of a young lady of quality. It was another part of Miss
Judy's theory of manners that everything concerning a gentlewoman, young
or old, must be strictly private. When, therefore, it came to such
delicate matters as walking and courtesying--as a young lady of quality
should walk and courtesy--not even Miss Sophia was permitted to be
present. Miss Judy took Doris into the darkened parlor and raised the
shades only a cautious inch or two, so that, while they could see to
move about, no living eye might behold the charming scene which was
taking place. And there in this dim light, the dainty old lady and the
graceful young girl would take delicate steps and make wonderful
courtesies--grave as grave could be--all up and down, and up and down
that sad old room.

Let nobody think, however, that Miss Judy thought only of
accomplishments, while she was thus throwing her whole heart and mind
and soul into the rearing and the training of this child of her spirit.
The substantial branches of education were not neglected. Miss Judy
tried untiringly to help Doris in gaining a store of really useful
knowledge. She did not know so well how to go about this as she did
about the music and the courtesy. She knew little if any more of the
hard prosaic side of the world than Doris herself knew--which was
nothing at all. But she had a few good old books. Her father had been a
true lover of the best in literature, and her mother had been as fond of
sentiment in fiction as in real life. These books, thick, stubby old
volumes bound in leather, gathered by them, were Miss Judy's greatest
pride and delight. She therefore led Doris to them in due time,
impressing her with proper reverence, and thus the girl became in a
measure acquainted with a very few of the few really great in letters,
and learned to know them as they may be known to an old lady and a young
girl who have never had a glimpse of the world.

Miss Judy had but one book which was less than a half century in age.
That one book, however, was very, very new indeed and so remarkable that
Miss Judy held it to be worthy of a place with the old great ones. She
had already read it several times, and yet, strange to say, she had not
given it to Doris to read. Of course she had told her about it as soon
as it came from the thoughtful friend in Virginia who had sent it. But,
for certain reasons which were not quite clear to herself, she was
doubtful about its being the kind of a book best calculated to be really
improving to Doris. She had read it aloud to Miss Sophia (who tried her
best to keep awake), and she was confidently relying upon her judgment,
which she considered so much sounder and more practical than her own, in
making the decision. It was quite a serious matter, and Miss Judy was
still earnestly though silently considering it after breakfast on that
morning in March.

"The more I think of it the surer I feel that the main trouble with
Becky was that she had no proper bringing up, poor thing;" remarked Miss
Judy suddenly and rather absently, as if speaking more to herself than
to her sister.

They sat side by side in their little rocking-chairs as they loved to
sit, and they were busily engaged in sorting garden seeds. That is, Miss
Judy was sorting the seeds while Miss Sophia held the neat little calico
bags which Miss Judy had made in the fall, while Miss Sophia held the
calico. Still, Miss Sophia's cooperation, slight as it seemed, really
required a good deal of effort and very close attention. It was all she
could do to keep the bags on her round little knees; nature, who is
niggardly in many things, having denied the poor lady a lap.

"Who?" asked Miss Sophia, staring, and struggling with the seed-bags.
"_What_ Betty?"

"Why, Becky Sharp, of course," said Miss Judy.

She was much surprised, and a little hurt that Miss Sophia should so
soon have forgotten Becky, when they had talked about her until they had
gone to bed on the night before, to say nothing of many other times. But
she was only a bit hurt, she was never offended by anything that Miss
Sophia did or said, and she went on as if she had not been even
disappointed. "We must make up our minds as to the advisability of
giving Doris the book to read before long. I was just wondering whether
_you_ thought as I think, sister Sophia, that if Becky's mother had
lived she would have been taught better than to do those foolish things,
which were so shockingly misunderstood. I firmly believe that if Becky
had been properly brought up, poor thing, she might have made a good
woman. I have been waiting for a good opportunity to ask _your_ opinion.
What would _we_ have been, without our dear mother?" she urged, as
though pleading with Miss Sophia not to be too hard on Becky. "And she
was always so poor, too. Mercifully _we've_ never had actual poverty to
contend with, as--poor Becky had. Most of the trouble came from
that--Becky herself said it did, you remember, sister Sophia."

"Just so, sister Judy," responded Miss Sophia, warmly, and without a
shade of reserve, although she had but the haziest notion of who Becky
was, or had been, or might be; and speaking with such firm decision that
Miss Judy felt as if the matter were really about decided at last.




V

AN UNCONSCIOUS PHILOSOPHER


There is much more in the way that a thing is said than we are apt to
realize. Miss Sophia always repeated her vague and unvaried formula,
whenever Miss Judy seemed to expect a response, and she always did it
with such an effect of firm conviction as renewed Miss Judy's confidence
in the soundness of her judgment and value of her advice. In this
satisfactory manner the little sisters were again discussing the new
book several weeks later, when the spring was well advanced. They had
thus debated the serious question of Doris's being or not being
permitted to read the new novel, for an hour or more; and they might
have gone on discussing it indefinitely, as they did most things, had
not Sidney Wendall come in quite unexpectedly.

As the Oldfield front doors set open all day, there was not much
ceremony in the announcement of visitors. The caller usually tapped on
the door and entered the house forthwith, going on to seek the family
wherever the members of it were most likely to be found. Sidney now gave
the tap required by politeness, and then, hearing the murmur of voices,
went straight through the passage and into the room in which the sisters
were sitting. They both glanced up with a look of pleased surprise as
Sidney's tall form darkened the doorway. Miss Judy could not rise to
receive Sidney on account of having an apronful of late garden-seeds.
Her sister was holding the calico bags, as usual; and then Miss Sophia's
getting out of a chair and on her feet was always a matter of time and
difficulty. But their faces beamed a warm welcome, and Miss Judy called
Merica away from the ironing-table in the kitchen to fetch the parlor
rocking-chair for Sidney to sit in, which was in itself a distinguished
attention, such as could not but be flattering to any guest. And when
Sidney was seated, Merica was requested to draw a bucket of water fresh
from the well, so that Sidney might have a nice cool drink.

Sidney, whom no one ever thought of calling Mrs. Wendall, was a large,
lean, angular woman. She had come in knitting. She always knitted as she
walked, carrying the big ball of yarn under her strong left arm. Her
calico sunbonnet was always worn far back on her head. She took it off
that day as soon as she sat down, and hung it on the knob of the chair.
Then she removed the horn comb from her hair, let it drop, shook it out,
twisted it up again with a swish--into a very tight knot--and thrust the
comb back in place with singular emphasis. Everybody in Oldfield knew
what those gestures meant. Nobody seemed to notice what wonderful hair
she had. It was long, thick, silky, rippling, and of the color of the
richest gold. It was most beautiful hair--rich and dazzling enough to
crown a young queen--and most strangely out of place on Sidney's homely,
middle-aged head; with its plain sallow face, its pale shrewd eyes, its
grotesquely long nose, its expression of whimsical humor, and its wide
jester's mouth.

The Oldfield people were so well used to seeing Sidney take her hair
down, and twist it up again, even in the middle of the big road, that
they had long since ceased to observe the hair itself. It was the
meaning of the gestures that instantly caught and held the eager
interest of the entire community. For, whenever Sidney took off her
bonnet, and let down her hair and shook it vigorously and swished it up
again into a tighter knot, and put the comb back with a certain degree
of emphasis, everybody knew that there was something interesting in the
wind. Poor Miss Sophia, who was not quick to understand many things,
knew what _those_ signs meant, and when she saw them that day she
straightened up suddenly, wide awake, and breathing hard as she always
was when trying her best to keep the track of what was going on, and
forgetting all about the seed-bags, which abruptly slid over the
precipice, wholly unheeded. Even Miss Judy, who so disliked gossip,
could not help feeling somewhat agreeably excited and turning quite
pink, as she remembered that she had never known Sidney's news to do any
harm, to wound any one, to injure any one, or to make mischief of any
description. She had often wondered how Sidney _could_ talk all day
long, day after day, year in and year out, going constantly from house
to house without doing harm sometimes through sheer inadvertence. She
now looked at Sidney in smiling expectancy, turning a rosier pink from
growing anticipation.

The mere fact of an unexpected visit from Sidney was enough to throw any
Oldfield household into a state of delightful excitement. Sidney's
visits were like visits of Royalty; they always had to be arranged for
in advance, and they always had to be paid for afterwards. It was
clearly understood by everybody that Sidney went nowhere without a
formal invitation given some time in advance, and an explicit and
sufficient inducement. Yet there was nothing in this to her discredit;
she was far from being the mere sordid mercenary that Royalty seems now
and then to be. Sidney was an open, upright worker in life's vineyard,
and did nothing discreditable in holding herself worthy of her hire. It
was necessary for her to earn a living for five needy souls; for her
three children, her husband's brother, and herself. There were not many
avenues open to women-workers in any part of the world in the day of
Sidney's direst need. There were fewer where she lived than almost
anywhere else throughout the civilized earth. She did what she might do;
she learned to earn bread for her family by the only honorable means in
her power. She studied to amuse the people of the village who had no
other source of entertainment. She raised her adopted profession until
it became an art. It is probable that she had the comedian's talent to
begin with. She certainly possessed the comic actor's mouth. And then
she doubtless soon learned, as most of us learn sooner or later, that it
is more profitable to make the world laugh than to make it weep. At all
events the part that she played was nearly always a merry one. Only
once, indeed, during the whole of her long professional career, was she
ever known to come close to tragedy; but those who were present at the
time never forgot what she said, how she said it, nor how she looked
while saying it.

It happened one night at old lady Gordon's, over the supper table. The
party had been a gay one, and Sidney had been the life of it, as she
always was of every gathering in Oldfield. She had told her best
stories, she had given out her latest news, she had said many witty and
amusing things, until the whole table was in what the ladies of Oldfield
would have described as a "regular gale." It was not until they were
rising from the supper, still laughing at Sidney's jokes, that she said,
in an off-hand way--as if upon second thought--that she would like to
have some of the dainties, with which the table was laden, to take home
to her children. Before old lady Gordon had time to say, "Certainly,
I'll fix up the basket," as everybody always said whenever Sidney made
that expected remark, Miss Pettus blazed out:--

"How _can_ you!" she cried, turning in her fiery way upon Sidney. "How
can you sit here, eating, laughing, and spinning yarns, when you know
your children are hungry at home--and never think of them till now?" Her
little black eyes were flashing, and she looked Sidney straight in the
face, meaning every word that she said.

The very breath was taken out of the company. The ladies were stricken
speechless with amazement and dismay. Even old lady Gordon had not a
thing ready to say. Sidney, too, stood still and silent for a moment,
resting her hand on the back of her chair. She turned white, standing
very erect, looking taller than ever, and very calm--a figure of great
dignity.

"I think of my children first, last, and all the time," she said quietly
and slowly after an instant's strained silence. Her cool, pale eyes met
Miss Pettus's hot black eyes steadily.

"But I don't think it best to talk about them too much;" she went on
calmly. "Do any of you ladies think my children would get their supper
any sooner if I came here whining about how hungry they were? Would you
ever invite me to come again if I did that--even once? Would you, Mrs.
Gordon? Would you invite me to _your_ parties, Miss Pettus? Wouldn't
you, and you, and all of you"--turning from one to another--"begin right
away to regard me as a tiresome beggar and my children as paupers? I am
afraid you would. It would only be human nature. I'm not blaming
anybody. But--I don't intend to risk it. I think things are better as
they stand now. I amuse you and you help me. I give you what you like in
exchange for what my children need. It's a fair trade; you're all bound
by it to regard me and my children with respect."

Miss Pettus was crying as if her heart would break long before Sidney
was done speaking. She fairly flew at her and, throwing her arms around
Sidney's neck, begged her forgiveness with a humility such as no one
ever knew that hasty, hot-tempered, well-meaning little woman to show
over any other of her many mistakes. Never afterward would she allow
Sidney to be criticised in her presence. She quarrelled fiercely with
the doctor's wife for saying that she really could not see how Sidney
got her news, and for quoting the doctor's opinion that it must come
over the grapevine telegraph. Miss Pettus would have had her brother
send Sidney's children a portion of everything that his store contained.
But Sidney would not accept from any one a pennyworth more than she
earned. If Miss Pettus wished to send the Wendall family a pound of
candles after Sidney had supped with her, spicing the meal with news and
anecdote, all very well and good. Or if, after Sidney's making a special
effort to enliven one of Miss Pettus's dinner parties in the middle of
the day, that lady suggested giving Uncle Watty a pair of her brother's
trousers, Sidney was glad and even thankful. To get her brother-in-law's
clothes was, indeed, the hardest problem she had to solve. And then,
when Uncle Watty had done with the trousers, they could be cut down for
her son, Billy. Under such proper circumstances, Sidney accepted all
sorts of things from everybody--anything, indeed, that she chanced to
want--with as complete independence and as entire freedom from any
feeling of obligation, as any artist accepts his fee for entertaining
the public.

The obligation commonly imposed by hospitality had consequently no
weight whatever with Sidney, and in this, also, she was not unlike some
other celebrities. She did not hesitate to express her opinion of old
lady Gordon, whose supper she had eaten on the previous evening, when
Miss Judy, knowing about it and wishing to start the conversational ball
rolling, now asked how things passed off. Sidney had swapped her
spiciest stories for old lady Gordon's richest food. Old lady Gordon was
perfectly free to think and to say what she pleased about those stories
(provided she never mentioned them before Miss Judy); and Sidney, on her
side, held herself equally free to think and to say what she thought of
her hostess and of the supper too, had that been open to
criticism--which old lady Gordon's suppers never were.

"That old woman is a regular _Hessian_," was Sidney's reply to Miss
Judy's innocent inquiry.

"Dear me!" exclaimed Miss Judy, quite startled and rather shocked.
"Really, Sidney, I don't think you should call anybody such a name as
that."

"Well, I'd like to know what else a body is to call an old woman who
hasn't got a mite of natural feeling."

"But we have no right to say that either of anybody. We can't tell,"
pleaded gentle Miss Judy.

She was wondering, nevertheless, as she spoke, what could have occurred
at old lady Gordon's on the night before. It was plain that the news
which Sidney was holding back for an effective bringing forth must have
had something to do with the visit. However, it was always useless to
try to make Sidney tell what she had to tell, until she was quite ready.
Even Miss Sophia was well aware of this peculiarity of Sidney's, and,
breathing harder than ever in the intensity of her curiosity and
suspense, she leaned forward, doing her utmost to understand what was
being said in leading up to the news. Miss Judy, of course, understood
Sidney's methods perfectly, through long and intimate acquaintance with
them; and then, aside from the fact that Sidney could not be hurried,
Miss Judy always tried anyway to turn the talk away from unpleasant
themes.

"Did you remember to ask Mrs. Gordon about Mr. Beauchamp?" Miss Judy now
inquired, adroitly bending Sidney's thoughts toward a delightful subject
in which they were both deeply interested. "Did she know whether he used
to be a dancing-master in his own country, as we have understood? I do
hope you haven't changed your mind," she added earnestly. "It is really
most important for Doris to learn to dance."

"No, I haven't changed it a bit. I've got the same Hard-shell, Whiskey
Baptist mind that I've had for the last forty years. But it isn't as _I_
think about dancing, or anything else that Doris is concerned in. It's
as you think--"

"No--no, you mustn't say that," protested Miss Judy.

"I do say it, I mean it, and I intend to abide by it," declared Sidney,
laying her knitting on her lap and loosing rings of yarn from her big
ball and holding them out at arm's length. "You've always known better
what was good for Doris than I ever have. When it comes to a difference
of opinion I'm bound to give up."

Miss Judy blushed and looked distressed. "It is really such an important
matter," she urged timidly. "A young lady cannot possibly learn how to
walk and how to carry herself with real grace, without being taught
dancing. If I only had some one to play the tune, I might teach Doris
the rudiments myself; or sister Sophia might, if she hadn't that
shortness of breath, and if I could play any instrumental piece on the
guitar except the Spanish fandango. That tune, however, is not very well
suited to the minuet, which is the only dance that we ever learned.
Mother taught us the minuet, because she thought it necessary for all
well brought up girls to learn it just for deportment, though she knew
we should probably never have an opportunity to dance it in society."

Thus reminded of the many things that they had missed, Miss Judy turned
and smiled a little sadly at Miss Sophia, as though it were the sweetest
and most natural thing in the world to speak of Miss Sophia's dancing
the minuet,--poor, little, round, slow Miss Sophia! And Miss Sophia also
thought it sweet and natural, her dull gaze meeting her sister's bright
one with confiding love as she murmured the usual vague assent.

"And did you think to ask Mrs. Gordon whether Mr. Beauchamp--" Miss Judy
hesitated at the Frenchman's name, which she pronounced as the English
pronounce it, and delicately touched her forehead.

"She said he was perfectly sane except upon that one subject, and the
kindest, honestest soul alive," said Sidney, whisking the ball from
under her arm and reeling off more yarn.

Miss Judy's sweet old face and soft blue eyes wore the dreamy look which
always came over them when her imagination was stirred. "How romantic it
is and how touching, that he should have believed, through all these
years of hard work and a menial life, that he is Napoleon's son, the
real King of Rome."

"Well, it don't do any harm," Sidney, the practical, said. "He don't
dance with his head. It seems to me, too, I've heard that lots of crazy
folks were great dancers. Anyway, you may tell him, as soon as you like,
that I'll knit his summer socks to pay him for showing Doris how to
dance, and you may say that I'll throw in the cotton to boot. I always
like to pay the full price for whatever I get. If he still thinks that
isn't enough, you might tell him I'm willing to knit his winter ones
too, but he's got to furnish the yarn--there's reason in all things."

"You are sure that Mr. Beauchamp used to be a dancing-master?" asked
Miss Judy.

"Old lady Gordon told me she had heard something of the kind, but she
said she had never paid any attention. She never does pay any attention
to anything unless she means to eat it," Sidney said.

"Poor old lady Gordon," sighed Miss Judy. "She hasn't much except her
meals _to_ attend to or think about. She must be very, very lonely, all
alone in the world."

"I've never seen any sign of her being sorry for herself," responded
Sidney, knitting faster, as she always did when warming to her subject.
"I never heard of her making any such sign when her son and only child
went away and died without coming back. I never heard or saw her show
any anxiety about _his_ son and only child, that she's never laid her
eyes on, though he's now a grown man. I never heard a hint from her
about him last night--till she had eaten the last ounce of the
pound-cake; and drunk the last drop of the blackberry cordial. Then she
remembered to tell me that this only grandson of hers is coming at
last."

Here was the news! Miss Sophia settled back in her chair with a deep
breath of satisfaction. Miss Judy exclaimed in interested surprise. Very
few strangers came to Oldfield, consequently the advent of a young
gentleman from a distant city was an event indeed. No wonder that Sidney
had made as much of it as she could. Miss Judy, and even Miss Sophia,
felt the high compliment paid them in being the first to whom Sidney had
taken the thrilling intelligence. It was, in fact, the highest
expression of Sidney's gratitude to Miss Judy, and fully recognized as
such by both the little sisters, who appreciated it accordingly.

When Sidney was gone on her way to distribute the great news at the
various points which promised the largest results, Miss Judy went into
the darkened parlor, the other of the two large rooms which the house
contained. It was rarely opened, and never used except when, at long and
rare intervals, a formal caller, of whom there were not many in that
country, was invited to enter it and to feel the way to a chilly,
slippery seat. There were two good reasons for the room's disuse. One
was that social preeminence in the Pennyroyal Region demanded a dark and
disused parlor, although it did not militate against a bed in the living
room. Formal visitors expected to grope their way through impenetrable
gloom to invisible seats. Accidents sometimes happened, it is true, as
when, upon one occasion, old lady Gordon, in calling upon Miss Judy
shortly before Major Bramwell left for Virginia, sat down in a large
chair, without being aware that it was already occupied by the major,
who was a very small man. The second good reason for the room's not
being used was that in cool weather Miss Judy could not get fuel for
another fire. It was all that Merica could do, all the year round, to
find enough wood for one fire; the stray sticks dropped from passing
wagons, an occasional branch fallen from the old locust trees which
lined the big road, and the regular basket of chips picked up behind the
cabinet-maker's shop, barely sufficing to keep up a small blaze in the
corner of the fireplace in the living room, which was also the sisters'
bedroom.

Miss Judy groped her way cautiously through the darkness of the chilly
parlor, and raised the shades far enough to let in a slender shaft of
sunlight. She looked around the room with a soft sigh. It was so full of
sad and tender memories, and so empty of everything else. The portraits
of her father and mother, painted very young, hung side by side over the
tall mantelpiece. The intelligent force of her father's face and the
soft beauty of her mother's came back to Miss Judy anew whenever she
looked at their likenesses. On the opposite walls hung the portraits of
her paternal grandfather and grandmother, painted when they were very
old. The old gentleman, a judge under the crown in Virginia, had been
painted in his wig and gown. His fine face was hard and stern, and Miss
Judy often wondered whether he ever had forgiven his son for fighting
against the king and the mother country. The old lady's face was as
sweet and gentle as Miss Judy's own, and there was a charming
resemblance between the pictured and the living features. But the
grandmother's face wore an expression of unhappiness, and the
granddaughter's was never unhappy, although it was sometimes sad for the
unhappiness of others and the pain of the world.

The portraits had been taken out of their frames, so that they might be
brought over the Alleghanies with less difficulty. They had never been
reframed, and there was something inexpressibly melancholy in their
hanging thus, quite unshielded, against the rough, whitewashed logs.
Melancholy, vague and far-off, pervaded indeed the whole atmosphere of
the shadowed room. It floated out from a broken vase of parian marble
which was filled with dried rose leaves, brown and crumbling, yet still
sending forth that sweetest, purest, loneliest, and saddest of scents.
It clung about the angular, empty arms of the few old chairs, dim with
brocade of faded splendor. It lay on the long old sofa--with its high
back and its sunken springs--like the wan ghost of some bright dream
that had never come true. But the tenderest and subtlest sadness came
from the fading sampler which Miss Judy's mother had worked in those
endless days of exile in the wilderness. Ah, the silent suffering, the
patient endurance, the uncomplaining disappointment, wrought into those
numberless stitches! And yet, with all, perhaps bits of brightness
too,--a touch of rose-color here, and a hint of gold there--such as a
sweet woman weaves into the grayest fabric of life.

Miss Judy, sighing again, although she could not have told why she
always sighed on entering the darkened parlor, now knelt down beside the
sofa, and drew a small box from beneath it. But she did not open the box
at once; instead, she seated herself on the floor and sat still for a
space holding the box in her hand, as if she shrank from seeing its
contents. At length, slowly untying the discolored cord that bound the
box, she lifted the cover, and took out a pair of satin slippers. They
had once been white, but they were now as yellow as old ivory, and the
narrow ribbon intended to cross over the instep and to tie around the
ankle had deepened almost into the tint of the withered primrose. The
slippers were heel-less, and altogether of an antiquated fashion, but
Miss Judy did not know that they were. She was doubtful only about the
size, for they seemed very small even to her; and she thought, with
tender pride, how much taller Doris was than she had ever been, even
before she had begun to stoop a little in the shoulders. Turning the
slippers this way and that, she regarded them anxiously, with her curly
head on one side, until she at last made up her mind that Doris could
wear them. They might be rather a snug fit, but they would stay on,
while Doris was dancing, all the better for fitting snugly. Yet Miss
Judy still sat motionless, holding the slippers, and looking down at
them, long after reaching this conclusion. The most unselfish of women,
she was, nevertheless, a truly womanly woman. She could not surrender
the last symbol of a wasted youth without many lingering pangs.




VI

LYNN GORDON


The slippers had belonged to a white dress which Miss Judy used to call
her book-muslin party coat, and this treasure was already in Doris's
possession. It had been very fine in its first soft whiteness, and now,
mellowed by time, as the slippers were, into the hue of old ivory, and
darned all over, it was like some rare and exquisite old lace. Doris
thought it the prettiest thing that she had ever seen; certainly it was
the prettiest that she had ever owned. When, therefore, the slippers
came to join it as a complete surprise, she took the party coat out of
its careful wrappings, and, after a close search, was delighted to find
one or two gauzy spaces still undarned. It was a delight merely to touch
the old muslin. She held it against her cheek--which was softer and
fairer still, though Doris thought nothing of that--giving it a loving
little pat before laying it down. There were household duties to be done
ere Doris would be free to get her invisible needle and her gossamer
thread, and to begin the airy weaving of the cobwebs.

There was only one room and a loft to be put in order, but Doris always
did it while her mother was busy in the kitchen, getting ready for the
day's professional round. Sidney was exceedingly particular about the
cleaning of her house, insisting that the "rising sun" of the red and
yellow calico quilt should always be precisely in the middle of the
feather bed, and that the gorgeous border of sun-rays should be even all
around the edges. The long, narrow pillow-cases, ruffled across the
ends, must also hang just so far down the bed's sides--and no farther.
The home-made rug, too, had its exact place, and there must never be a
speck of dust anywhere.

The house was said to be the cleanest in Oldfield, where all the houses
were clean. Some people believed that Sidney scrubbed the log walls
inside and outside every spring, before whitewashing them within and
without. Be that as it may, the poor home had, at all events, the fresh
neatness which invests even poverty with refinement.

Doris slighted nothing that morning, although she was naturally
impatient to go back to the book-muslin. Yet it seemed to take longer to
get the house in perfect order than ever before. The trundle-bed in
which Kate and Billy slept was particularly contrary, and it really
looked, for a time, as if Doris would never be able to get it entirely
out of sight under the big bed. It was settled at last, however, and she
had taken up the party coat and had seated herself beside the window,
when her mother entered the room.

Sidney cast a sharp glance at the white cotton window curtain to see if
it were drawn exactly to the middle of the middle pane, or rather to the
hair line, which the middle of the middle pane would have reached, had
Doris not put the sash up. Sidney, rigid in her rudimentary ideas of
propriety, considered it improper for a young girl to sit unshielded
before a window in full view from the highway. It made no difference to
Sidney that nobody ever passed the window, except as the neighbors went
to and fro, or an occasional farmer came to the village on business.
Sidney was firm, and Doris, the gentle and yielding, did as she was told
to do. The coarse white curtain was accordingly now in its proper place.
Sidney noted the fact, as she cast a sweeping glance around the room,
seeking the speck of dust which she seldom found and which never escaped
her keen eyes. Doris put the book-muslin aside and arose as her mother
came in, and she now stood awaiting directions for the management of the
household during the day. Sidney's professional absences lasted from
nine in the morning until six in the evening every day, winter and
summer, the whole year round, Sunday alone excepted. During these
prolonged absences the care of the family rested upon Doris's young
shoulders, and had done so ever since she could remember. It may have
been this which gave her the little air of dignity which set so
charmingly on her radiant youth. She now listened to her mother's
directions, gravely, attentively, respectfully, as she always did.

"Everything is spick and span in the kitchen," Sidney said, setting the
broom on end behind the door and rolling down the sleeves over her
strong arms. "Make the children stay in the back yard till the school
bell rings. Don't let them go in the kitchen. They clutter up things
like two little pigs. And don't let them get at the cake that Anne
Watson sent. We'll keep that for Sunday dinner. It's mighty light and
nice. It lays awful heavy on my conscience, though. I really ought to go
to see poor Tom this very day. I ought to go there every day and try to
cheer him up. But I've got so many places engaged that I actually don't
know where to go first. Remember--don't let the children touch the cake.
Give 'em a slice apiece of that pie of Miss Pettus's. And there will be
plenty of Kitty Mills's cold ham for them and for Uncle Watty too."

"Yes'm," answered Doris, assenting to everything which her mother told
her to do or not to do. Trained by Miss Judy, she would no more have
thought of speaking to an older person or to any one whom she respected,
without saying "sir" or "madam," than a well-bred French girl would
think of doing such a thing. Miss Judy and Doris had never heard of its
being "servile" to do this. They both considered it an essential part of
good manners and gentle breeding. Many old-fashioned folks in the
Pennyroyal Region still think so.

Untying her gingham apron, and hanging it beside the broom, Sidney put
on her sunbonnet, and, firmly settling her ball of yarn under her left
arm, began to knit as she left the door-step on which Doris stood
looking after her.

Sidney paused for a moment at the gate after dropping the loop of string
over the post, and looked up at the little window in the loft.

"It would, I reckon, be better to let your Uncle Watty sleep as long as
he likes. He's kinder out of the way up there, and better off asleep
than awake, poor soul, when he hasn't got any red cedar to whittle. I
noticed yesterday that he had whittled up his last stick. He never knows
what to do with himself when he's out of cedar. I'll try to get him
some. Maybe old lady Gordon's black gardener Enoch Cotton will fetch
some from the woods, if I promise to knit him a pair of socks."

An expression flitted over Doris's face, telling her thoughts. Sidney,
seeing it, felt in duty bound to rebuke it.

"Now, Doris--mind what I say--as young folks do old folks, so other
young folks will do them when their turn comes. I never knew it to fail.
We all get what we give, no more, no less. It always works even in the
end, though it may not seem so as we go along. See that your Uncle
Watty's breakfast is real nice and hot. Make him some milk toast out of
Mrs. Alexander's salt-rising--if it's too hard for his gums. Old lady
Gordon said she would have Eunice fetch me a bucket of milk every day.
You won't forget?"

Doris again said "yes, ma'am" and "no, ma'am" in the proper place,
listening throughout with the greatest attention and respect, and trying
very hard not to think about the book-muslin party coat.

Sidney twitched the string which held the gate to the post, to make sure
that it was firmly tied. "That crumpled-horn of Colonel Fielding's could
pick a lock with her horns. Now remember about Uncle Watty. He's had a
hard time, poor old man, ever since his leg was broken. If Dr. Alexander
had been here, it would have been different. I should just like to give
that fool of a travelling doctor a piece of my mind. Him a-pretending to
know what he was about, and a-setting your poor Uncle Watty's broken leg
east and _west_, instead of north and _south_!"

Doris's cheek dimpled, but she answered dutifully as before. She had her
own opinion as to how much the latitude or longitude of Uncle Watty's
left leg had to do with his general disability. She could remember him
before the leg was broken, and she had never known him to do anything
except whittle a stick of red cedar. Youth, at its gentlest, is apt to
be hard in its judgment of age's shortcomings. Doris knew how good her
mother was as she watched her walking down the big road, with her long,
free, swinging stride, with her sunbonnet on the back of her head, and
her knitting-needles flashing in the sun. But she wondered if there were
no other way. She hated to see her set out on these rounds, she had
hated it ever since she could remember, and had gone on hating it as
vehemently as it was in her gentle nature to hate anything. The mother
never had been able to make Doris see from her own point of view, and
Doris had never been able to make her mother understand the intensity of
her own sensitiveness, or the soreness of her silent pride. Many a day,
as Doris sat sewing beside the window in seeming contentment, she was
restlessly seeking some means of escape; almost continually she was
trying to find a way to lift the burden from her mother--striving to see
something wholly different that she herself might do. Going back to her
book-muslin on that morning, she was wondering whether Mrs. Watson or
Mrs. Alexander might not need some needle-work done. Perhaps she could
earn a little money in that way, and they could live on very little. But
hers was not a brooding disposition, and she was soon singing over the
old party coat. Then the school bell reminded her that the children's
faces and hands must be washed before they went to school; and by the
time they were sent off down the big road, Uncle Watty was ready for his
breakfast. Doris carried out her mother's directions to the letter. She
poured his coffee, and sat respectfully waiting until he had finished
eating, and then she washed the dishes, and put them away.

Returning to her seat by the window, she glanced now and then at Uncle
Watty, who had seated himself under the blossoming plum tree to enjoy a
leisurely, luxurious pipe of tobacco, having recently swapped a butter
paddle, which he had whittled out of red cedar, for a fine old "hand" of
the precious weed. It was, however, most unusual for Uncle Watty's
whittling to assume any useful shape, or, indeed, any shape at all.
Every morning, except Sunday, he hobbled off down the big road, to take
his seat before the store door on an empty goods-box, with his
pocket-knife and his stick of red cedar, ready for whittling. Year after
year, the box and Uncle Watty were always in the same spot, moving only
to follow the sun in winter and the shade in summer; and the heap of red
cedar shavings always grew steadily, ever undisturbed save as the winds
scattered them, and the rains beat them into the earth. When Uncle Watty
finally came hobbling around the corner of the house that day, and went
away in the direction of the store, Doris looked after him,
wondering--rather carelessly, and a little harshly, after the manner of
the young and untried--what could be the meaning of an existence which
left a trail of red cedar shavings as the sole mark of its path through
life. But that perplexing thought also passed as the other had done. She
began thinking of the dancing lessons, growing more and more absorbed in
the darning of the party coat. She wished she knew whether Miss Judy had
ever worn it to a real dancing party. She had never heard of one's being
given in Oldfield, excepting of course the famous ball at the
Fielding's, near the jail, on the night that the prisoner escaped; long,
long before she was born. Most of the Oldfield people thought it a sin
to dance. Miss Judy must have looked very pretty in the book-muslin.
Doris laid it on her lap, and, turning to the window, gave the curtain
an impatient toss, pushing it to one side. There was no use in keeping
it half drawn when never a soul ever went by. And the sun was shining,
almost with the warmth of midsummer, on this glorious May-day. When the
spring was still farther advanced, when the leaves were larger on the
two tall silver poplars standing beside the gate, lifting a shimmering
white screen from the soft green earth to the softer blue sky; when the
climbing roses, already blooming all over the snowy walls, were more
thickly festooned; when the Italian honeysuckle hung its rich bronze
garlands and its fragrant bloom from the very eaves of the mossy
roof--then Doris might push the curtain farther back, but not before, no
matter how brilliantly the sun shone or how entirely deserted the big
road was. As Doris sat sewing and thinking, it seemed to her that her
mother was unnecessarily strict. She had even thought it wrong to allow
her to learn to dance. Miss Judy had found much difficulty in persuading
her. However, she had consented at last, and presently Doris, all alone
in the old house, began singing blithely, oblivious of everything except
the anticipation of the dancing lessons and the pleasure of darning the
party coat. The song was one of Allan Ramsay's, a languishing love-song
which Miss Judy's mother had sung. But as Doris's thoughts danced to
inaudible music, and her needle flew daintily in and out of the soft old
muslin, the words and the tune soon tripped to a gayer measure than they
had, perhaps, ever known before.

The birds, too, were lilting gayly on that perfect May morning. A couple
of flycatchers were breakfasting in mid-air. It is impossible to
conceive of a daintier way to satisfy hunger; as a Kentucky poet has
said: "It is, apparently, all color and rhythm--with green boughs and
violet sky for canopy, the pure air for a table--and in its midst the
sweet bouquet of the woods." And the flycatcher was but one of many
beautiful melodious creatures thronging between heaven and earth. Brown
thrashers by twos and fours flitted back and forth across the big road,
leaving one green wheat-field for another of still richer verdure. A
happy pair of orioles, flashing orange and black, were darting--bright
as flame and light as smoke--through the tallest silver poplar, building
an air-castle almost as wonderful, and nearly as fragile, as those that
young human lovers build. With the fetching of each fine fibre, the
husband fairly turned upside down, and hung by his feet, while singing
his pride and delight. The wife, more modestly happy, quietly rested her
soft breast on the unstable nest--with all a woman's trust--as though
the home were founded upon a rock, as all homes should be, and hung not
by a frail thread at the hazardous tip of an unsteady bough
as--alas!--so many homes do. It was steady enough just now, when love
was new and the spring was mild, and only the southern breeze stirred
the white-lined leaves with a silken rustle. The soft cooing of the
unseen doves sounded far off. The bees merely murmured among the
honeysuckle blooms. The humming-bird, which was raying rubies and
emeralds from the hearts of the roses, came and went as softly as the
south wind.

Doris smiled at the sylvan housekeeping of the orioles, which she
watched for awhile, letting her sewing rest on her lap. But tiring soon
of the little drama of the silver poplar, as we always tire of the
happiness of others, the girl's eyes wandered wistfully through the
fragrant loneliness to the wooded hills which gently folded the drowsy
village. The trees, delicately green, almost silver gray, in their
tender foliage, were still fringed by the snow of the dogwood, and the
misty beauty of the red buds; and the cool, leafy vistas, sloping gently
down toward the village, met the sea of blossoming orchards, breaking in
wide, deep waves of pink and white foam at the foot of the hills. But
Doris had seen those same trees, and hillsides, and orchards every
May-time of her eighteen years, and sameness, however grateful to older
eyes, has never a great charm for youth.

Doris's eyes came back to the book-muslin with a keener interest. As she
sat there, sewing and singing, in the soft light that filtered through
the old curtain, the girl was beautiful, almost tragically beautiful,
for her uncertain place in the world. Her slender throat, like the stem
of a white flower, arose from the faded brown of her dress as an Easter
lily unfolds from its dull sheath. Her radiant hair, yellow as new-blown
marigolds, clustered thick and soft about her fair forehead, as the rich
pollen falls on the lily's satin. Her delicate brows were dark and
straight; and her curling lashes, darker still, threw bewitching shadows
around her large, brown eyes. Her face was pale with a warm pallor
infinitely fairer than any mere fairness. Her lips, which were a little
full, but exquisite in shape and sweetness, were tinted as delicately as
blush roses. Her small, white hands, with their rosy palms and tapering
fingers, bore no traces of hard work. But Doris was not thinking of her
hands as, without turning her head, she put out one of them for another
length of thread. The spool was a very small one, and it stood rather
unsteadily on the uneven ledge of the window, and it rolled when Doris
touched it. Instinctively she tried to catch it, and to keep it from
falling to the ground outside the window. She had been reared to
neatness and order, and to economy which valued even a reel of cotton
too much to see it needlessly soiled. Of course Doris tried to catch the
falling spool,--and that was the way everything began! It was all as
simple and natural and purely accidental as anything could have been.
And yet at the same time it was one of those inscrutable happenings
which make the steadiest of us seem but feathers in the wind of destiny.

Only a moment before that foolish little spool began to roll, the big
road seemed entirely deserted. Not a human being was in sight--Doris was
sure that there was not, because she had looked and looked in vain, and
had longed and longed that there might be. Nevertheless, as the little
reel started to fall, and Doris darted after it as suddenly and swiftly
as a swallow, there was a young man on horseback directly in front of
the window, appearing as strangely and as unexpectedly as if he had
sprung out of the earth. And, moreover, he was looking straight at
Doris, with hardly more than a couple of rods between them, when she
burst into full view in the broad light of day, appearing like some
beautiful bacchante. The white curtain fell behind her radiant head as
the breeze caught and loosed the golden strands of her hair, and the sun
flashed a greater radiance upon its dazzling crown. She saw him, too,
with a startled uplifting of her great shadowy dark eyes as she bent
forward--while her exquisite face was still smiling at her own innocent
thoughts, and her rose-red lips were still a little apart with the
singing of the old love-song.

The white curtain then swung again into place. It was full of thin spots
which Doris could see through; but she was so startled, and her heart
was beating so fast at first, that she shrunk back without trying to
look. How right her mother had been, after all. That was her first
feeling. When she recovered self-possession enough to peep out, she saw
that the young man's horse was curveting back and forth across the big
road in a most alarming manner. This continued for a surprising length
of time before Doris observed that, whenever the horse seemed about to
stop, the rider touched him with the spur. Such a flash of indignation
went over Doris then as quite swept away the last trace of
embarrassment. How could he do such a cruel and such a meaningless
thing! She wondered still more why he dismounted, and, throwing the
bridle reins over his arm, began walking up and down in front of the
window, gazing closely at the ground as though looking for something
that he had lost. Doris noticed that he glanced at the window every time
he passed it, and she knew that she ought to go out and help him find
what he had lost. That was a matter of course in Oldfield manners. It is
the way of most country people to take a keen and helpful interest in
everything that a neighbor does; and city people deserve less credit
than they claim for their indifference to their neighbor's affairs,
which is too often mere selfishness disguised. Notwithstanding this
local social law Doris did not stir, held motionless by an influence
which she could not understand. She had known at once who the young man
was. Too few strangers came to Oldfield for her to fail to place him
immediately as the grandson of old lady Gordon, the young gentleman from
Boston, whose coming everybody was talking about. She noted through the
worn places in the old curtain how tall he was and how dark and how
handsome. She could not decide what kind of clothes his riding clothes
were. At last he mounted his horse and galloped up the hill, and then
Doris returned serenely to the darning of the book-muslin party coat.




VII

THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA


Within the hour Lynn Gordon rode back down the hill, and passed the
window very slowly, watching the curtain as a star-gazer awaits the
passing of a cloud.

The baffling width of white cotton hung still unstirred; Doris was no
longer sitting behind it, but the young man had no means of knowing that
she had gone. As the hand on the reins unconsciously drew the horse
almost to a standstill, the doctor and his wife left their seats on the
porch of their house over the way, and came out to the gate to speak to
him. They had met him at his grandmother's on the previous evening, and
they had been old friends of his father. Lynn sprang from the saddle
and, leading his horse, crossed the big road to shake hands with them.

"Have you lost something?" asked Mrs. Alexander.

"Oh, no--yes--I have lost a jewel--a pearl," the young man replied
rashly.

The doctor's lady exclaimed in surprise. Jewels were rarely lost or
found in that country. The gems oftenest lost were the sparkling seeds
which flashed out of the jewel-weed; the finest pearls ever found were
those which the mistletoe bore.

"Dear me, what a pity," lamented Mrs. Alexander. "And how was your pearl
set?"

"It wasn't mine. I didn't notice how it was set. Oh, yes, I did. It was
set amid roses and honeysuckle and humming-birds against a field of
spotless snow," Lynn said, still more lightly.

The doctor's wife was not a dull woman. She understood his tone, though
she did not understand what he meant. She had been eagerly scanning the
big road, as far as she could see; thinking that a jewel dropped near by
on the highway--unrolling like a broad band of brown velvet from the far
green hills on the north to the farther green hills on the south--must
sparkle and flash, showing a long way off in such brilliant sunshine.
Now, however, she knew that Lynn was not in earnest, and she turned with
a smile on her own face to meet the laughing frankness of his fine dark
eyes. But a glance was just passing between the young man and the older
man, and she caught that also, with the vague, helpless uneasiness,
tinged with resentment, which every woman feels at seeing a sign of the
freemasonry of men.

But a doctor's wife learns to overlook a good many things which she
would like to have explained, if she be a sensible woman, as Mrs.
Alexander was. This one merely said:--

"You are a joker, I see, as your father was. Nobody ever could tell when
he was serious. Come in and sit with us. It's nice and cool these early
mornings on the porch. Tie your horse to the fence. I thought when I saw
you getting down from the saddle, that you meant to hitch him to
Sidney's, and I was just going to call and ask you to tie him to ours
instead. The doctor's horses pull boards off our fences every day, but
it doesn't matter, because he keeps somebody to nail them on again;
while Sidney has nobody but herself to depend upon."

"And even the resourceful Sidney--being a woman--can't drive a nail,"
remarked the doctor, deliberately.

He knew how well worn the truism was, but he used it designedly, as a
toreador uses his scarf. He liked to see his wife flare up. Her kind
eyes grew so bright and her wholesome cheeks so red, and it was always
so delightfully easy to get her in a good humor again. It is a tendency
which is very common in large men with amiable little wives like Mrs.
Alexander, and one which is very uncommon in smaller men with wives of a
different disposition.

Lynn Gordon, as an unmarried man, naturally knew nothing of these
matters and blundered on, disappointing the doctor's confident
expectations by asking the lady a question, which turned her attention
in another direction. He inquired who Sidney was, seeing an opportunity
for learning something about the girl behind the silver poplars.

There was no subject upon which Mrs. Alexander was more willing to talk,
nor one upon which she could talk more eloquently, and she accordingly
began at once to give Lynn the history of Sidney Wendall, whom she held
to be a most interesting as well as a most admirable and remarkable
character. It was no easy or simple thing, so the doctor's wife said,
for a woman of the Pennyroyal Region to earn a family's living. In that
country no white woman could work outside her own home (were there
anything for her to do) on account of coming into competition with black
laborers. And Sidney had received no training to lift her above the
laboring class, having had even less than the average country education.
And yet, as the doctor's wife pointed out, she had managed to maintain
her family and herself in reasonable comfort and universal respect. It
was all very well for the men to laugh at Sidney and make fun of her
news and her gossip. It was all very well for them to say--as the doctor
said, according to his wife, who flashed her eyes at him--that Sidney
made her news out of the whole cloth when she did not get it over the
grapevine telegraph. Everybody knew how hard men always were on any
woman who was not pretty. As though poor Sidney could help the length of
her own nose! Let the mean men make fun as much as they pleased! The
indignant lady would like, so she said, to see one of them who had done
his duty in the world more nobly than Sidney had done hers. She would
also like, so she declared, to see one of them who kept as strict guard
over what he said about his neighbors, and who was as free from
evil-speaking and mischief-making, as Sidney was--for all her talking
that they were always so ready to ridicule.

The doctor leaned back in his chair, beaming at his wife. He was very
proud of her when she talked and looked as she was doing now, and he was
truly sorry when she was compelled to pause for sheer lack of breath.

"I am afraid I don't know the lady of whom you are speaking," Lynn said,
as soon as he had a chance to speak. "I haven't been here, you know,
since I could remember. Do you mean some one who lives over there in the
house behind those silver poplars?" And then, he added artfully, "It
seems to be deserted."

"There is where Sidney Wendall lives, but she is never at home in the
daytime. Her business takes her out. But Doris, the eldest daughter, is
at home. She has always taken care of the house and the other children,
and even of Uncle Watty. She used to do it when she wasn't so high," the
doctor's wife said, holding her hand about three feet from the porch
floor. "Such a lovely, golden-haired, dark-eyed, delicate little
changeling, in that homely, rude, rough-and-tumble brood."

"Is this beautiful Doris a child still?" inquired the young man,
deceitfully leading on nearer to what he wished to learn.

"Oh, no. I was speaking of years ago. Doris is about grown now, and
prettier than ever. You'll be sure to see her. There are very few young
ladies in Oldfield. She seldom goes out, though. She stays close at home
and takes care of things just as she always has done. It must be a
lonely, dreary life for a girl,--and such a beauty too,--but she never
seems to mind it. I heard her singing this morning about the time that
you rode up."

"I met Sidney coming out of the Watsons' gate when I went in to see Tom
in passing," the doctor said suddenly, and with a different manner. "I
wish, Jane, that you would ask Sidney, the first time you see her, to go
there as often as she can. Send her something, and tell her that I think
her going would cheer up Tom."

"Indeed!" exclaimed Mrs. Alexander, scathingly. "Then Sidney's 'gab,' as
you ungrateful men call it, has its uses after all!"

"I am not jesting now, my dear. I am seriously disturbed about Tom
Watson. So far as I am able to judge, there is nothing more that surgery
or medicine can do for him. The time has come, now when we have done our
utmost for his body, that we must find some relief for his mind. He must
not be allowed to sit there propped up by the window, staring out at the
big road, and never trying to speak even the few indistinct words that
he might utter, and always brooding, brooding--over his own awful
condition, I'm afraid."

"Well, I've done what I could," said the doctor's wife, quickly, as
though her husband's words bore some unspoken reproach. "I know my
double duty to a neighbor and a patient of yours, John. But I can't go
to see Tom Watson again. You never saw such a sad sight, Mr. Gordon. I
actually dream about it after I have seen him. That is where the Watsons
live," she said, pointing to the house. "I go every morning to the cross
fence between our house and theirs, taking some little thing for Tom
just to show that I have been thinking about him, and I call Anne to the
other side of the fence and ask her how he is. But doing even that hurts
her and hurts me, for she knows that I know that he never can be any
better."

"And I think he knows it too. That is the most terrible thing of all,"
the doctor said, musingly, as if turning over ways and means in his
mind.

Mrs. Alexander looked at Lynn with a sudden dimness shadowing the
brightness of her kind eyes. "You don't know the Oldfield people, Mr.
Gordon, though you are really one of us. Unless you had known Tom Watson
as we knew him, you can hardly understand how terrible and how strange
his present condition seems to us. He used to be a great, strong, noisy,
reckless, hot-tempered dare-devil, but as tender-hearted as a child and
liked by everybody, black and white, big and little, in the whole
country."

A sudden recollection caused her to smile at her husband, forgetting
that she had just been scolding him and that he richly deserved it:--

"You remember, John, that time when Tom kept those bear cubs tied up in
his back lot. One day the biggest of them got loose and caught Sidney as
she was going home with a pitcher of milk which Anne had given her.
Sidney was almost scared out of her wits, and screamed as loud as she
could, till the bear squeezed her so tight that she couldn't make
another sound. But she never let go the pitcher--never even loosed her
grip--and kept on holding it out of the cub's reach, long after she
couldn't scream any more. Tom went running. Can't you see him now, John?
and hear him shouting at every jump: 'Let go, Sid. Good Gad--woman! are
you going to let the bear hug the life out of you before you'll give him
that spoonful of milk?'"

"And to think of poor Tom as he is now;" she went on presently, the
smile fading. "I will speak to Sidney as you suggest, John. I will send
her a basket of sweet potatoes and urge her to go as often as she can.
Anne would never think of asking any one to come, but I know she would
be pleased to have Sidney drop in. She's always like a fresh breeze on a
hot day even to well folks. She told me, however, the other morning that
Tom Watson never seemed to notice anything that she had to say. She said
that, no matter how hard she tried to entertain him, he kept on staring
out at the empty big road, just sitting there, not trying to speak, and
looking like a dead man only for his restless, burning eyes."

"And yet he may live for years just as he is now," the doctor said. "But
we must not give up trying to help him because he can never be any
better. I must devise some sort of relief. It will not do to let him sit
there, like that, all day, day after day--maybe for years. I tried this
morning to find out what he was thinking about. I also tried to learn
from Anne what his tastes were, what sort of things he had liked or was
interested in before he met with the accident. His sight is much
impaired, and he seems never to have been anything of a reader. I doubt
whether he ever had any indoor interests, except playing cards. All that
I can remember is that he used to gamble like the very devil."

"Shame on you, John, to be raking up that against the poor fellow, as he
is now," protested the doctor's wife, indignantly.

"Nonsense! Who's raking anything up?" the doctor responded. "I was
merely trying to think of some way of diverting his mind. I thought
perhaps a game of cards--"

The doctor's wife uttered a smothered little shriek: "John _Alexander_!
What are you thinking of to speak of card-playing in Anne Watson's
house?"

The doctor grew calmly judicial, as all good husbands grow when their
wives become unduly excited. "I am well aware of Anne's prejudice. I
know precisely how strong--"

"Strong!" repeated his wife, interrupting him. "It's the strongest
thing--the only really strong thing--_in_ Anne--that, and her religion.
Her horror of card-playing is a part of her religion. It's bred in her
bone. She got it from her father, the elder. Some people thought he was
actually out of his head about cards. And Anne believes as firmly as he
believed it, that cards are Satan's chief weapon, and that even to touch
them is to imperil the soul. She believes it as firmly as she believes
in baptism for the remission of sins; as firmly as she believes that
there is a heaven and a hell."

All this breathless outpouring the doctor waved aside: "As I have
already said, my dear, I know perfectly well what Anne's feeling used to
be. Now, however, in Tom's hopeless condition she will, of course, look
at the matter with more reason."

"Now _isn't_ that like a man?" appealed Mrs. Alexander, to no one in
particular, since she could hardly appeal to her visitor against his own
sex. "Wouldn't anybody but a man know that Anne would only stand the
firmer for that very reason? Any woman would see in a moment that the
very fact of Anne's knowing that her husband's mortal life was
hopelessly wrecked, could not fail to increase her resistance against a
thing which she believes must lose him the life everlasting."

The doctor took his feet down from the porch railing, and tapped his
pipe against the post with an unnecessary amount of noise. Lynn Gordon
looked hard at the silver poplars on the other side of the big road.
Different men have different ways of giving outward expression to the
embarrassment which every man feels at a woman's innocent frankness
regarding spiritual things. Neither of these men spoke for a space. The
doctor was casting about for the surest and swiftest way of fetching his
wife back to some ground on which he felt rather more at home, and
decidedly more secure of his own footing.

"Anne knew that Tom was a born gambler; she knew it before she married
him. Nobody but a woman--a fanatical visionary like Anne--would have
been foolish enough to expect to change a leopard's spots."

"It doesn't strike me as particularly foolish for Anne--or for any other
woman--to expect her husband to keep his promise not to get any _new_
spots," the lady retorted, with all the promptness and spirit that her
husband anticipated.

The doctor glanced at the young man as triumphantly as he dared, and the
young man returned the doctor's glance as non-committally as he could.
They had both often observed before this, as most observant people
observe at some period of their lives, that while a man will defend
another man whenever he can, regardless of his own feelings toward the
individual, he has never a word to say in defence of men; and that,
while a woman will seldom defend another woman without strong personal
reasons, she is always ready, _cap-a-pie_, to defend women, through
thick and thin.

Nevertheless, the doctor was again a trifle disappointed to find his
wife content with firing a single shot, and he presently said, trying to
urge her on:--

"I have not disputed the fact that Anne Watson is a good woman. Tom no
doubt made the promises that such men always make when they want to win
some pretty girl, and he doubtless hoped to be strong enough to keep
them. But I cannot allow a patient of mine to die or to fall into
melancholy because he has failed to keep promises that many good men
break; or because his wife lacks common sense; no matter how good she
may be or what sort of religion she may be living up to. If Tom wants to
play cards,--as I think that he does, as I am nearly sure that he
does,--I shall certainly find him a partner if I can. I would play with
him myself if I knew how."

"Let me do it, doctor," said Lynn. "I know something about several
games. It would give me real pleasure to do anything in my power for
your patient."

Mrs. Alexander said nothing more in opposition; she merely looked her
thoughts. When, therefore, it was arranged, as the young man was
leaving, that he should come on the following morning to go with the
doctor to see Tom Watson about the game of cards, the lady merely gave
her smooth auburn head a side-wise toss, as if to say they would all see
how it turned out.




VIII

AT OLD LADY GORDON'S


Lynn rode slowly by the Watson house, thinking of its tragedy, which had
thus touched him so soon after his coming to this quiet village, the
seeming abode of peace. It was his first partial realization that the
folded green hills cannot shut away the pain of the world. He was too
young and too strong, and had not suffered enough in mind or body, to
know that quiet and peace only make the heart ache more keenly with the
sorrow of living.

And this was no more even now than a partial perception. He was but
twenty-two, yet in the springtime of life; and the earth also was still
in the season of its perpetual youth. The green of new leafage now
tinted the thinning white of the blossoming orchards; the green and the
white and the last rosy sweetness of apple blossoms were yet melting
slowly into the rich verdure of the hillsides. But the snowy spray of
all the exquisite flowering drifted fast before the incoming summer
tide. Already the wild flowers were almost done blooming in the woods,
and the scented meadows were growing red with clover blossoms.

The largest, richest fields lying on both sides of the big road,
knee-deep in clover and dotted with cattle, belonged to the Gordon
estate. Ultimately they would all be his own, but he was not thinking of
this as he looked at them that day. He had never thought of making
Oldfield his home, having long cherished other plans. Yet, as he looked
at the old house, it was a pleasant sight on that May morning, with its
low white walls bowered in dense shrubbery and its mossy roof overhung
by giant elms. There were many maples, also, and a cypress tree stood
beside the gate, swinging its sombre plumes so close to the ground that
the young man did not see a cart standing before the gate until he was
almost upon it. Coming nearer, he saw that it belonged to a butcher who
had driven in from the country, and that it was well filled with his
wares. The butcher stood astride a plank which had been laid across the
front wheels, and he was busily engaged in turning over the pieces of
meat, evidently seeking something to please the mistress of the house.
Old lady Gordon sat at the open window in her accustomed place, looking
grimly on; and the small Frenchman who managed her farm waited beside
the cart, standing in silence, glancing anxiously from its contents to
the mistress and back again. The butcher scowled, as he tossed the
steaks, the joints, and roasts about, thinking angrily how much more
trouble it always was to please old lady Gordon than all the rest of the
easy-going people living along his semi-weekly route. Finally, however,
he found a piece which seemed promising, and he handed it to the small
Frenchman, who took the huge joint,--holding it as if it were a
sword,--and jauntily carried it across the lawn to the window and held
it up for the mistress to decide upon. She gave only one contemptuous
glance at it; one was enough to cause its rejection with great scorn.

"No, I won't have that!" she called out in her loud, deep, imperious
voice, speaking to the butcher over her manager's head. "How many times
must I tell you that I don't like the bony parts?"

Monsieur Beauchamp suddenly dropped the joint as if it had burnt him,
and started as if he had been stung. His face flushed scarlet, and he
drew himself up to his fullest height.

"Ah, madame," he said poignantly yet proudly, "I am stab to ze soul to
hear you say zat you do not like ze Bonapartes!"

"For gracious' sake!" old lady Gordon exclaimed, taken quite off her
guard; and dropping her turkey-wing fan in her start of amazement.

In another moment she remembered, and forthwith did what she could to
soothe the little Frenchman's deeply wounded feelings. She turned away
her head as her grandson drew near, and put up the turkey-wing fan to
hide the smile which she could not control, when her gaze chanced to
meet his as he looked on, a silent and interested spectator of the
scene.

"Why, Mister Beauchamp," she said, quite gravely, as soon as she could
speak at all, "I am amazed at your thinking that I meant any disrespect
to your relations. How in the world could you think such a thing? I give
you my word of honor, that I have always believed the Bonapartes to be
the only human beings ever created expressly to rule over the French."

Monsieur had begun to soften almost as soon as the mistress had begun to
explain, and by the time the explanation was finished, he was fairly
beaming with delight. One hand was already holding his hat, but the
other was free, and this he now laid upon his heart, bringing his small
heels together in a most impressive bow. And then, smiling and quite
happy again, he picked up the rejected joint of mutton and carried it
back to the cart very cheerfully indeed. The turning over of its
contents was accordingly resumed for some time longer, until old lady
Gordon consented at last to allow the butcher to leave a large roast.
She shouted after him, nevertheless, as he rattled away; telling him at
the top of her strong voice that he need not think that she would take
another piece as tough and lean as this piece was; that he need have no
such expectation the next time he came round.

She told Lynn the story of the Frenchman when the young man had entered
the room in which she always sat and, with her permission, had thrown
himself down on the couch under the window. But she could not answer his
question about Monsieur Beauchamp immediately, because Eunice, the fat
black cook, chanced to come in just at that moment for a consultation
over the dinner, and the meals in old lady Gordon's house were always
the subjects of very grave consideration, requiring a considerable
length of time.

While the mistress and the cook were thus conferring, the young man
gazed carelessly, and yet curiously, around this large low room in which
his grandmother lived, and had spent the greater part of her life; and
in which his father had been born. The low ceiling had been covered with
canvas years before, but the original white of the canvas had long since
turned to a smoky brown. The walls, which had never been plastered, were
also covered with canvas, and afterward had been hung with old-fashioned
wall-paper in hunting scenes. These had faded into a general effect of
hazy dimness, but Lynn's keen young eyes made out the hunters, the
hounds, and the game, as he lay idle with his long arms under his
handsome dark head, wondering what sort of man his grandfather had been.
He had heard it said that rooms are like the people who live in them,
and, recalling the saying, he wondered again whether this room was now
as it used to be in his grandfather's time. There stood his
grandfather's secretary in one corner, still filled with papers, just as
he must have left it. The bed in the opposite corner must also have
stood in the same place for many a year. It had been a very stately
edifice, a magnificent structure, in its day. It even yet upheld a heavy
tester of faded crimson damask, gathered to the centre under a great
golden star of tarnished splendor. It had evidently once been of
imposing height, and it was still of unusual width, but it had lost
something of its height with age, as human beings do. It had been much
too high for old lady Gordon to climb into and out of, as easily as she
liked, when she began to grow stouter and more indolent, and it was not
her way to submit to any inconvenience which she could avoid. So that
the thick mahogany legs of the grand old bed had been sawed off by
degrees--as old lady Gordon's ease required--till it now squatted under
its big, dusty red tester like some absurd turbaned old Turk. Lynn
smiled as he looked at it, letting his gaze wander on to the tall chest
of drawers, to the high-backed split-bottomed chairs, to a great oaken
chest at the foot of the bed--to all the homely, comfortable,
unbeautiful things.

Looking at his grandmother, who was still absorbed in the consultation
with the cook, the young man suddenly felt how like her face his own
was; feeling it with the curiously mingled uneasiness and satisfaction
which come to most of us when we recognize ancestral traits in our own
spirits, our own minds, or our own bodies. She was a large, tall old
woman, still handsome and even shapely, despite her many years and her
great weight. Her chin was square and her forehead broad, yet her
grandson was somehow pleased to think that his own chin was more
delicately rounded, and that his forehead was higher than hers while not
less broad, and that his mouth was clearer cut. Still, the strong
likeness was there, in every one of the features of their two faces and
most of all in their eyes--long, large, deep, thick-lashed,
heavy-browed, and as black as human eyes ever are; and now as old lady
Gordon turned her head, the young man saw with a kind of shock that his
grandmother's eyes were almost as young, too, as his own. For young eyes
in an old face are not a pleasant sight to see. It seems better for the
ageless, unwearied spirit, thus looking out, to have grown old with the
wearied body, so that both together may be ready for the Rest.

Old lady Gordon noticed her grandson's gaze, as soon as Eunice had gone
from the room, and recognized the admiration which partly occupied his
thoughts. She accordingly smiled at him, settling comfortably back in
her broad, low rocking-chair. She wore a loose flowing wrapper of fine
white muslin, as she always did in warm weather. In the winter she
always wore the same garment made of fine white wool, covering it with a
long black cloak on the rare occasions upon which she left the house
during cold weather. It was a most unusual dress and one of peculiar
distinction, but old lady Gordon took neither of these facts into the
slightest account. She wore the fine white muslin in the summer because
it was cooler than anything else; and she wore the white wool in the
winter for the reason that, while warm and soft, it would wash with less
trouble than colored stuffs, when she dropped things on it at the table,
as she did at almost every meal. It is, perhaps, often just as well that
we cannot know the causes which bring about many pleasing and even
poetic results. Old lady Gordon's servants, especially Dilsey the
washerwoman, held opinions somewhat different from hers concerning the
greater convenience of constantly wearing white in winter as well as in
summer. But old lady Gordon never took that into account either; neither
that nor anything whatsoever that ever touched her own comfort at all
adversely.

"Come and hand me my bag, I want a cough-drop," she said to Lynn that
day, yawning. "It's too far round on the back of the chair for me to
reach it."

Lynn sprang to serve her and handed her the bag. It was the first time
that he had seen it; that is to say, it was the first time that he had
really observed the bag; he must, of course, have seen it, since no one
ever saw old lady Gordon without it. During the day it always hung on
the back of the chair in which she sat when not at the table; when she
sat at the table it always hung on the knob of the dining-room chair.
Through the night it always swung from the post of her bed close to her
hand. When she drove out in her ancient coach the bag went with her. And
a wonderful bag it was! There were many more things in it than mere
cough-drops. There were various other sorts of drops--drops for the
gouty pain which sometimes assailed old lady Gordon's toe, and drops of
good old brandy for cramp after over-eating. And there were candles and
matches, all ready for lighting if she should chance to grow wakeful
through the night, and always plenty of novels; and numerous simple
toilet articles, such as a hairbrush and comb, together with biscuits
and hair-oil and tea-cakes and handkerchiefs and an occasional piece of
pie. It would indeed be hard to think of anything that old lady Gordon
could have needed or desired, during the day or the night; or even have
fancied that she wanted, without finding it ready to her hand in that
wonderful bag. There was a hand-bell in it, too, though the bell usually
lay at the very bottom of the bag, under everything else, because there
was hardly ever any occasion for ringing it. The bag was a very gradual
evolution, like most complete inventions. Old lady Gordon herself had
given a good deal of thought for a good many years to the bringing of it
to its ultimate state of perfection; and Eunice the cook and Patsey the
housemaid had both concentrated their attention upon it more and more as
the mistress's wants and demands increased; until it had now become so
comprehensive that Eunice rarely had to be summoned out of her cabin, at
midnight, to give old lady Gordon a lunch; and Patsey was able, as a
rule, to sleep the whole night through on her pallet in the passage
outside the mistress's door; no matter whether that lady might suddenly
crave refreshment, or whether several kinds of drops might be needed in
consequence of a too hearty supper.

When old lady Gordon had taken the cough-drops out of the bag, and Lynn
had replaced it on the back of her chair, within easier reach, she
answered his question, which he had almost forgotten in his wondering
observation of the bag.

"You were asking about little Beauchamp," she said. "Your grandfather
found him somewhere and brought him home with him a long time ago. He
has been here ever since. I don't remember how long ago that was. I
don't know anything about him before he came. I hardly noticed him, in
fact, until after your grandfather's death, when I found him useful in
helping me manage the farm."

The grandson looked at the grandmother in silence, paying little heed to
what she was saying of the Frenchman. He was wondering why she said
"your grandfather" instead of saying "my husband." He had already noted
that she invariably said "your father" instead of saying "my son." He
knew little of women's ways, having lost his mother before he could
remember, so that his life had been mostly among men, and he knew
nothing whatever of his grandmother. Yet he felt, nevertheless, that a
wife and mother who had loved her husband and her son would not speak of
them to her grandson as "your grandfather" and "your father," as his
grandmother did. He had also a curious, half-amused, half-indignant
feeling that her doing so was intended to make him feel somehow
responsible for something which she disliked, and did not wish to assume
responsibility for herself.

"I never thought of asking your grandfather where he found him," old
lady Gordon went on indifferently. "Most likely it was in New Orleans.
The few foreigners in this country mostly came from there. Your
grandfather used to go there pretty often with flatboat-loads of horses.
But it doesn't matter where Beauchamp came from in the first place. He's
mighty useful to me now, wherever it was. I really don't see how I could
get along without him. He is a faithful, honest, industrious little
soul. Of course that bat in his belfry flies out now and then--as you
saw and heard. I try to remember it, but I forget sometimes. And how
could a body guard against such an unheard-of thing as that was?" She
laughed lazily, fanning herself with the turkey-wing, and rocking slowly
and heavily. "He isn't a bit luny about anything else, and he is just as
useful to me as if he didn't believe he was the son of Napoleon
Bonaparte. I don't care if he thinks he's Julius Caesar himself. What's
the odds--since it never interferes with his work? And his wife's a
treasure too, in a different way. There's nothing French or flighty
about her. She belongs around here--somewhere in the Pennyroyal Region.
I don't know or remember where he picked her up. She is a great,
slow-witted, homely, slab-sided drudge, almost twice his size. And such
a worker! She never turns her head when he calls her the 'Empress
Maria.' She just goes straight along, hoeing the garden and making
butter. But--all the same--she thinks the sun rises and sets in him."

The young man laughed. "Fine! And he no doubt thinks she hung the moon."

His grandmother looked at him more attentively than she had done
hitherto. She had never been thrown with men of quick mind, and was not
accustomed to such ready response. She liked quickness of perception as
she liked all bright and pleasant things; and she disliked slowness of
understanding as she disliked everything tiresome--like the sybarite
that she was.

"Certainly he does. That's always the way," she in turn responded,
smilingly. "The worse mated the married seem to be--to outsiders, the
better they appear to suit one another. Talk about 'careful, judicious
selection!'" Old lady Gordon made an inarticulate but eloquent sound of
scornful incredulity. "If you were to rush out there in the big road
this minute--with your eyes shut--and seize the first passer-by, you
would have just as much chance of knowing what you were doing--what you
were getting--as you ever will have!"

Lynn wondered again what sort of a man his grandfather could have been.
And his young mother, whom he had never known? Had this cynical old
woman disapproved of her, had she been unkind to her? There is always
something repellent to wholesome youth in the cynicism of the old.
Feeling this, Lynn said rather coldly that he had thought little of such
matters, he had been too much absorbed in other things, in laying life
plans which must be quite apart from all thoughts of love and marriage
for a good many years. The mere mention of these cherished plans brought
a flush to his dark cheeks, and caused him to sit more proudly erect.
They were seldom far absent from his mind, and the main thought lying
nearest the heart is never long unspoken by frank young lips. It was
less than a year since he had been graduated from the Harvard Law
School, but his deep-laid plans lay far back of his graduation. He could
hardly remember when he had not seen the path of his ambition straight
and distinct before him. It was a steep one, to be sure, and hard and
long, as the road to the heights must ever be. But he had faced all this
wholly undaunted, knowing the power within himself, and the additional
strength which fortune had given him. Yet he was a modest young fellow,
and simple-hearted as well as single-minded. There was in him little
vanity in his personal gifts, little pride in his inherited possessions.
He simply recognized these as lucky accidents, for which he could claim
no credit; holding them merely as the means whereby he might hope, more
confidently than most young men, to reach the utmost limit of his
ambition. The right to practise law was already his, and the rest of the
way upward must open as he pressed earnestly and untiringly onward,--the
bar, the bench, the supreme bench, those must be within the winning of
any man having fair ability, unbounded capacity for hard work, and
abundant means to wait for its fruition; and he knew himself to be
possessed of all these. This seemed to him the highest ambition possible
to an American, as perhaps it was, in those days when the ermine was
still held unspotted, high above the mire of politics.

And yet, notwithstanding these lofty aims and matured plans, Lynn Gordon
was very young, hardly more than a boy, after all, in many things, so
that he soon began to talk with boyish openness of the herculean task
which he thus had set himself in sober earnest. His grandmother listened
with such intense interest, such thorough understanding, and such
complete sympathy as surprised herself far more than it surprised her
grandson. She was taken wholly unawares,--not dreaming of finding him
anything like this,--having looked forward to his coming with but
lukewarm enthusiasm.

The old who have been disappointed in almost everything that they have
ever set their hearts upon, cease, after a while, to expect anything,
and learn to shield themselves against further disappointment by real or
assumed indifference. Old lady Gordon in her fierce pride had never
owned, even to herself, how deep and bitter and lasting had been her
disappointment in her own son. It counted for nothing with her that he
had been what many would have considered a good man, though not an
intellectual man in the estimation of any one. To his mother his
goodness had seemed but the negative virtue of an undecided character
and a mediocre mind. For the best love of a nature like hers cannot be
born of mere toleration, even in a mother's heart. This mother--being
what she was--might perhaps have come nearer to forgiving the things
which were lacking, had this only child been a daughter. A woman like
old lady Gordon never expects much of another woman, even though she be
her own daughter. But she always expects everything of every man,
especially when he belongs to her own family, and thus it was that old
lady Gordon never could wholly forgive her only son. Least of all could
she ever quite forgive him for being his father over again; an almost
unpardonable offence which other poorly gifted children have committed
in the eyes of other embittered mothers, who have illogically expected,
as poor old lady Gordon had expected, to gather figs from thistles.

When she had first faced the truth in the prime of life, her fierce
pride had raised the iron shield of pretended indifference, and she had
upheld it so long that it had gradually grown into the rusty armor of
age's insensibility. And yet, through all its steely coldness, the young
man's warm words now struck fire. A deep glow came into the impassive,
handsome old face, and a warm light into the hard, fine old eyes, as she
looked at this spirited, strong, determined, capable young fellow, with
his brilliant face aglow, and his intelligent eyes alight. She suddenly
felt him to be much more her own spirit and flesh and blood than his
father had ever been. It seemed for an instant as if her own strenuous
youth, with its impassioned visions of conquest--so long forgotten--came
rushing back through the eloquent lips of her grandson.




IX

A ROMANTIC REGION


But, alas, the habits of age are always fixed, and its enthusiasms are
mostly fleeting. At breakfast, on the next morning, old lady Gordon was
as stolidly absorbed in the food which she was eating as she usually was
in her meals. Her cynicism, her indifference, too, had all come back.

Both came promptly into play, when Lynn chanced to remember his promise
to play cards with the sick man, and mentioned it, which he had
forgotten to do on the day before, in the intenser interest of the talk
about his own future. The old lady smiled sardonically and chewed on
deliberately, while the young man gave an account of what had taken
place at the doctor's house.

"Anne won't allow it," she finally said. "If anything could have changed
her or have taken the nonsense out of her, it would have been seeing Tom
go to destruction, mainly because she went to meeting. A woman like Anne
takes to religion just as immoderately as a man like Tom takes to
gambling."

Lynn did not speak at once. He was feeling the uneasiness which comes
over right-minded youth at any sign of irreligion in the old.

"I thought every man liked his wife to go to church, however seldom he
might go himself," he finally advanced hesitatingly.

"And so he does, when he doesn't happen to want her to stay at home,"
said old lady Gordon, with a cynical laugh. "But I've never known a
husband pious enough to like his wife's religion to interfere with his
own comfort or wishes. And Tom really needed Anne a good deal more than
her church did. There are men who are as sure to go wrong if their wives
leave them alone, as ships are to drift without their rudders--and Tom
Watson was one of these. He had little or no intellectual
resources,--none at all, probably, within himself,--and he was
consequently entirely dependent upon companionship. That sort of male
animal always is, and if he can't get good company he takes bad, simply
because he has to have company of some kind. Every sensible woman
understands that sort of man, especially if she is married to him; and
she knows, too, just what she's got to do, unless she's willing to take
the certain consequences of not doing it. Any other woman than Anne
would have thought she was lucky when Tom didn't take to anything worse
than cards."

Lynn was glad when the breakfast was over. He did not like his
grandmother in this mood nearly so well as he had liked her in the
kindly responsive one of the night before; and yet, although he knew her
but slightly, he felt sure that this mood was more natural, or, at all
events, more habitual, to her, than the other. It was most likely this
instinctive feeling which had unconsciously kept him--during the talk
with her on the previous day--from speaking of the beautiful girl whom
he had seen. He now felt more distinctly, though still without knowing
why, that he did not wish to hear his grandmother speak of her or of her
environment, as he now knew that the old lady would speak. He already
understood enough, remembering the kind things which the doctor's lady
had told him, to anticipate the different presentation of the widow
Wendall and her family that his grandmother would certainly make.

He left her as soon as he could, offering his engagement with Dr.
Alexander as a ready excuse. Passing out into the quiet, empty big road,
he walked along under the old locust trees which lined one side of the
way. The locusts were flowering, and the long clusters of pure white
flowers, swinging among the dull gray-green of the feathery foliage,
filled the fresh air of the May morning with wholesome sweetness. The
shrubs in the yards, bordering the length of the big road with the vivid
verdure of new leaves, were also in bloom. The young man smelled the
honeysuckle blossoming thick over the sick man's window, but he did not
look that way. He looked, naturally enough, in the opposite direction,
where the silver poplars stood, since the interests and the sympathies
of youth must always lie on the other side of life's big road, away from
all affliction and pain.

He was not sorry to find that the doctor had gone into the country in
answer to an urgent call, and that the visit to the invalid consequently
must be postponed. He was sorry, however, to see the white curtain of
the house behind the poplars hanging precisely as it had hung on the
previous day; and, although he walked to the top of the hill beyond the
house and, turning, strolled slowly back again in front of the window,
he had no second glimpse of Doris. Thus idly strolling, he went along
the big road, stopping now and then to lean over a fence to look at the
hyacinths and tulips, which were at their sweetest and brightest in most
of the front yards; or to linger beside the rosy clover fields to drink
in the fragrance and to watch the vernal happiness of the birds. He
paused occasionally to lift his hat smilingly to the friendly faces
which smiled at him from the vine-wreathed windows and the wide-open
doors; but, loiter as he might, he saw nothing more of the girl of whom
he was thinking and hoping to meet, and although he delayed his return
as long as he could, he was still back at his grandmother's house all
too soon.

No one could walk through Oldfield a second time on the same morning
without a visible or audible explanation to a public who had plenty of
leisure to note the few passers-by, and to speculate upon their possible
destination, and to discuss the most probable reasons for their going up
or coming down the big road. Lynn had an instinctive perception of this,
little as he knew of the life of the village. Accordingly he now paused
uncertainly at his grandmother's gate and stood still, not knowing what
to do with the perfect day, with the ideal Ides of May.

Looking idly toward the northern hilltops, he saw the figure of a
horseman suddenly break the sky line and rush galloping downward into
the village. Onward thundered the big black horse and his strange rider,
sweeping by like a whirlwind, and speeding on and on, till they vanished
over the southern hilltops. A light cloud of dust floated for a moment
between the farthest green and the farthest blue, and then that too
disappeared, and the coming and going of the wild apparition might well
have been some trick of a fantastic imagination. And yet Lynn had
received a curiously distinct impression of the man's appearance in this
space of time, brief almost as a lightning flash. He had seen the
foreign dress, the great boots so long that they were slit to the knee;
the blood-red handkerchief tied loosely around the neck, and, most
distinctly of all, the sinister expression of the dark, deeply lined
face and the wildness of the black eyes under the wide, flapping, soft
brim of the large sombrero hat. Altogether it was so strange, so unreal
an interruption of the peace of this pastoral spot, that the young man
could only stand silent gazing after it in bewildered surprise.

"That's Alvarado! You've seen one of the sights of the country," his
grandmother called out to him from her place by the window.

"Who is Alvarado?" he asked, when he had entered the room.

"That is a question which a good many people have been asking for a good
many years, and nobody has ever had a satisfactory answer," old lady
Gordon replied.

Smiling her sardonic smile, she deliberately turned down the leaf of the
novel which she had been reading as usual, and laid it on her lap. She
was always amused by these histrionic appearances of Alvarado which so
terrified most of the Oldfield people. It had indeed long been known all
over the Pennyroyal Region that, while other folks always drove hastily
into the nearest fence corner whenever they saw Alvarado coming, old
lady Gordon invariably kept straight along in the middle of the big
road--never turning one hair's breadth to the right or the left--and
that Alvarado was always the one who had to turn out. She said nothing
of this, however, and thought nothing of it; but she told her grandson
all that she knew or that any one knew of Alvarado.

He was a Spaniard who had suddenly appeared in the vicinity of Oldfield,
some twenty-five years before. No one had any knowledge of him previous
to that time, and no one had ever known where he came from. Yet, for
some reason never clearly understood, his coming had, nevertheless, been
associated from the first with the scattering of the Gulf pirates which
had followed the deposing of their last king. It is true that Lafitte
was long since gone to render his awful account of the terrible deeds
done in the body--with perhaps his desperate service at the battle of
New Orleans as the largest item on the other side of the blotted ledger.
But the death of Lafitte in 1826 did not immediately free the Gulf from
its fearful scourge. The passing of piracy was gradual, very gradual
indeed, and even long drawn out, as the traders of the Pennyroyal Region
knew only too well, through their close and continual connection with
New Orleans by route of the flatboat. There was, therefore, to the minds
of the Oldfield people, nothing improbable in the continued existence of
numbers of Lafitte's followers, who were younger than himself and
consequently not yet really old men. Still, while there was no
impossibility or even any improbability in Alvarado's being a comrade of
Lafitte, there appeared no actual proof that he ever had been. According
to old lady Gordon's account, the principal grounds of suspicion were
these: his appearance, which was otherwise unaccounted for, just at the
time that the pirates were being driven from the Gulf and out of the
Gulf states; his frequent, long, and mysterious absences at sea after
his coming to live in the vicinity of Oldfield; the fabulous sums of
gold and silver fetched home by him from these voyages, when he was
known not to have any visible means of making money; the many curious
weapons of marine warfare scattered through his strange house, which was
half a fort, half a farmhouse, and wholly barbaric in its rough richness
of furnishing; the generally credited rumor that he habitually wore a
coat of mail; the well-known fact--open for every passer-by to see--that
he kept a horse standing continually at his gate, day and night, for
years, saddled and bridled, with pistols in the holsters, apparently
ready for instant flight.

Many of these things old lady Gordon had seen with her own eyes. Most of
them she knew to be true, but she had never gone to his house, although
he had at one time received a measure of social recognition,
when--according to old lady Gordon--there had been something like real
society in Oldfield. He was rather a handsome man after a sinister,
foreign fashion, although he had been past youth when he first came to
Oldfield, and he had a dashing way with him which fascinated the
unobservant. It was in this manner that he was thrown with Alice
Fielding, the colonel's prettiest and youngest daughter, so old lady
Gordon said.

"You mean the old gentleman whom I saw yesterday? That stately,
beautiful old man with the silver hair curling on his shoulders, and
wearing the long black cloak?" Lynn said.

"That's the man, but I wish you might have seen him in those days. He
was just about as fiery as Alvarado, though in a slightly more civilized
way, and he never wanted Alice to have anything to do with him. He never
wanted the Spaniard around his house at all. No man like Colonel
Fielding--English in every drop of blood--ever wants anything to do with
any foreigner. But there's no use in trying to manage a girl like Alice
Fielding,--a little, soft, say-nothing, characterless thing,--there's
nothing in her strong enough to get a good firm hold on. She's blown
like a feather this way and that way by the strongest influence--good or
bad--that she falls under. You'll find the kind, and plenty of them, all
over the world. The Fielding negroes used to say Alvarado threw a spell
over Alice. I presume he did, but it was the spell which that sort of
man always throws over that sort of girl. She was a flighty, vain little
creature, and flattered of course by his being so madly in love. That
was plain enough for anybody to see. Nobody ever doubted that he loved
her. But she had never thought of marrying him until she was terrified
into doing it. She was probably in love with John Stanley so far as she
was capable of loving any man. It was said they were upon the verge of
becoming engaged to be married. I don't know about that, but there was
no doubt of John's loving her. It took him years to get over her
marriage to Alvarado."

"I don't understand. Why did she marry him?" asked Lynn.

"Through sheer fright mixed with a kind of silly romance, as nearly as
anybody ever could make out. It happened in this way. There was some
kind of a party at Colonel Fielding's. There always was something going
on while his girls were young and gay; and there is plenty of room in
the jailer's residence for any kind of entertainment--and many's the
ball and dinner they gave! That night Alvarado was one of the guests, as
he often was. Nobody knows what led up to the outbreak, but he suddenly
fell on the floor in convulsions, stiff and stark and black in the face,
and actually foaming at the mouth--a sight, they said, to make the
strongest shudder. The doctor was hurriedly called out of the supper
room and at once shut the door of the room in which Alvarado was
lying--at the point of death as everybody thought. As the guests huddled
together whispering, it flew all over the house that he had taken poison
and that he refused to take an antidote unless Alice would consent to
marry him. Your father was there and saw her go into the room, and he
said afterwards that she looked as much like a dead woman then, as she
did a year later when she lay in her coffin. No one, except those who
were in the room, ever knew what happened, but the colonel presently
came to the door and sent for the preacher. It was a dancing party, or
he would have been there already, as almost everybody else was. But it
didn't take long to fetch him, and he married Alvarado to Alice Fielding
then and there."

"And John Stanley?" inquired Lynn.

"He knew nothing of the marriage till he came to see Alice on the next
Sunday as he always did. He didn't live in Oldfield at that time. He had
gone away soon after another unlucky affair which most men wouldn't have
worried about, but which seems to have had a lifelong effect upon him.
He was always a sensitive, high-strung fellow and deeply religious--full
of lofty ideals and all that sort of thing--even then, when he was
hardly more than a lad. He had come here only a week or so before to
take an assistant's place in the clerk's office. He was a cousin of Jack
Mitchell, the county clerk--that's the way he happened to come. Well,
Jack Mitchell was a politician and as high a talker and as low a doer as
was to be found betwixt the Cumberland and Green River, which is saying
a good deal. I reckon he couldn't be more than matched in these days. I
haven't noticed much change in politicians during the last quarter of a
century. Jack had been elected by a large majority, and was reelected,
and had his hand fairly on a higher rung of the political ladder, when
he made a false step and slipped. The trouble came from a foolish
quarrel caused by drink. Jack Mitchell always was quarrelsome when in
liquor, and on that day he happened to accuse another Kentuckian of
cowardice. That, of course, was crossing the dead-line. It was just the
same then that it is now and always will be, till our blood and training
are different. And the fact that the man who had been branded as a
coward was a worthless loafer, made no more difference then then it
would make now. The wretch who had been 'insulted' rose up, as soon as
he was sober enough, and borrowed a shot-gun and went to wipe out his
dishonor, just as if he had been a real gentleman. Jack, with his usual
luck, was not in the office when his enemy, who was still drinking
heavily, suddenly appeared in the doorway, levelling the gun. He was not
so drunk, though, that he didn't know that he was aiming at a boy whom
he had never seen before, in place of the man whom he had come to kill.
He knew it well enough, for he muttered something about killing the
young one if he couldn't get the old one. But John Stanley was too quick
for him. Jack's pistol lay handy, as it always did, as pistols always
do, hereabouts. The boy hardly knew what was happening before he had
shot dead a man whose name he didn't know--a man whom he had never seen
or heard of before."

"What a strange story," Lynn said. "I think I have never heard a
stranger one."

"Oh, I don't know about it's being strange. Of course somebody had to be
killed," old lady Gordon responded indifferently.

"Somebody had to be killed--and why?" repeated Lynn, wonderingly; for,
although to the manner born he was not to the manner bred.

"Oh, well, when things get into that shape somebody's bound to be
killed! When a Kentuckian is accused of cowardice he has to kill
somebody to prove his courage. There's nothing else to be
done--apparently. And it might as well have been Betts as anybody else."

She yawned, and swayed her turkey-wing fan.

"It would all have blown over and have passed, as all such things pass
in this country, if John Stanley hadn't been morbid about it, if he had
been at all like other people. Of course he was acquitted at the
examining trial. There were plenty of witnesses to the fact that he
fired in self-defence. The family of the man who was killed never made a
motion toward taking the matter up, and they would have been ready
enough to do it if they could have found any pretext for blaming John.
They were, in fact, rather looked down on for taking it so easy. But
John has never forgiven himself; he has always thought he might have
done something else than what he did. He has rarely mentioned it to any
one, but I understand that he once told Miss Judy that, if it were to do
over again, he would run the risk of being killed himself rather than
take the life of any human being. As I have said, he was always very
religious, even then, and this was, I suppose, the reason why he brooded
so over the affair. To this day he's more like a praying monk shut up in
a cell than he's like the famous judge of a large circuit."

"Of course he never married," said Lynn.

"Oh, yes, he did--but not for a long time; not for years and years after
that Spanish tiger had made an end of that foolish little kitten. Alice
lived only a few months. They said that Alvarado wasn't unkind; that he
even tried to be kind in his way. But Alice seemed to hate him--as much
as she was capable of hating anybody--when she found out how he had
tricked her; that he hadn't taken poison at all when he pretended he
had, and that the awful-looking foam on his lips had come from chewing
soap."

"Don't--don't!" cried the young man. "Leave the romance. Tell me about
Judge Stanley--though he too has done what he could to spoil the story
by marrying. What sort of woman is his wife? Poor little Alice!"

"I've never seen his wife. She has been here only once or twice, for a
few days at a time. They say she is a high-flier and very ambitious.
John didn't begin to go up very high in the world till after he had
married her. She no doubt makes him a much better wife than Alice ever
could have made. A silly, big-eyed, clinging, crying little woman who
doesn't weigh a hundred pounds can drag down the strongest man like a
mill-stone around his neck. That apparently harmless little creature
managed to ruin the lives of two big strong men--each worth half a dozen
of her for all useful purposes. John Stanley certainly has never seen a
day's happiness, and there can be no sort of doubt that Alvarado has
been partially demented ever since her death. His craziness seems to
take the form of senseless litigation. He appears unable to keep away
from the court-house when he knows that John Stanley is here, and he is
always bringing lawsuits on ridiculous pretexts, so that the judge is
compelled to rule them out of court. Alvarado is forever trying to find
a chance to pick a quarrel with the judge, but he might just as well
give it up. He will never be able, no matter how hard he tries, or how
insulting he may be, to drag John Stanley into a duel or even into a
quarrel."

"Why?" asked the young man in surprise, not understanding. "Is the
Spaniard such a terrible person? Is the judge afraid?"

"Afraid--John Stanley afraid!" repeated old lady Gordon, scornfully. "He
never knew what fear was. For calm, cool, unflinching courage in the
face of the greatest danger, I have never known his equal. If I could
remember and tell you some of the brave things that that man has done.
Why, when he was only a lad he seized a lamp which had exploded and
coolly held it in his bare hands--with the blazing oil burning the flesh
to the bone--till he could carry it to a place of safety, rather than
endanger the lives of other people by throwing it down. No longer than a
year or two ago he nearly lost his own life by saving an old negro woman
from a runaway horse. John Stanley is no more afraid of Alvarado than he
is of me. It's all on account of his queer notions of religion, of
humanity, and of the sacredness of human life. It all grew out of that
unlucky accident of his youth, a matter that another man would not have
given a second thought to. His fear, his horror of shedding blood has
gradually grown more and more intense, until it seems to have become a
positive mania. Nothing now can ever drive him from it. Alvarado may as
well give up trying to provoke him into a quarrel. But he on his side is
quite as determined as John Stanley. He will never give it up; he's no
doubt been at the court-house hatching some plot this very day. I often
wonder what the end will be, should both of the men go on living. To
think of all the wrong and wretchedness that one foolish baby face can
cause!"

Lynn did not cry out again, half in earnest and half in jest, begging
his grandmother to spare romance; but he got up, silently, and took a
turn or two about the room. He was genuinely shocked to find himself
feeling the repulsion which her lack of womanliness forced upon him. The
merciless cynicism revealed by everything that she said might have
amused him had he heard it from another person; but he was
uncontrollably repulsed by it coming from his father's mother. He was
glad when she began to speak of other subjects, and less moving ones,
although these also were interwoven with the history of the Pennyroyal
Region.

She was not a native of Oldfield. Her birth-place lay farther up in that
country on the "Pigeon Roost Fork of the Muddy, which is a branch of
Green River," on the very spot thus described by Washington Irving's
Kentucky classic. But Irving had only heard of "Blue Bead Miller," the
famous hunter and Indian fighter, whom he has immortalized in that
charming tale under his real name; and old lady Gordon had known him in
her childhood and early youth. Many a time she had seen him in her
father's house, where he would often come, bringing his rifle, "Betsy,"
for her mother to "unwitch." And this, her mother--who was young and
city-bred, and full of wondering interest in all these strange ways of
the wilderness--would always do with girlish delight, gravely running
her slim white fingers up and down the grimy barrel, as one who works a
beneficent charm, while the grim old woodsman looked on with
unquestioning faith.

Near this old home on the Pigeon Roost Fork was the Roost itself, that
marvellous mecca of the wild pigeons, where countless billions of gray
wings darkened the great woods on the sunniest midday; and where
unnumbered trillions of the weightless, feathered little bodies crushed
the great limbs of the mightiest giants of the forest. And this wondrous
sight, too, old lady Gordon had seen many times, long before Audubon saw
it to describe it for the wonderment of the whole world.

She had not much to tell of the bridegroom with whom she came as a young
bride to live in Oldfield; she spoke mainly of journeying on horseback
over the Wilderness Road, and of passing the place called "Harpe's
Head," which had then been very recently named for a most hideous
tragedy. It was a story full of grewsome romance, this tale of the
unheralded coming of two monsters among a simple, honest, scattered, yet
neighborly, woods-people. The two were brothers, or claimed to be, but
there was no outward likeness between them. One was small, and not in
any way calculated to attract attention; while the other was far above
the ordinary stature of men, and so ferocious of aspect that the very
sight of him chilled the beholder with fear. Neither of the men ever
wore any head covering, and both had wild, manelike, red hair, and
complexions of "a livid redness"--whatever that may have been--such as
left a lasting impression of horror upon all who encountered them. They
were soon known throughout the length of Wilderness Road as Big Harpe
and Little Harpe. They lived close to the road, and almost immediately
after their coming travellers began to disappear, never to be heard of
again, or to be found long afterward to have been murdered. A very pall
of terror spread gradually over the whole Pennyroyal Region; arson,
robbery, and atrocities unspeakable followed murder after murder, and
yet the few, far-apart people of the terror-stricken country could only
tremble in helpless fear, till the murder of a woman led to the tracing
of the long, wide, deep track of blood and crime to the door of the
Harpes.

"When they murdered a woman, the whole country rose up as one man. And
it was just the same then that it is now when the same thing happens,"
old lady Gordon said grimly. "The best men in the Pennyroyal Region--as
good and as God-fearing men as could be found in the world--hunted the
Harpes like wild beasts. They beat the whole wilderness for the
monsters, until they found them at last. Little Harpe managed to escape;
it was not known how, and he was never seen or heard of again. But it
was Big Harpe who had been the leader; he was the one that the men
wanted most, and they now had him fast like a wild animal in a trap. Yet
not one of his captors touched him; not one of them spoke to him; they
all merely sat still with their eyes on him, and waited for the woman's
husband to come."

"History repeats itself--especially in Kentucky," Lynn said.

Old lady Gordon smiled her most sardonic smile. "The skull of Big
Harpe's head stayed on the end of a pole by the side of the Wilderness
Road through a good many years. The place where it was put up is still
called 'Harpe's Head'--I presume it always will be."

All this was before old lady Gordon came as a young bride to live in
Oldfield; but another band of robbers and assassins still terrorized
that part of the Pennyroyal Region. The cavern in which the band made
its den was on the other side of the Ohio River, but it was Kentucky
that suffered most from its ravages. Many a richly laden flatboat was
never heard of after it was known to have stopped at the entrance to
Cave-in-Rock, as the place was called in the beginning of the last
century, and as it is called at the present time. Many a gold-laden
boatman, who had unknowingly passed down the river without stopping at
the Cave-in-Rock, was beguiled into entering it on his way
homeward--only to vanish forever off the face of the earth. The cavern
would seem to have offered powerful temptations to the unwary traveller.
The cave itself was then as it is now a most curious and interesting
survival of prehistoric times. It is a single chamber in the solid rock,
opening at the river's brink, two hundred feet long and eighty feet
wide, its sides rising by regular stages after the manner of the seats
in an amphitheatre. Its walls are covered with strange carvings cut deep
in the stone; there are representations of several animals unknown to
science, and there are also inscribed characters which have led those
learned in such matters to believe the cavern to have been the council
house of some ancient race. But nothing was known of these things while
Cave-in-Rock remained the hiding-place of robbers and assassins. The
terrified country round about Oldfield knew the place only by vague
hearsay as a drinking, gambling resort, wherein boatmen and all unwary
travellers going up or down the Ohio were lured to destruction. No one
who entered the awful mystery of the cavern ever came out to tell what
he had seen or what had befallen him. It seemed--so old lady Gordon
said--as if the hand of the law would never be able to lay hold upon
actual proof of the crimes committed at Cave-in-Rock, but when the band
was ultimately run to earth, an upper and secret chamber was found to be
filled with the bones of human beings.

The grandmother and the grandson sat silent for a space after she grew
weary of story-telling. They were thinking in widely different ways of
the wild, true tales of these terrific passion storms which had swept
Kentucky throughout her existence. Was another fair portion of the good
green earth ever so deep-dyed in the blood of both the innocent and the
guilty?

"And yet through all we have always been a most religious people," the
young man said musingly.

"Very!" responded the old lady, who was growing hungry. "None more so.
We've about all the different religions that anybody else ever had, and
we've started one or two of our own."




X

RELIGION IN OLDFIELD


It is in the quiet village, remote, as this was, from the rushing change
of city life, that the fervor of religion always appears warmest and
seems to linger longest.

In Oldfield everybody went to church twice a day on Sunday, in winter
and in summer, and through the rain as well as through the sunshine.
That is to say, everybody except old lady Gordon and Miss Judy Bramwell,
neither of whom ever went at all.

There was nothing strange or inconsistent in old lady Gordon's staying
away. She was generally held by everybody to be as an out-and-out
heathen, whereas in reality she was merely a good deal of a pagan. And
she was not in the habit of accounting to anybody for what she did or
did not do, being equally indifferent to private and public opinion.

But Miss Judy's never going was a much harder thing to understand. For
the little lady was not only the model for the whole community in
week-day matters, but she was also known to be a most devout
Episcopalian, so that, taken altogether, the fact that she never went to
church remained always an impenetrable mystery, notwithstanding that the
Oldfield church-goers discussed it untiringly on almost every Sunday of
their lives. Nor did Miss Judy, who was the soul of guileless frankness
in everything else, ever offer any sort of an explanation for this
unaccountable remissness. She could not make any untrue excuses, and she
would not give the real reason; her gentle heart being much too tender
of her neighbors' feelings to admit of her mentioning the truth, so long
as she was able to hide what she was bound in conscience to feel.

"They are doing the best they can, you know, sister Sophia," she would
say, almost in a whisper, as the neighbors passed on Sundays; and she
would steal on tiptoe to close the door, so that Merica might not
overhear. "They are not to blame, poor things; it is their misfortune
and not their fault, that they don't know the difference between a
meeting-house and the Church, and between a lecture and the Service."

"Just so, sister Judy," Miss Sophia would respond, more befogged if
possible over consecration and apostolic succession than she was over
most things. When, however, after a time, she came gradually to
comprehend that this stand, taken privately by Miss Judy, would spare
herself the exertion of walking to the meeting-houses, both of which
were at the other end of town, she became so decided in her support of
Miss Judy's position as to remove the last shade of doubt from that mild
little lady's mind. Nothing of all this was ever suspected by any third
person, but in the absence of any actual knowledge, it ultimately came
to be taken for granted that Miss Judy stayed at home on Sundays and
read the prayer-book to her sister because Miss Sophia was not equal to
the long walk to church and back, especially in bad weather. Miss Judy
of course said not a word either to confirm or to contradict this
impression, which strengthened as the years went by. But she always gave
the neighbors so sweet a smile when they passed on the way to meeting
that everything seemed to everybody just as it should be.

One of the churches belonged to the Methodists and the other to the
denomination known as The Disciples of Christ. The town was not large
enough to supply two congregations or to support two preachers; and it
was consequently necessary to hold services in each of the churches on
alternate Sundays in order to insure a sizable congregation and a
moderate support for the circuit rider and the Christian elder, when
they came from their farms in another part of the county to preach on
their appointed days; thus giving freedom to all and favor to none.

A single contribution box served for the two churches. This, which was
in reality a contribution bag, was a sort of inverted liberty cap made
of ecclesiastical black cloth, and lined with churchly purple satin.
When not in use it usually stood on the end of its long staff in what
was called the Amen corner of the Methodist church. The office of taking
it down from its accustomed resting-place, and of carrying it over to
the Christian church when needed there, had belonged from time
immemorial to Uncle Watty. It is not certain to which of the two
denominations Uncle Watty himself belonged. It was, indeed, never a very
clearly established fact that he was a member of any denomination, but
this uncertainty had nothing whatever to do with the lifelong holding of
his office. It seemed to everybody to be the right and proper thing for
Uncle Watty to take up the collection, mainly for the reason that he
always had done it, which is accepted as a good and sufficient reason
for many rather singular things in that region. Miss Judy, who knew
about it, as she knew about everything, although she never saw him do
it,--since she never went to meeting,--always considered it a
particularly kind and delicate arrangement, devised by some thoughtful,
feeling person expressly to save Uncle Watty the embarrassment of having
nothing to put in the bag himself. But Uncle Watty apparently took
another view of it; and, like a good many people who do little
themselves and exact much from others, he was extremely rigorous and
almost relentless in his handing of the contribution bag. Its tough,
hickory handle was equal to the full length of the b

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