Jack Ballington, Forester
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Title: Jack Ballington, Forester
Creator: John Trotwood Moore
Illustrator: George Gibbs
Release date: May 23, 2014 [eBook #45652]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45652
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JACK BALLINGTON, FORESTER ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Illustration: I WAS NEVER SO HAPPY (Page 80)]
JACK BALLINGTON
FORESTER
BY
JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE
AUTHOR OF "OLD MISTIS;" "A SUMMER HYMNAL;"
"THE BISHOP OF COTTONTOWN;"
"UNCLE WASH," ETC.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY GEORGE GIBBS
THOMAS LANGTON
TORONTO, CANADA.
Copyright, 1911, by
THE JOHN C. WINSTON Co.
TO THE TWINS
HELEN AND MARY DANIEL MOORE
*CONTENTS*
*I*
*THE HEIR OF THE BLUEGRASS*
CHAPTER
I Soul Dreams and the Soil
II Little Sister
*II*
*"A TWILIGHT PIECE"*
I The Flame in the Wood
II The Home-Stretch
III The Hickories
IV Colonel Goff
V Pedigrees and Principles
VI The Make-Believe
VII The Chimes of the Wisteria
VIII The Stone-Crop
IX The Transplanted Pine
X Conquering Satan
XI Two Ways of Love
XII Work and Mine Acre
XIII The Unattainable
XIV God and a Butterfly
XV Hickories and Old Hickory
XVI Heart's Ease
XVII "Lady Carfax"
XVIII The Last Dance
XIX The High Jump
*III*
*THE HICKORY'S SON*
I "Love is not Love That Alters"
II A Dream and Its Ending
III The Awakening
IV The Call of the Drum
V The First Tennessee
VI The Battle in the Bacaue Mountains
VII The Juramentados
*IV*
*THE BURGEONING*
I Two of a Kind
II How Aunt Lucretia Ran Away
III A Night with Captain Skipper
IV My First Automobile
V The Sick Tree
*ILLUSTRATIONS*
I Was Never So Happy . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
"Stop Her--He'll Kill Her," I Cried
"Love is not Love that Alters."
I was on Him, My Knee on His Breast
*FOREWORD*
_I am the child of the Centuries. I am the son of the AEons which were.
I have always been, and I shall always be. To make me it has taken
fire, star-dust, and the Spirit of God--the lives of billions of people,
and the lights of a million suns._
_I have grown from sun and star-dust to the Thing-Which-Thinks._
_It were the basest ingratitude if I were not both thankful to God and
proud of my pedigree._
_What has come to me has been good; what shall come will be better: for
I am Evolution, and I grow ever to greater things. Life has been good;
death will be better; for it is the cause of all my past, making for a
still greater future._
_And this I know, not from Books nor from Knowledge, but from the
unafraid, never silent voice of Instinct within me, which is God._
_My debt to the past is great: I can never, in full, repay it; for they,
my creditors, passed with it. They left me a world beautiful: shall I
make it a world bare? They left a world bountiful: shall I leave it
blazed and barren to the sands of death?_
_I am in debt to the Past. Shall the Future present the bill to find
that I have gone to my grave a bankrupt? Find that I have wantonly laid
waste the land, leaving no root of wild flower, no shade of tree, no
spring that falleth from the hills?_
_Shall I destroy their trees for the little gain it may bring to my
short Life-tenantry? Shall I make of their land a desert by day and a
deluge by night? Shall I stamp with the degeneracy of gullies my own
offspring, and scar with the red birth-mark of poverty the unborn of my
own breed?_
_I live, charged with a great Goodness from the Past: I can die, paying
it, only by a greater Kindness for the Future._
*I*
*THE HEIR OF THE BLUEGRASS*
*JACK BALLINGTON,
FORESTER*
*CHAPTER I*
*SOUL-DREAMS AND THE SOIL*
Those who live near to Nature learn much: for it is only by living close
to her that we learn from her. The best advice ever given on longevity
was from the cheery old gentleman who said: "To live long, live
naturally; eat what you want, and walk on the sunny side of the street."
School children think that some wise man made all the hard rules of
grammar that grown-up folks try to teach them. They do not know that
the child-man learned to talk first and that the rules were made from
his speech. It is like the simple people at the circus who think the
trained horse is dancing to the music; it is the music that is dancing
to him. From the facts of life we draw our rules just as the scholars
made rules of grammar from the facts of language.
Nature is the One great Fact.
I was thinking of one of her facts the other day--she has so many--but
one I had noticed very plainly: the man who lives close to her is an
optimist.
Let the farmer fail year after year, and still he plants, hoping. Let
the merchant fall behind one year and he is shaken; another year, and he
quits. One season of deep water-hauling sends the fisherman home to his
fields. When the wild game vanishes the pioneer hunter becomes the
pioneer farmer. The merchant, the lawyer, the doctor,--there never was
one who did not dream, betimes, over his books, that he would yet live
to retire and till his acres.
Every failure in life goes back to the soil for a new start.
That is the fact; now for the rule. It is this: God intended that man
should be, first of all, a soil-worker. And tilling the soil includes
not only planting, but bringing all growing and living things thereon to
strength.
Rearing things on the soil is man's natural vocation, since neither
drought, nor flood, nor failure, can shut out from his heart that
instinct of hope which has come down through so many centuries of
soil-loving ancestors. The hoping instinct has been housed in him so
long that it is part of his heredity.
Maritime nations found empires, but not religions. Religions come from
the soil. Men, living in the open, watching their flocks by night, find
in the eternal wonder of the soul-questioning stars that which satisfies
their own souls.
Imagine fighting Rome founding a religion! Or bookish Greece! Or the
trading Saxon!
Religions come from mangers. All great soul-dreams were born amid
flocks and herds.
This is my own story, and the telling of it shall be in my own way. And
as I am not a writer, but a forester, doubtless my telling will be all
awry. For I have seen enough of life to know that the generals who have
won in the field of fiction, like the generals who have won in the field
of fact, have won because they have had the drilling.
And in my case the drilling has been only trees--trees, and their
children, the flowers.
*CHAPTER II*
*LITTLE SISTER*
This is my story, as I said, and the telling of it must be in my own
way. That is why I am giving this chapter first--because it happened
first--four years before the real story began. Another reason is that in
the telling of it I can set forth the characters of the old general, my
grandsire, who believed in fighting; of my Aunt Lucretia, his daughter,
who believed in pedigrees; of Eloise, the beautiful and daring one, who
believed in dancing and riding and shooting, and in making those who
loved her miserable; of Colonel Goff, an Englishman, who believed in
horses and hounds; and of Little Sister, who believed in Uncle Jack; and
even of myself, Uncle Jack, who believed in trees.
Little Sister is the three-year-old daughter of my brother Ned
Ballington, who, with his lovely wife, Thesis, and his major domo, Uncle
Wash (a colored gentleman of the Old School), and his other live things
and birds, resides on the farm adjoining ours.
But Little Sister, whose real name is Mildred, and her brother, two
years younger, who was baptized Edward, but whom Uncle Jack had
nicknamed Captain Skipper, because nothing could keep him still, spent
the most of their time at The Home Stretch, the home of their great
grandsire, General John Rutherford, where also lived their Aunt
Lucretia, and Eloise, and Uncle Jack.
It was either very hot or very cold on those days when Uncle Jack did
not drive them over to spend the day, and maybe a night, too. Once in a
great while the footing was too slippery for the pony. But these
omissions occurred, at the most, perhaps twice each summer and winter;
for the heart of the Middle Basin, that beautiful bluegrass country in
which they live, beats in the breast of Summer.
John Rutherford, the First, built The Home Stretch in 1800. It adjoined
the lands of Andrew Jackson, and the very spirit of the old fighter
hangs over the place. For John Rutherford had loved him--nay, had
lived, fought, and died for him--at New Orleans. There is a tradition
that Old Hickory himself named the place--in fact, that John Rutherford
owned it for no other reason than that his horse beat Andrew Jackson's
in the home stretch. The bet was a thousand acres of land. The race
track may still be seen at Clover Bottom, just across the way, where
Stone's River makes a bend around a hundred acres of land, rich as ever
the crow made a granary of, and as level as Chalmette Plain, where
Jackson's riflemen stopped the British before New Orleans.
Little Sister was a fair, frail, sensitive little tot. Her bright blue
eyes, pale pink face and dark brown hair kept one thinking of full
summer moons rainbowed at night. And her temper--she was fire and
powder there--a flash, maybe a clenched small fist, a small foot brought
down in sudden scorn--an explosion--and then she was sobbing for
forgiveness in your arms. That was Little Sister.
Once she slapped Aunt Lucretia in the face. "I can't see where in the
world she gets her temper from," Aunt Lucretia said; "for if there is an
angel on earth it is Thesis, her mother. General Rutherford" (Aunt
Lucretia always called her father General Rutherford), "this child ought
to be spanked till she is conquered. Her mother sends her over here
expecting us to make her behave."
"Tut, tut, Madam," said the General (he always called his daughter
madam), "that is not the way to break colts. That kind of a conquering
would spoil her. She'll need all of that temper, when she knows enough
to control it, to get through life and land anywhere near the wire
first. Besides, with her sensitiveness, don't you see she is suffering
now more than if we had punished her? If she were a plug now" (for the
General hated nothing so much as a plug), "she would never be sorry till
you made her sorry with a beating. But the conscience of a thoroughbred
beats hickory, and gentleness, Madam, is away ahead of blows in
everything but war--and we are not fighting now."
Then to make sure that she did not get a whipping, Uncle Jack, who was
eighteen and preparing for college, would snatch her away from Aunt
Lucretia and take her out to see the colts. At sight of them her
troubles vanished; for her love of all live things which are born on a
stock farm was as deep as her Ballington blood. A great burst of
sunshine would spread over her conscience-stricken face.
"O Uncle Jack, aren't they just too sweet for anything? Do let me get
down this minute and hug them--every one!" And Uncle Jack would let
her, if he had to catch each colt himself.
The clear-cut way she talked English! And her great heart of
motherhood! These were the two wonderful things in a tot so small. It
was not difficult to see where she inherited the first. But how could so
tiny a thing have such a great mother-heart? She loved everything
little--everything _just born_ on the place. The fact that anything in
hair, hide or feathers had arrived was a cause of jollification. "O do
let me see the dear little things!" would be her cry. And she generally
saw them if Uncle Jack were around.
One day they missed her from the house and Uncle Jack quickly tracked
her to the cow barn. It had occurred to him that the day before he had
shown her the Short-Horn's latest edition, a big, double-jointed, ugly,
hungry male calf, who slept all day in a bedded stall, a young Hercules
in repose, and only waked up long enough to wrinkle his huge nose and
sleep again.
There Uncle Jack found her. She had climbed over the high stall-gate to
pet and coddle the great calf. She had placed her own beautiful string
of beads around his tawny neck.
"Come out of there," laughed Uncle Jack. "What do you see pretty about
that great ugly calf?"
"O Uncle Jack," and she sighed affectedly, "I am truly sorry for him.
He is not pretty, to be sure--and so I have given him my beads. And he
doesn't seem to be very bright, nor at all well mannered, poor
dear--but--but," she added reflectively--"he has a lovely curly head and
he seems to be such a healthy child!"
On another occasion they missed her. It was nearly night. Everybody
started out in alarm to hunt for her. Aunt Lucretia was the first to
find her, coming from the brood-sow's lot.
"Where in the world have you been, child?" she asked as she picked her
up.
"Playing with the little yesterday-pigs," said Little Sister. "And Aunt
Lucretia, I ought to have come home sooner, I know, but I kissed one of
the cunningest of the little pigs good night, and all the others looked
so hurt, and squealed so because I didn't kiss them too, I just had to
catch and kiss every one before they would go to sleep."
Inheritance had played a tremendous part in Little Sister. Most
children crow and lisp and talk in divers languages before they learn to
talk English; while some never learn at all. But not so with her. The
first long word she attempted was perfectly pronounced. The first
sentence she put together was grammatically correct. The correctness of
her language for one so small made it sound so quaint that Uncle Jack
had her always talking. Her earnestness and intensity only added to her
originality.
Pete was a little darky on the farm whose chief business was to
entertain Little Sister when everything else failed. His repertoire
consisted of all the funny tricks of a monkey. But his two-star
performances were racking like Deacon Jones' old clay-bank pacer and
playing 'possum. Little Sister never tired of having Pete do these two
things. They were very comical. Everybody knew Deacon Jones, with his
angular, sedate, solemn way of riding, and the double-shuffling,
twisting, cork-screw gait of the old pacer. The ludicrous motions of
the pacer had struck Pete early in life, and he had soon learned to get
down on all-fours and make Deacon Jones's horse ashamed of himself. The
imitation was so perfect that Ned and Uncle Jack used to call in their
friends to see the show, which consisted of Pete's doing the racking
act, while Little Sister, astraddle of his back, with one hand in his
shirt collar, and the other wielding a hickory switch, played the
Deacon.
One evening, before company, Pete had paced around so many times that he
was leg-weary. Little Sister, astride his back, whacked him in the
flanks vigorously and exclaimed: "Come, pace along there, damn you, or
I'll put a head on you!"
The company nearly fell out of their chairs, while Thesis blushed and
Ned stammered an apology. Then he remembered that only a few days
before he had heard his grandsire, the swearing old Indian Fighter, make
the same remark to Pete for being slow about bringing his shaving water;
and he knew that if Little Sister was proud of anyone, it was of her
great grandsire, who fought valiantly with "Stonewall" in the Valley.
Ned and Thesis gave the old gentleman a talk, and begged him to be
careful of his oaths in the presence of Little Sister: but when he had
heard it, he laughed more than he had laughed for a year, and
straightway proceeded to buy her a doll that cost a gold eagle, and was
as large, and nearly as beautiful, as Little Sister herself.
The spring that Little Sister was four years old, the General, as was
his custom every morning before breakfast, went out to the barn and
paddock to see the brood mares and colts. A stately brown mare,
ankle-deep in blue grass, stood in the paddock nearest the house, under
a great maple tree, its falling branches almost concealing her. She
turned every now and then in a nervous, unhappy way, and, going up to
the brown, new-born weakling of a colt lying in the blue grass, and
which seemed unable to rise, she lowered her shapely head till her
nozzle caressed it and then she whinnied softly. Something was very
badly wrong and she knew it.
The old General had been looking on for quite a while, frowning. When
the General was sorry for anything he expressed his sympathy by a
nervous strutting and swearing. When he was angry or fighting--as his
battles in Virginia proved--he was as silent as a stone wall, and as
staunch. _Then_ he never swore.
"The damned little thing's deformed, Jim," he said to the negro stable
boy who was standing near. "Poor old Betty," and he rubbed his favorite
saddle mare's nose, "she is distressed."
There was the sound of fox hunters coming up the pike. The hounds
passed first, in a trot, nosing. Then the two hunters rode up to the
rock fence where the General stood. One of them rode a docked hunter
with ungainly long head and sloping rump and shoulders. Both horse and
rider were unmistakably English; the man was middle-aged, portly, and
handsome. The other rider was a young man riding a Tennessee saddle
horse.
"Good morning, General," said the Englishman, saluting, "can't you join
us to-day? Thought we'd exercise the pack a bit. The blooming old chap
was out last night--over in the hills after a negro's chickens--and
we'll take up his trail and have a little chase. Fawncy striking him in
that stretch of Stone's River bottom--aw--but we'll have a chase!"
"No--no--Goff," said the old General, impatiently, "I'm pestered to
death with this little colt. I don't know what to do with it."
The hunter glanced over into the paddock.
"O that old ambling saddle mare of yours! Aw--you know what we did with
them in England--two centuries ago--anything with that Andalusian jennet
blood in it--that old pacing gait--killed 'em--aw! exterminated 'em,
sir! Always told you so. They're fit for nothing but for old women to
ride to church on."
The younger man broke out into a boisterous laugh. His face was round
and weak, his mouth wide, his eyes insincere, and his laugh was affected
and betook of his eyes.
"The Colonel's right, Grandpa. Tell Jim to kill it an' come on with
us."
The old General glanced at him quickly. "Braxton Bragg Rutherford, my
son, when you enter West Point you will find it a rule there that very
young officers do not try to impress their views on their superiors
until asked."
"Colonel Goff, suh," he said, turning to the Englishman, "that old mare
has carried me for fifteen years and never stumped her toe. Her dam
carried me through the Valley campaign with Stonewall Jackson. She
helped us chase Banks and Fremont out of God's country. She saved my
life once because she could outfoot Yankee cavalry. You were with me
and know it. I owe the whole family a debt I can never repay, and suh,
I'll be damned if I don't hate to kill her colt."
Colonel Goff looked over the fence at the colt lying in the grass. Then
he said to the negro, aside: "Pull out its legs, my man--there--that
will do. Hold them up!"
The legs were knuckled over at the ankles, deformed evidently. When it
tried to stand it came down limply in a heap.
Colonel Goff turned and, beckoning to the negro, whispered: "Jim, take
it into the stall there and destroy it without letting the General
know." Then he added in a louder tone, "Come, General, we'll wait till
you get your cup of coffee and join us."
But the General shook his head. Rough he was and used to war and death,
yet this was old Betty's colt. Goff, knowing his stubbornness, saluted,
and rode on after the hounds.
The old man stood thinking. He examined the deformed limbs again. Very
sternly he looked the colt over. Very sternly he reached his
conclusion, and once reached it was irrevocable. Jim, knowing, put in
apologetically:
"Giner'l, hit'll never walk, we'll hafter kill it."
"I don't want to see it done, Jim. I'll go in. Po' ole Betty--that she
should be played off on like that!" He stroked the mare's neck with a
kindly pat, and went in.
Breakfast was ready for him. He sat down, abstracted, worried. Uncle
Jack, his grandson, eighteen, slender, and slightly lame, and who didn't
love to talk of the war, nor the thought of going to West Point, and who
wanted always to study about trees and a better way of farming, sat next
to Little Sister. The General told him of his misfortune. "It is a
great disappointment to me, suh, old Betty, my favorite saddle
mare--I've ridden her for fifteen years--the best mare in Tennessee, by
gad, suh, the very best!
"It's weak, puny and no-count, Jack," he went on as he tested his
coffee--"deformed or something in its front, and knuckles over, can't
stand up."
"That's too bad," said Uncle Jack; "I'll go out after breakfast and see
what I can do for it, Grandfather."
"No use," said the General, gruffly. "It'll be merciful to destroy it.
I've told Jim, too; it'll be better off dead."
Little Sister had not seemed to listen, but she had heard. This last
remark of her grandsire stopped a spoonful of oatmeal half way to her
mouth. The next instant, unobserved, she had slipped from her chair and
gone to the barn.
"I tell you, Jack, I think this breeding business is a poor lottery,"
went on the old General after a while. "To think of old Betty, the
gamest, speediest, best mare I ever owned--"
There were protesting screams from the barn. They were instantly
recognized as Little Sister's. Uncle Jack glanced at her empty place,
paled, kicked over two chairs and a setter dog which blocked the door,
and rushed to the barn.
A tragedy was on there. A negro stood in old Betty's stall with an ax
in his hand. On some straw in a far corner lay a sorry-looking colt.
But it was not alone, for Little Sister stood over it, shaking her tiny
fist at the black executioner, and screaming with grief and anger:
"You shan't kill this baby colt--you shan't--don't you come in
here--don't! How dare you, Jim?"
The flash of her keen blue eyes had awed the negro in the doorway. He
had stopped, hesitating, in confusion.
"Go away, Jim," said Uncle Jack firmly. "Come, Little Sister, let us go
back to grandpa." But for once in her life Uncle Jack had no influence
over her. She was indignant, grieved. She fairly blazed through her
tears and sobs: she would never speak to grandpa again as long as she
lived! As for Jim, she would kill him as soon as she got big enough!
She wouldn't even speak to Uncle Jack unless he promised her that the
baby colt should not be killed!
"Poor little colt," she said as she put her arms around its neck and her
tears fell over its big, soft eyes, "God sent you last night and they
want to kill you to-day."
Uncle Jack brushed away a tear himself and, stooping, picked up the
colt's feet, one at a time, examining the little filly.
Little Sister watched him intently: to her mind Uncle Jack knew
everything. The tears were still in her eyes when Uncle Jack looked up
quickly and said in his jolliest way: "Hello, Little Sister, this filly
is all right! Deformed be hanged! She's sound as a hound's tooth, just
weak in her tendons and we can soon fix them. Give her a little time for
strength. No, they'll not kill her, little one--" and he caught the
little girl up, giving her a hug.
The tears gave way to a crackling little laugh. Little Sister was
dancing in the straw for joy! What fun it was to help Uncle Jack fix her
up! She brought him the cotton batting herself and gravely watched him
as he made stays for the weak tendons and bent ankles. Finally, when he
had the filly fixed and had called Jim, who held her in his arms to the
mother's flank until she had had a good breakfast, the little girl could
not keep still. In a burst Of generosity she begged Jim's pardon and
said she intended to give him a pair of grandpa's boots that very day.
In return for this Jim promptly named the filly "Little Sister."
But having once said that the colt was "no-count," the old General
refused to notice it. "Po' little thing," said he, a month after it was
able to pace around without help from its stays, "po' little thing!
What a pity they didn't kill it."
But Uncle Jack and Little Sister, with the help of old Uncle Wash,
nursed it, petted it and helped old Betty to raise it. And the next
spring their reward came in a nervous, high-strung but delicate looking
little slip that was indeed a beauty. The General would surely relent
now! But those who thought so did not know the old man. He merely
glanced at the weanling and remarked again: "The damned little weakling!
That old Betty should ever have played off on me like that!" He turned
indifferently away. Whereupon both the filly and the little girl turned
up their noses behind his back.
The fall that the filly was three years old the big county fair came
off, with pacing stakes for the best three-year-old. The purse was a
thousand dollars, but greater still was the glory!
The old General had entered a big colt named Princewood for the stakes.
This colt had been carefully trained for two seasons and had already
cost his owner more than he was worth. "But it's the reputation I am
after, suh," the General said to the driver, "the honor of the thing.
Our farm has already taken it twice, you know."
Now Uncle Jack was something of a whip himself. He could not ride
because of a lame knee, so he became an expert in driving. The old
General had failed to notice how all the fall he had been giving Betty's
filly special attention with a hot brush now and then. Wrapped up as he
was in Princewood's wonderful speed, he had not noticed that Uncle Jack
had frequently called for his light road wagon, and that he and Little
Sister, now six years old, had taken delightful spins down the shady
places in the cool byways, where the footing was good and there was no
gravel or stones, and nobody could see them when they asked the
high-strung little filly "to step some," as Little Sister expressed it.
Then at supper one night, when Colonel Goff had dropped in as he often
did, the old General began to brag about Princewood's wonderful speed
and of the way in which his favorite grandson, Braxton Bragg, could
drive him.
"Why, Goff," said the General, "that boy is a wonder! He drove the colt
to-day a mile with one hand in 2:25."
Uncle Jack winked at Little Sister, and she had to cram her mouth full
of peach preserves to keep from laughing. The General saw and guessed
there was a joke on him somewhere, and being one of those who loved to
joke others, but did not love to be joked himself, he flushed red and
began to praise Braxton Bragg openly, hoping it would go home to his
other grandson who sat so quietly at the table winking at Little Sister
and with something evidently up his sleeve....
"Yes, suh," said the General after a while, "Princewood will simply eat
up the field, and Braxton Bragg--ay, there's a boy for you!--he'll be a
great soldier some day--Braxton Bragg will simply drive the hoofs off
the whole bunch."
Then Eloise looked up. Eloise was fifteen and lithe, with her red-gold
hair just being put up, and so graceful and beautiful that Little Sister
worshipped her, as did also Uncle Jack and Braxton Bragg, and Colonel
Goff for that matter.
Eloise had caught the wink that Uncle Jack gave, and understood it in an
instant. For Eloise knew things, especially about horses.
"And you really think Braxton Bragg and Princewood will eat up the
field," she said ever so sweetly and respectfully to the old General.
"My, I'd like ever so much to take the field end of that," she added
indifferently, but winking at Uncle Jack.
"My dear," said the old General, "I don't gamble with sweet school
girls; but if Princewood fails to make good, I'll just give you that
fine Whiteman saddle you've been wanting all the time----"
"I can't play a one-sided bet like that; it isn't fair," said Eloise.
"I'd like to be as generous as you are, sir, and put up a forfeit. But
dear me," and she sighed like the exiled queen in the fairy tale, "I'm
dowerless and own nothing."
"Good," said Colonel Goff. "Brave girl! now that lets _me_ in.
General, just let me take the bet off your hands. Now then, Eloise,
I'll take you dowerless--for you are a dower all unto yourself," he
said, bowing grandly, "and I'll bet you--mark me now--I'll bet you that
new English saddle mare I've just imported, against your own sweet self,
that my friend the General's Princewood will win that race!"
"It's a go," cried Eloise, rising gracefully and taking his hand,
"red-leather-bargain-done-for-ever," she added laughing.
The General looked pleased--he showed it in his bland smile and the
vigorous nodding of his head. He whispered to Goff: "By gad, Goff, but
all joking aside--she'll make you the finest wife alive!"
Eloise heard and looked over at Jack with a smile, but Jack's head was
down on his breast and there was no smile on his lips.
Never remotely--in any way--in his dreams--(and being a poet, he dreamed
often) had he thought of Eloise belonging to anyone but him!...
It looked as if all the county was there on the fine fall day of the
race. It was one of those sweet old country fairs where the yeomanry of
the hills and the lassies from the valleys make holiday, and the heifers
with polished horns share the glory with the fillies, bedecked with
ribbons, and stepping proudly in air to music.
The field was a large one; for the purse was rich and the honor even
richer.
"And Princewood's a prime favorite, suh," chuckled the old General as he
walked around, holding by the hand a little girl who went everywhere
with him, and who wondered whether, after all, Uncle Jack really knew.
And so hearing so much that was braggart of Princewood, she all but lost
faith: as is the way of us all if we do not touch, now and then, the
shrine of our Truth.
Eloise was there, now flirting with the country beaux, and now riding
Colonel Goff's saddle mare in the rings for blue ribbons. By two
o'clock she had the mare's head-stall full of them, and one big one
adorned her own riding whip as "the best lady rider." Seeing her beauty
and grace, Colonel Goff murmured to himself:
"By gad, but I'll make her Lady Carfax some day."
The bell had already rung twice for the race and all the owners and
horses were supposed to be preparing to score down, when a new entry
drove in. He sat in a spider-framed four-wheeled gentleman's road cart
instead of in a sulky, which would make him at least four seconds slow
in a race like that. And he wore a cutaway business suit and a soft
felt hat, and not a gaudy jockey cap and silk coat as did Braxton Bragg,
who drove Princewood and was bragging about what he was going to do.
The newcomer nodded familiarly to the starting judge and paced his
nervous looking little filly up the stretch.
"Who is that coming into this race in that kind of a thing?" asked the
old General of a farmer standing near, for his eyesight was failing him.
"Why, General, don't you know yo' own grandson? That's young Jack
Ballington," said the man.
"The hell you say!" shouted the excited old man. "Why dammit, has Jack
gone crazy? He always was a fool!" And he clattered over a bench with
his wooden leg and hobbled up the stretch to head off the pair.
"By gad, suh, Jack," he shouted, "are you going to drive in this race?"
Jack nodded and smiled, while he soothed the nervous little filly with
gentle words.
"And what's that little rakish looking thing you've got there?"
"That's Little Sister, Grandfather," he said, good-naturedly. "I'm
really just driving her to please our little girl and see how she'll act
in company."
The old General was amazed, indignant, outraged. "Why, you're the daddy
of all damned fools that ever lived!" he blurted. "They'll lose you
both in this race! Get off the track, Jack, for God's sake, and don't
disgrace old Betty this way--why, that old mare--I've ridden her for
fifteen years! Why, I rode her dam clear through the war. She helped
chase Banks and Fremont out of the valley--why that little no-count
thing--Jack, she'll drop dead if you extend her."
Jack smiled. "It's just for a little fun, Grandfather, and to please
the little girl; for it's her pet, you know. I'll just trail them and
if she's too soft I'll pull out the second heat. But she's better than
you think," he added indifferently.
The old General expostulated, threatened; but Jack laughed
good-naturedly and drove off. Then the old General repented. It was
comically pathetic to hear him call out: "Jack, Jack, don't tell anybody
it's old Betty's colt, will you? Promise me, boy. Why, I rode her for
fifteen years. I rode her dam all through the valley of Virginia with
Stonewall Jackson." But Uncle Jack drove on, chuckling to himself:
"I'll bet ten to one he'll be telling it before I do."
When the little filly got into company she was positively gay. She
forgot all about herself, and like great people the world over she lost
her nervous ways when the great effort was on, and went away at the go
of the starter with a rush that almost took Uncle Jack's breath from
him.
He pulled her quickly down. "Ho--ho, Little Sister--if you do that
again you'll give us all dead away, and that will spoil the fun." He
glanced quickly around to see if anyone saw him. But the crowd were all
busy watching Princewood. So Uncle Jack trailed behind, the very last of
the bunch, but with the little filly fighting indignantly for her head
all the way.
Nobody seemed to see them at all, that is, nobody but a little girl, who
clung nervously to the old General's middle finger, and wondered, with
her child's faith fiercely battered, if her Uncle Jack, her Uncle Jack
who knew it all and could do anything, if he, the mighty, was really
going to tumble from his lofty throne in her mind?
Then she got behind the General's big Prince Albert coat tail, and wiped
away two nervous little tears. Princewood had paced in way ahead. She
stuck her fingers in her ears, so that she could not hear the shouts,
and her little nervous lips closed tight with indignant shame. When she
took them out the shouting was over, but she heard the old General say,
"Wasn't it a walkover? That fool grandson of mine has always made me
tired. I don't believe the little thing can go round again."
This cut into the soul of the little girl. She pretended to go after a
glass of the big red lemonade that they sold under a near-by tree; but
really she went to cry in the dark hall under the grand stand and to
wipe her tears on the frills of the pretty little petticoat Mother
Thesis had made for her just to wear to the fair.
There was one who knew, however, because she really had horse sense.
She was riding a beautiful English saddle mare across the infield, and
she looked like a young Diana in her dark blue riding suit, and she sat
her horse like the Centaur's wife. As she rode across the grassy
infield, Braxton Bragg came up, and catching her mare by the bit,
stopped her short. His little round, weak face was focused into a
smile. Eloise flushed, vexed that he should seize a moving mare by the
bit, for it is against all good horsemanship to do it; just as one pilot
would resent another interfering with his wheel. She looked down on him
without a smile.
"Say, Eloise," he said as one who seeks a compliment, "how do you like
the way I did it?"
Long ago Eloise had said of Braxton Bragg: "Answer a fool according to
his folly." Therefore she smiled dryly now and said, "Beautifully. How
entirely and completely you do fill that sulky seat, Braggy." Braxton
Bragg, not knowing what satire was, took this for a compliment, and
smiled again. Then, encouraged, he whispered low to her: "You've never
given me a chance to show you just how much I could do for love of you,
Eloise."
"Oh," she answered, ever so sweetly.
"Yes," he sighed affectedly, trying to look love-lorn, cocking his head
with affected sadness and succeeding only in looking ridiculous.
"Oh," she said sweetly again. If he had had sense he would have seen
the sweetness was for ends of her own. "Oh, how sweet of you and how
cruel of me, Braggy." Her tone was very clear. If he had only looked
down the past he might have remembered that whenever she had called him
Braggy she had been planning to do him.
He sighed again, which shut his mouth the second time. Eloise,
demurely, but inwardly nearly bursting, did likewise. "Well?" he asked,
expectantly.
"Yes," said Eloise encouragingly.
"I mean--can't--I now?"
"There's never a better time than the present, Braggy, you remember the
school books say." Then she reached down and, pretending earnestness,
said:
"You've got a walk-over, it's plain. It's yours for the asking, Braggy.
And so--well--it's big odds I'm giving you, Braggy," and she laughed
like a wood thrush, "but if you win that race I'll be yours alone
henceforth and forever, Braggy."
He paled, taking her hand, which fell sidewise down past her saddletree,
in his.
"Oh Eloise--dearest,"--he started bookishly, but ended in his own way,
which was mentally unlearned: "Gee--but I'll win or bust!"
"And if you don't," began Eloise, ever so indifferently. "Of course you
will," she smiled; "but if you don't, Braggy, now dear, why you'll just
send me that set of seal-skins for that fashionable hennery I'm going to
at Washington?"
"Good! Good!" he cried boisterously. "What odds you give me! You
against a hundred dollar seal-skin! Oh, my, let me get busy!" And he
rushed off, smirking back sillily at her.
"A saddle mare, a saddle, and a set of sealskins all in one day. Well,
that's going some," Eloise chuckled as she rode up to the fence where
Uncle Jack stood. Reaching down from her saddle, she tapped him on the
shoulder.
He looked up into her laughing eyes, and flushed, for he had always
loved her.
"Jack, Jack, you are a dandy! You did it beautifully! O, the stride of
that rush before you called her down! Say, how do you like my mare?
Isn't she a beauty?"
"If you say so," he said slowly, testing her, "I'll lay up the next
heat; let _him_ win." He had remembered Goff's bet.
She flushed. Then she rapped him over the shoulder lightly with her
whip.
"Why, Jack, that would be horrible! Do you think I'd have made the bet
if I hadn't believed in you, loved you, brother mine?"
Jack flushed. "Do you, Eloise--do you--"
Eloise laughed. "Like a sister. Aunt Lucretia says we've got to marry
each other, so what's the use of my kicking? But listen--now--say,
Jack--you've played right into my hand. I'll need that Whiteman saddle
for this beautiful thing. So hold up a while till I ride over and close
that bet with the General. Now is my time! He's crazy about that great
lobster of his and I could win The Home Stretch on this bet if I had
anything to put up."
She wheeled her horse, threw a kiss down at Jack, and galloped off to
find the General.
When Little Sister got back from her cry the General was gone. He was
over at the table talking to Uncle Jack.
"Now, Jack," said he, "don't disgrace old Betty any more. Why, I rode
her fifteen years. I rode her--"
Uncle Jack had always been so quiet that it was a distinct surprise to
the old General when he showed an unsuspected grit and gameness.
"Hang her old dam, Grandfather, and your cursed old war in Virginia!
Drop dead, will she? Well, sir, you are likely to see something drop
yourself before this heat is over." And he turned on his heels and
walked off.
The old General looked at him astounded, and with positive admiration.
"By gad," he said to himself, "he's either crazy or got more sense than
us all. By gad, to think of him getting mad and having grit like that!
He may make a soldier yet," and he chuckled with pride.
Now Uncle Jack meant business. He changed his cart for a sulky. Again
they got the word. Princewood, having the pole and all advantage,
flashed ahead in his big lumbering pace, Little Sister in the very rear,
struggling for her head. Slowly, gradually, Uncle Jack let her have it.
Steadily, like moving machinery set in grooves of steel, she came up on
them, relentlessly, mercilessly cutting them down, one after another.
At the half there was nothing but Princewood ahead and no one even saw
her yet, for the shout was: "Princewood! Princewood!" This heat would
make the race his.
"Princewood's got 'em, General!" yelled a countryman, his mouth so wide
open from excitement that tobacco juice ran down his chin whiskers and
into his shirt collar. "Princewood's got 'em! There's nothin' that kin
head 'im!"
"He's got 'em!" yelled the partisans of the old General, packed solidly
around him and cackling with half crazy joy. "Now jes watch sum'thin'
drop."
But a girl sitting on her horse and looking over the crowd saw it
differently. A daring, knowing, triumphant smile lingered around her
mouth. And not in heaven, nor in the star-lighted lake below, ever shone
two stars rippling into little wavelets of glint and glory like those in
the eyes of her.
The General, seeing her, shouted: "Yes, watch it drop! No saddle for
you, young lady!"
Down went her keen, fun-loving eyes to those of the old soldier. "It's
dropped already, General--see! I own that saddle now!"
Something had happened. The little filly felt the reins relax and a
kindly chirrup come from her driver. In a twinkling, in the whir of a
spinning wheel, she was up with the big fellow, half frightened at her
own speed, half doubting that it was really she who did it, half sobbing
with the keen thrill of it, like a great singer who for the first time
hears her own voice filling a great hall.
"_Princewood! Princewood!_" shouted the crowd around their idol, the
General, "_Princewood's broke the record!_"
The old General rose in happy anticipation: "Yes, boys, it looks like
the record is busted by--"
Here his jaw dropped as if paralyzed; for his trained eye took in the
situation and the word died in his mouth. What was that little bay
thing that had so gamely collared his big horse? Who is that
quiet-looking fellow in the soft hat handling the reins like a veteran
and leading the march like Stonewall's Foot-Cavalry in the Valley? His
grandson, Jack, was in a cart; this man sat in a sulky. And Jack was
driving a little limp-waisted, hollow-flanked--
"Who the devil--" he began, when someone clinging to his middle finger
looked up, great smiles chasing tears down her cheeks and so excited she
could scarcely breathe.
"Why, it's Little Sister, Grandpa! Now isn't she just too sweet for
anything?"
The next instant the little filly laughed in the big pacer's face, who
had quit in a tangled break, as much as to say: "_You big braggart
duffer, have you quit already?_" and then, like a homing pigeon loosed
for the first time, she sailed away from the field.
"Princewood--Princewood has broke the record--" shouted the farmer who
hadn't caught on and was shouting for Princewood, but was looking at the
champion pumpkin in the window of the Agricultural Hall.
And then the old General lost his head and what little religion he had
left. For he jumped on a bench, his wooden leg rattling as he danced up
and down, like a flock of goats in a barn loft, and this is what the
town crier in the courthouse window, a mile away, heard him yelling:
"_Damn Princewood! Damn the record! It's Little Sister--Little
Sister--my own mare--old Betty's filly. I rode her fifteen years! I
rode her dam--_"
"Oh--" sang out mockingly a beautiful girl, sitting her horse beside
him, with a laugh that sounded like a wood thrush's. "But I've won a
saddle and a seal-skin cloak and the sweetest mare in the world! Say,
Braggy," for Braxton Bragg just then drove in, the last of the whole
procession--"that engagement is all off, isn't it?"
Then Uncle Jack, who had stopped and got out of the sulky, came up, his
face aglow. And she, her eyes still fired to starry beauty, leaned from
the saddle and kissed him.
"You darling Jack, how can I ever get even for this?"
"I said he'd be telling about it first," said Uncle Jack, wagging his
head at the crowd, where the old General stood telling them that it was
_he_ who had bred the great little filly and that it was _his old mare_
who was the dam of her!
"And the little old no-count thing did play off on you sure enough,
didn't she, Grandpa?" came from the tear-eyed tot beside him, so naively
in earnest and telling such a plain unvarnished truth that even the old
General's partisans had to wink and nudge each other as they walked off.
The old General laughed as he picked her up and said: "And here's the
little girl that saved her, gentlemen, the smartest girl in Tennessee;
and she's got more horse sense than her old granddaddy!"
There was one more heat, of course; but it was only a procession, and
those behind--and that meant the field--cannot swear to this day which
way Little Sister went....
*II*
*"A TWILIGHT PIECE"*
... "And all that I was born to be
and do, a twilight piece."
--_Robert Browning_.
*CHAPTER I*
*THE FLAME IN THE WOOD*
Home again and Tennessee in April! When the train swept over the
Highland Rim, the woods, not yet in full leaf, seemed afire with the
clustering blooms of the pink azaleas. On both sides, in little sudden
and short valleys, and farther off on dwarf-oak hillsides, they blazed.
Far beyond their faint, mist-like flush mingled with the sky line in the
distant openings, and seemed an arc of soft sunset clouds.
Cream-white dogwoods rose up in open spaces against the blurred, pink
backgrounds, clustering like evening stars in rose cloud-banks. Anon
they grew in separate groups, down in little dells, and each of these
tiny bowls was full of them.
Their odor, soft and fragrant, swept through the train, dew-damp and
like old memories in sweetness.
This seems to me to be the main thought about all wild flowers, that
they alone are God's idea of beauty and not those that bloom in gardens
and hot houses through the skill of man. If, from any cause, such as
the gas from a comet's tail, men should vanish in a night, none of these
last would live to bloom again. Like their makers they would pass from
the earth. But like Nature's Maker the wild sweet things of the wood
and meadows and mountains would bloom again, although man were not,
mirroring God's idea of beauty even to the desert.
If it is Nature's great desire that that which is best shall live, the
wild flowers have Nature's underwriting of approval. Ancient Linnaeus
said of one unfolding: "I saw God in his glory passing near me and bowed
my head in worship."
Through all the ages those who see, whether poet or planter, think the
same great thoughts. Tennyson said of the flower plucked from the
crannied wall, that if he could know what it was he should know what God
and man were. They bring a larger thought even than that, for they
prove that God _is Beauty_.
Even as I was thinking this the train rushed through what had once been
a wood, but was now a burnt and scarred spot, bare of life. The azaleas
in their beauty, were the flame in the woods which Nature had kindled:
but this desolate spot was the flame which had come from the hand of
man...
When the train stopped for water at the little station I got out and
gathered a great bunch of flowers for Eloise....
Then as we dropped down into the Middle Basin, filled with the blue
grass in its spring glory, whole acres of hepaticas twinkled up at us
like fallen fireflies.
At last I was home again, and home with a new mission, new ideas. For
four years I had studied trees and flowers in a German university. I had
prepared myself to be a forester. Now I was looking out of the car
window at the wantonness that had turned hillsides into gullies and rich
loam into beds of clay. The little streams that I had remembered
running from a familiar wood, now crawled, winding amid sand dunes bare
of trees. The folly of it hurt me. I saw that here was work for me to
do.
*CHAPTER II*
*THE HOME-STRETCH*
How familiar were the hills around the little Hermitage Station! And
how grateful was the sweet clear air of its dew-bathed meadows after the
noise and smoke of the train!
My Aunt Lucretia imprinted two chilly kisses from tight-shut lips on
each of my cheeks. She was a large, strong, stout woman, with a fine,
high nose and full mouth, which, when it would, could settle quickly
into close-shut lips of determination. Her eyes were hazel and keen:
kindly when quiet; but quick to flash and far-seeing.
Without a word and very deliberately she looked me over through her gold
nose glasses. I smiled as I remembered how often I had seen her pass on
a horse she was purchasing in the same way. Down the six feet of my
height her keen eyes went, dwelling, I imagine, a bit longer on my legs
where the old lameness had been in my knee since my boyhood sickness
from typhoid fever. Again I smiled, for in that same way I had seen her
linger over the doubtful tendon of a horse. But the noted German
surgeon, Hoffman, had, in my first year at Berlin, skillfully removed
the floating cartilage, and I saw my Aunt Lucretia's face light up,
satisfied with the straight limb, and my weight upon it. Then she
looked lengthwise across my shoulders, and a surprised pleasure shone in
her eyes. I had grown from a frail boy into an athlete.
We had not said a word. I stood smiling at her, and she, as was her
custom, would not speak until her survey was done. Very deliberately
she looked me over. I had seen her examine Young Hickory, lineal
descendant of Andrew Jackson's famous Truxton in the same way.
I was eager to say something and get to Eloise. I had caught a glimpse
of her face at the surrey's door.
"I thought you would grow into that," Aunt Lucretia remarked, as she
readjusted her glasses. Then, as if to impress on me her long expressed
thought, she added, "You have grown beautifully up to your pedigree,
Jack."
I laughed. "Well, if you have passed on me, here goes," I said
boisterously, as I seized her around the neck and gave her a kiss, which
knocked off her glasses.
"Tut--tut, Jack, that will do! Kissing is silly and thoroughly
unsanity. There is Eloise waiting for you--but no kissing--no hugging
her--none of it," she added.
I saw the straight, fine figure draw back half haughtily into the
carriage, and a half-protesting look flash for an instant over the
pretty face, profiled through the open space. She threw back her head
in the old tribute-demanding way, and her half-closed lids veiled her
eyes under great curving, brown-red brows. I caught a gleam of the old
daring fun in them, as she smiled and held out both her hands, taking
mine.
"Awfully glad to see you, Jack--welcome home."
My heart betrayed itself in the quick glance I gave her. She had
developed so wonderfully in those four years. And how I had longed to
see her!
She sat smiling kindly into my eyes; I stood looking sillily into hers,
holding both of her hands in mine, forgetful of Aunt Lucretia, and with
no word that I could say to Eloise.
"Eloise," I began haltingly at last, "is it--have you--is it really
you?"
I bent down to kiss her, but she fenced away and drew back smiling.
I dropped her hand, hurt.
"Jack," and her tone tried to compensate me, "behave now--everybody is
looking." Then she added louder, "Have you really grown into this
handsome chap--and no lameness any more?"
"Tut--tut," broke in Aunt Lucretia, half irritated, "you two make me
tired. Of course he has--you have both grown wonderfully up to your
pedigree--I always said so--nothing strange in that. And as you are
both grown now," she added patronizingly and with the old return of
authority, "I intend to marry you to each other before Christmas--see if
I don't."
I blushed and Eloise smiled--a trace of the old fun-loving tease
breaking across the corners of her mouth. Her beautiful clear
blue-hazel eyes smiled up into mine, full of the old fun and daring.
I bent over her. "Eloise, aren't you really going to kiss me?"
"It is unsanitary, Jack,--and--" she glanced at Aunt Lucretia--"bad form
and--"
I turned, hurt, and shook hands with old Thomas, the driver.
"Mighty glad to see you back home, Marse Jack, mighty glad!" said he.
I looked closely at his horses, with that pretended admiration that I
knew would please him, in order to hide my chagrin. There was
embarrassment in it too, for I knew I was under inspection from the eyes
of Eloise.
"I declare, Marse Jack," he went on, "dis sho'ly ain't you, is it? I
declar to goodness if you ain't biggern yo' daddy wuz, and yo'
gran'pa--the ole Jineral." He grew easily loquacious. "When I fust seed
you a-comin' out dat cyar dore, I didn't know you, and yit I sed to
myself, _sholy I've seed dat face--hit 'pears mighty complicated to me
somehow_."
A smothered laugh from Eloise. "That is what I've been trying to say,
Thomas, but couldn't, to save me, think of the right word. Thank you so
much--'_complicated,_' Jack--that's too good!"
I showed plainly that I did not like this from Eloise. Ridicule we may
bear, but not from our beloved. And I had loved Eloise always, but
never so much as now. Then she suddenly broke into a smile, and said in
her sweet sisterly way of old: "Forgive me, Jack--I haven't lost my old
teasing way with you, have I?"
"I don't want you to," I said quietly.
"Well, what do you think of her?" broke in Aunt Lucretia.
"I can't tell you how beautiful I think she is, Aunt Lucretia," said I.
Eloise laughed, and looked dreamily up. How quickly her eyes had
changed from daring to dreams. In her low, even laugh lay four years of
fashionable Washington schooling. In the soft tones of her voice were a
thousand music lessons. In the well-gowned girl before me was training,
the spirit of gentlefolk, centuries of correct pedigrees. She had
always been strong, and with a form as lithe as a young frost-pinched
hickory. How she could ride a horse and handle a gun! Her hair had
been yellowish and flossy, now it was like the distant flush of a
red-top meadow, mower-ripe. I had left her an over-long school girl,
thin and callow, daring, caring for nothing so much as running a risk of
her neck and limbs in trees, and bare-back gallops on any half-broken
colt on the farm. But now--
Aunt Lucretia, watching me, guessed.
"Oh, well, she'll pass, won't she?" she said rather braggartly for her,
I thought. "You'll believe what I kept writing you now, eh? Though you
never referred to it once, not once."
"Oh! Aunt Lucretia," began Eloise protestingly. Even her voice had
changed. It was not the imperative, rollicking, colt-breaking voice of
the school girl I had known four years ago. It was now like a fall of
soft, freestone water over a moss-lined rock bed, purling into a deep
pool below, sand-bordered and waveless.
"Please don't tease him," she began again.
Aunt Lucretia laughed triumphantly: "Oh, never mind. I want to rub it
in on Jack. He needs it curried into him. He hasn't written me a line
to show that he intended to carry out my wishes until I grew positively
uneasy, for fear he'd marry one of those Hessians, whose ancestors
Washington crossed the Delaware to whip that night."
(Hadn't written, I thought. But no one shall ever know what I had
dreamed and hoped in those four years.)
I was looking into Eloise's eyes; she flushed, for I saw she knew my
thoughts.
"You shan't be hard on Jack," she said, taking my part as it seemed to
save herself. "Jack, dear," and she took my hand in hers, her eyes for
the first time flashed with sympathy, "we must do as of old, we must
pool interests, when she is against us we must combine to beat her. And
to prove it I am going to defy her and kiss you, for you've heard her
say that we are betrothed, and this is always the first thing after a
betrothal," and with the old daring in her eyes she looked up at me.
I remember into what a perfect Cupid's bow her hitherto straight lips
curved, and I flushed crimson as my lips met hers. Aunt Lucretia,
seeing this, said with emphatic shame, "Tut--tut, unsanitary and silly!
Get into the surrey, Jack. Thomas, drive these two fools home!"
In my heart I thanked Aunt Lucretia for that tirade. I knew Eloise of
old. She was always on the side of the under dog. For that reason she
had kissed me. Still, with all her pretense I noticed that Aunt
Lucretia had arranged that we should sit together, and had seated
herself in front with Thomas, where she could watch her roan span trot
off.
"Eloise," I whispered, dropping my hand on hers, "is it really you? I
never dreamed you would be so beautiful. I have loved you always,
Little Sister. Don't you love me a little?"
She laughed at my low voice. Then she suddenly grew serious, and said
in a tone that hurt me, "Of course I do, Jack, as your adopted sister.
But don't!" she protested, as I tried to kiss her cheek. "You are
acting so queerly; as if we were really in love!"
I drew back, very much hurt. "Eloise!"
"Don't be silly, Jack, or you'll spoil it all. Haven't I always been
your little sister?"
"But surely, Eloise," I said, my heart in my throat, "after all these
years--you don't know how I've loved you always, and lately yearned for
home and you."
She gave me a startled look. "Jack, we must stop this. I have
something to tell you."
The hills swayed as the surrey rushed by. I saw the old field mistily,
the distant trees and the white lime roads. I was almost reeling in the
fear which her tone had brought.
"What do you think of them?" asked Aunt Lucretia proudly.
I looked at the handsome pair, stepping like one, at a good three
minutes' gait.
"Splendid," I said. "I should guess they were Young Hickory's, and
their dam, Nuthunter."
Uncle Thomas could not restrain a laugh. These horses were his pride.
"Ain't los' none of yo' hoss sense hobnobbin' with them furrin' folks,
Marse Jack. You sho' hit it 'zactly!"
"I was afraid," went on Aunt Lucretia, "that I might not be successful
in straightening out the Nuthunter legs; he hasn't the best of hocks,
you know. But did you ever see anything more beautiful?" she added.
"I never," I answered, looking steadily into Eloise's eyes.
"Jack," laughed Eloise, "I must discipline you."
For answer I caught up her hand behind Aunt Lucretia's back and kissed
it.
"I'm sorry for you, Jack," she said with her old quietness,
"but--but--well, I'll see you to-night and explain." Then she looked
out and exclaimed, "The Home Stretch, Jack! Isn't it beautiful? Has it
changed any?"
*CHAPTER III*
*THE HICKORIES*
We drove up to the great mansion built of home-baked bricks. It sat on
a blue grass slope, and before it lay twenty acres of blue grass lawn,
tree-peopled: oaks, ash, poplars; and elms, red and white; and a great
broad-topped gum. Eloise and I remembered this last best of all, for in
the fall it early turned into a great, flaming brushheap of red, crimson
streaked with black. Scattered about on the lawn, filling the gaps, were
single trees of dogwood. In the dusk they shone like silver nosegays in
dark vases.
The evening dank was in the air as we drove up; that rare odor, which is
really no odor, but only a memory of one; and as we whirled up the drive
there came a whisp of perfume, blue grass cut before its time, fresh
spring hay, for a sick brood mare, in the meadow beyond.
The night sounds made me homesick, even though I was at home; a
whippoorwill, a whinnying mare, the lowing of a lonesome calf in the
barn. Far off, in the faint purple twilight, stood the hills; and
nearer was the black fringe of trees which moated Stone's River. Here
was home and April, and my heart was eager for them.
This was The Home Stretch, the home of my grandsire, General John
Rutherford. His daughter, my Aunt Lucretia, ran the farm for him, as
she did everything else within ten miles of her, for my grandsire was
old, and had lost a leg while fighting with Stonewall Jackson in the
Valley.
Eloise guessed my thoughts. Her voice was quiet and tender as she said,
"You should see our hickories, Jack!"
I jumped from the surrey at the door, and drew her with me. "Let us
look at them first of all," I said, "because there was our playhouse,
there were our dreams."
She smiled as she pointed to the walks still lined with sunken ale
bottles, their mouths projecting upward as borders for our flower beds.
Aunt Lucretia had gone into the house. Thomas had wheeled the surrey and
team to the barn.
The land we stood on had once belonged to Andrew Jackson. Here he had
lived before he had moved to the farm four miles away known as the
Hermitage. Clover Bottom had been the pride of a great, strong heart.
In the field beyond had stood the pioneer store where Jackson and Coffee
had traded, with Indians. Beyond that was the far-famed circular field,
in the great bend of Stone's River, and level as a floor, where Truxton
and Plowboy and the unbeaten Maria had once raced. Still farther beyond
Stone's River circled like a tube of quicksilver through the green of
the wooded hills.
Never before was honesty put to such a test as when Andrew Jackson gave
up this home to pay an unjust debt. Without complaint he moved further
into the wilderness, and built his great double log-cabin home. That
cabin is now a shrine!
Here stood the giant hickories in a group, the rugged, stately trees.
Why did he plant them here? Or had the old hero, with that love of his
for the unbending tree for which he was named, let them stand unscathed,
as Nature had placed them? They stood in a great group, cathedral-like,
one taller and more stately than his fellows, like a spire.
Of all the trees the hickory is the conqueror. Its purpose in life is to
withstand. It is a fighting tree, rough of dress, careless of manner,
rude in its unpolished bark. To be frightened by the hails of heaven is
not for it. The hurricane cannot quell it. From its youth it has
fought the storm, and when the storm has tired it has still stood,
tattered but glorious.
Every fall in one great flaming pyre as of a burning bush wherein there
is Divinity, they have blazed and burned before our wondering eyes. A
warrior tree, and yet, withal, what no warrior ever was: a giver of
gifts, not a wrecker of those already garnered; not bullets, not shells,
not grape shot dropped on the land; but nuts. Some day, truly, the real
conqueror of the world will conquer like this tree--overcoming in a hail
of kindness flung from loving hands.
"It was these trees," I said, turning to Eloise, "that sent me to
Germany to study forestry; these trees and Dr. Gottlieb. How is he? I
can hardly wait till morning to run over to his cabin."
Eloise laughed. "Oh! you were always a poet, Jack. Dr. Gottlieb is the
same, and he is famous now; such books he has written of flowers and
trees!"
"Do you know they use his text-books in Germany?" I asked proudly; "and
that last work of his, 'Tree Influence on Precipitation,' was talked
about in all the universities. Look," I said, pointing to a scarred and
gullied hillside across the road, showing bare even in the twilight,
"there is the great work to be done in our land, there is the coming
field for the young brains of our country--that, and better farming, and
the watering of our great barren spots in the West. We've cut down our
trees wantonly--our pioneer sires did so before us,--for the land had to
be cleared or they would have died. But now if I can only get them to
change! You should see the German and French system. When I came
through France, along their coasts, both on the Mediterranean and the
Channel, were great forests planted to break the winds and storms. I was
told that a century ago the winds began to make deserts of their coasts,
encroaching mile after mile into the land. Now, with the trees planted,
it is a garden again."
Eloise was listening silently. Then she said, "Jack, that is all very
fine, and it took courage in you to do it, to go over there. It was not
Aunt Lucretia's idea; hers was a horse-farm for you; and the General's
was West Point and war. He has never been the same toward you, Jack--I
can see it--since you would not go to West Point."
"He never cared for me as he did for Braxton," I said. I winced, for I
loved my old grandsire.
"He has not written me a line since I have been gone," I went on.
"Poor Jack," and she took my hand in hers in the old way, "and I have
always teased you cruelly, Jack."
"And Eloise," I said, "I have always loved you."
"Jack," she said, "Little Brother,"--those words I knew of old meant
condescension--"I knew it would not do. I wanted you to love someone
else. You know Aunt Lucretia's silly conditions." She flushed in the
twilight. "I hoped while you were away," she went on, "if we didn't
write you'd forget me."
"And instead," I said, bringing her hand to my lips, "I thought of no
one else but you. I came back loving you, Eloise, more than ever; as a
man's love is greater than a boy's."
She grew suddenly stern. "Jack, Jack, haven't I told you not to?"
"Not?" I cried. "Did any real lover ever have a choice? It's not his
part to decide--"
"Listen, Jack; you know I would not lie to you, but you must understand
how foolish--how useless--"
"Come to supper, Jack--Eloise." It was Aunt Lucretia calling. "Here is
father and Colonel Goff," she added as we walked up the steps. "Father
has grown quite deaf, Jack, since you saw him."
Colonel Goff, handsome, alert, and quick even to bluntness, came
forward, and shook my hand.
"Glad to see you back again, Jack--welcome home."
My grandfather sat in his great chair, facing the lawn. His wooden leg
rested on the railing. Great curls of tobacco smoke rose from his corner
of the porch.
There was the old nervous, staccato clatter of wood and cane meeting on
the floor as he arose to greet me. I saw the stern, unyielding face
give back no smile of pleasure as he took my hand. He stood looking at
me doubtfully, his mind evidently weakening with old age. The sadness
of it flashed over me, for his mind had been the mind of a strong man in
his day. My Aunt Lucretia promptly screamed in his ear, "This is Jack,
Father; he has come home."
"Jack, ah--ah--Jack, glad to see you, suh; and who did you say it was,
Lucretia?"
"Your grandson, Jack Ballington. He has been away studying in Germany,"
she screamed again.
"Aha," said the old man, "aha--of course--wouldn't go to West Point,
though the President himself gave him the appointment in my behalf.
Aha--Jack--a brooding, dreaming sort of a feller--always mooning around
trees and writing poetry. Won't fight--not a damn one of 'em will. And
what a chance to fight you would have now! What a bully scrap we are
going to have! Have you heard, suh," he turned, and spoke sharply to
me, "have you heard that the Spaniards blew up our battleship the other
month, and that we are going to blow hell out of 'em? And they've been
needing it for two centuries. Ah! If I were only younger, wouldn't I
be in! Imagine it, Goff," he said, turning to him, "imagine me fighting
under the old flag again! Didn't think I'd ever live to see that day
when we were charging Banks in the Valley. Ah, 'twas a family
scrap--only a family fight--like old man Tully and wife--have to fight a
little at home now and then, so they'd love each other more when they
made up. Ah, suh, I'd give this farm to be your age again, and a chance
to fight under the old flag once more. Joe Wheeler wrote me the other
day that President McKinley would make me a Brigadier, if I'd go in. By
gad, suh, I sat down, and shed tears to think I was too old!"
He was silent awhile; then, "Ha, ha, but I read in the paper to-day that
the Spanish Prime Minister is out in a statement saying it'll be easy to
whip us, because we're divided North and South, and that the Southern
Confederacy will arise again! He is right. We have already arisen. I
see in every Southern State ten times more have volunteered than their
quota calls for. Yes, we'll arise, and will help McKinley whip hell out
of them!" He stamped his wooden leg on the floor.
"Now, Braxton Bragg--ah, he's in it. Do you know, suh, that he's a
Captain in the First Tennessee, and they are preparing now to go to the
Philippines? Ah, what a chance, what a chance you had, suh! And what
do you say you did in Germany?"
"I studied forestry and farming, sir," I said, flushing hot under his
words, "and with it I took two years' training in the military school at
Berlin, taking instructions up to the rank of captain in the Emperor's
Guards."
"The hell you did!" he shouted excitedly. "Did you have sense enough to
do that? Those soldiers are the best drilled soldiers in the world,
Goff. Your damned English to the contrary notwithstanding," he added,
smiling at the Colonel. "In the Emperor's Guards! Strike a match,
Lucretia, and let me see him." In the light of the match he stood up I
stood above him six good inches. That and my shoulders breadth
surprised him, for he went on: "You left here a crippled stripling,
mooning all the time over flowers and such cat-hair, and crying if
anybody cut down a tree. But you'll never fight, none of you ever have!
Sissy is the word for the whole kit of the world's mooners. Still, you
do surprise me, suh, now and then; I'll be honest about it; like this
studying military in Germany. Ha--ha--think of it!"
"And beating you and your whole bragging bunch with Little Sister--have
you forgotten that, sir?" asked Eloise, nervily thrusting her intense
face into his, her eyes flashing, ready as she always had been to fight
my battles for me.
My grandsire laughed good-naturedly. He had always had respect for
Eloise in her fighting moods, as had everybody else on the farm. His
voice was decidedly conciliatory as he said, "There, dear,--maybe I am
too hard on Jack--ha--ha--guess that was neatly turned, and we took our
medicine like men and soldiers. Eh, Goff?" He turned to me suddenly.
"If you'd only quit this tree foolishness and fight; but you won't do
it, suh--not a damned one of you ever did! And your lameness?"
"It was a cartilage in my knee, sir; Dr. Hoffman, the famous surgeon,
took it out soon after I went over. I am not lame now, sir, at all."
"Glad to hear it, suh, glad to hear it."
He was silent for a moment, looking out into the dusk. "And you know
all about trees--aha--well, there's only one tree in the world I care a
damn for; there it is, and it is dying. My mother loved it. She used
to nurse me there," he added tenderly, his voice dropping low.
"It's that beautiful elm at the dining-room window, Jack," explained my
Aunt.
"The most perfect tree I ever saw," went on my grandsire, reminiscently.
"The others just grew up any way, but that one stood like the great
feathered eagle plume in the hair of the Comanche chief, Setting Sun.
He was the first Indian I killed on the plains--in a hand to hand
fight--and that eagle feather in his hair--I'll never forget it. And
that elm was like it--and--and my mother loved it," he said, his voice
muffled up in huskiness. He blew his nose vigorously, and went on more
cheerily, "Make yourself at home, suh--do what you please. I wanted you
to be a soldier, suh, like Braxton Bragg, ah, what a man that boy has
developed into at West Point! But it isn't born in you--can't make a
fighter out of a dreamer."
He sat down, and Aunt Lucretia, taking my hand, led me in. "Goff," I
heard him say, "that fight at Winchester when we charged into the
town--you led me a little you know, and--"
I felt Eloise's hand in mine as we went down the hall. "I hate him,"
she said, tossing her head back toward the old man. "It's mean and
sinful; but I hate him! After all these years to greet you in that way.
And Braxton Bragg--you should see what a fool he is, Jack, in his
captain's straps, and living hourly up to his name!"
*CHAPTER IV*
*COLONEL GOFF*
Colonel Goff followed us shortly afterwards into the hall. He had
ridden over on his English hunter while Eloise and I had been on the
lawn greeting our tree friends. He was immaculately groomed, in
polished boots, puttees and cap, an English crop in his hands. Fifty
years old, his black hair slightly streaked with gray, he was handsome,
and there was a masterful air about him that even an enemy must have
admired. A younger son of the Earl of Carfax, he had come to America
when my grandsire was fighting with Stonewall Jackson in Virginia. He
had volunteered for service, and had been placed in Jackson's corps, and
on my grandsire's staff. Here his real, sterling qualities found birth
and he proved to be a brilliant soldier. It was he who charged ahead of
the rebel yell and led the advance that scattered Banks. It was he who
led again at Cedar Creek, caught the brilliant Sheridan napping, and
sent his command reeling back in a retreat which would have meant
demoralization for anyone but Sheridan. His fondness for my grandsire
was no less than the old man's for him, and after the war Colonel Goff,
being in disgrace, it was said, with his father at home, moved to
Tennessee to be near his old commander. He had bought a fine place near
ours, and here he had lived the life of an English gentleman, with his
hounds, his horses, and his utter disregard of all the local and
established ideas of country temperance or morals. He was not a man who
asked for things, he took them.
Even before I left home I had secretly rebelled at his admiration for
Eloise. In all her masterful ways, her riding, her fox chasing, her
hunting with the men, following Goff or the General all day on her pony,
and killing quail dead-straight, in the flush of the covey, he had
openly admired her. Afterwards I heard him say that she was a duchess
born, and the only one he had seen in America. He had humored, petted
and helped to spoil her as a child. As a girl, there never was a costly
thing she wanted but he gave it to her.
In the dining-room, when supper had been announced, I noticed the
flushed pleasure in Eloise's eyes at sight of him. It was half a daring
look, as of the hunted defying the hunter, that I saw in her eyes, but I
could not rightly decipher it, or tell whether it meant she was
conquered or as yet unconquered.
My heart burned with jealousy at the sight of it. The great joy of my
home-coming was gone! I knew his way, and that he would stay for
supper.
"I had thought," I whispered sourly to Eloise, "that I would at least
have this first evening alone with you."
Eloise laughed. "Oh, he comes when he pleases, and I--I send him home
when I please."
He had greeted me pleasantly, but during supper he paid little attention
to me. Once he laughed at my study of forestry, and added, "And to go
to Germany for it, when you might have gone to England!"
After supper, when I had gone with Aunt Lucretia to the barn to help her
with a sick colt, I smelt the odor of his cigar coming up from our old
seat under the elm. I grew bitter at the thought that anyone but I
should sit there with Eloise. My Aunt must have noticed this, for she
called: "Come in here--both of you. This isn't fair to Jack."
Aunt Lucretia and Colonel Goff could never meet ten minutes in their
lives without a heated argument over American and English horses. She
generally worsted him, because she had all the records at her tongue's
end, and because in any kind of controversy she was fearless. For an
hour to-night, and until he left, she scored him fearlessly. "Take that
nick-tailed horse of yours," said Aunt Lucretia, "Colonel Goff, couldn't
you do better than that in England?" There were two things which always
especially incensed her; one was to cut off a horse's tail and the other
to import an animal from England, when a better one might be had here.
Colonel Goff explained that there were no such horses in America. "He
is a four-mile hurdler," said he. "You've nothing of the kind in this
blooming country."
"Why, madam, he holds the record jump behind the Quoin hounds at
Melton-Mowbry. The kill was in the main driveway of a manor and his
rider cleared the picket fence to be in first. That fence measured five
and a half feet and to this day it is the record at Melton-Mowbry."
"A four-miler, that means a running horse," said my Aunt. "Of course we
have them. And a hurdler--that's only a jumping horse. Now, we've
never cared much for jumpers. Why, I've a mule in my barn that can go
over a ten rail fence any day. Uncle Ned says she just climbs it;
anyway, I've never been able to build one high enough to keep her out of
the cornfield on the other side. But there's Eloise's Satan, son of
Young Hickory, scion of General Jackson's Truxton. The man his sire is
named for used to beat your English at any kind of a game at New
Orleans, and I'll wager that Satan would be a mighty hurdler and high
jumper if he only had a chawnce," she said, smiling, in funny mimicry of
Goff.
"Fawncy!" laughed Goff, twisting his mustache. "Why, he couldn't jump
over a chalk line! It's all in the training and pedigree! My Nestor
colt holds the record for the Melton-Mowbry meet, and his high jump was
five feet six."
My Aunt turned the subject as if it were forgotten. But I knew she
never forgot, and that she had something up her sleeve.
I was worried that Goff should linger so on my first night, for I saw
plainly that he hoped we would retire and that he wanted to get Eloise
off for a _tete-a-tete_. Aunt Lucretia saw this also, and whispered to
me when she got the chance, "Freeze him out, Jack; he shan't have her
to-night!"
"Why, Major Hawthorn," she said presently, turning and rising abruptly.
The major came in on us silently, in his soft, well-bred way. I rose
instantly to greet him.
"Jack, my boy!" said he, throwing one arm around me, and drawing me to
him. "How you have grown! I heard you had come home, and I had to see
you to-night."
"And you didn't want to see _me_?" said Eloise, coming up, and kissing
him; for the Major was her ideal, and she was always his pet. "Now,
Major, you always said that you loved me as much as you did Jack," she
teased, winding an arm into his.
"Just the same as ever, my dear; you are both my two children always,"
he laughed. "Why, good evening, Goff--and the General, where is he?" he
asked my Aunt Lucretia. "I have news that will please him."
My Aunt went after my grandfather.
"Jack," he turned to me, "what a man you have grown into! I'm hungry
for a long talk with you."
The Major sat down, and Colonel Goff offered him a cigar. He struck a
match, but before using it, held it a moment to my face. "Inspection,
Jack," said he, smiling; "you know how hard it is to break an old
soldier of his habits."
I saw his finely-cut, sensitive face light up. I noticed the familiar
turn of his mustache, his kindly mouth, the correct dress, the straight,
martial bearing, and the courtesy, that seemed a gift of his own.
"And it looks as if I might die in harness," he went on. "Ah, here's
the General."
He rose and shook hands with my grandsire. "I have come over to tell
you, General, of a telegram I received this afternoon from the
President, and I should so like to have your advice before
answering--the advice of all of you," he said kindly, turning and bowing
our way.
"Ah, Hawthorne," said my grandsire, "I know what it is--I knew it was
coming--I wrote Joe Wheeler--"
"I thought you had something to do with it," said the Major, "and I
shall abide by your decision, my General," he added softly.
"McKinley has appointed you Brigadier-General," went on my grandsire
quietly. "The First Tennessee will be in your brigade. I can't talk of
it, Hawthorne--I want to go to the Philippines with you so bad, and give
the damned Yankees--ah, pardon--pardon me--I mean the damned Spaniards
another good drubbing!"
There was a burst of laughter from us all. My grandsire sat down
confused.
"It is as you said," Major Hawthorne replied, "and I am going to do as
you say, General. I have taken your orders in Virginia too often to
refuse now."
"Hawthorne, I envy you; by gad, I envy you," said the old man.
"General, do you know that I never was so happy before? I have so
wanted to fight under the old flag. Jack," he turned to me, his face
smiling, "Jack, I have come to see you for this purpose--I want you on
my staff--I know the training you have had, I know the stuff that is in
you. I want you, my boy. I've ridden ten miles to-night to tell you."
"Tut--tut--Hawthorne--nonsense!" broke in the General. "Don't start out
making breaks like that. Jack is a good boy, but he is not a
fighter--now, there's Braxton Bragg--"
"My grandfather is doubtless right, General Hawthorne," I said quietly.
"I thank you from my heart for your kindness--but--"
Eloise arose flushing, indignant. "Jack _is_ a fighter; a better
fighter than some people who strut around in khaki, and make great
pretense, but amount to nothing," she said deliberately and with
emphasis.
Then she came over and put one arm affectionately on my shoulder. "And
General Rutherford," she went on, her voice trembling with anger, "I
mean this for you, and I mean no disrespect; but it is cruel of you the
way you have slurred Jack, and I almost doubt that you ever made the
good fighting record you have, when I think how easily you can be fooled
into taking a tin soldier for the real thing! I do, and now you know
what _I_ think."
Colonel Goff laughed, pleased. "You pinked him just right, Eloise.
Been thinking I'd tell the General that myself--eh, General?" and he
slapped the old man familiarly on the back.
The old General answered testily, "Tut--tut--madam;" and then he
laughed. "Gad, but I wish you were a man! Damned if _you_ wouldn't
fight!"
*CHAPTER V*
*PEDIGREES AND PRINCIPLES*
My Aunt Lucretia undoubtedly was the real master of The Home Stretch.
She ruled its thousand acres of low, rolling, blue grass land, which
bore in pioneer days the canebrake and the poplar, and for a century had
been the nursery of thoroughbreds.
My Aunt lived and dreamed in pedigrees. Heaven, according to her, was a
blue-grass meadow filled with pedigreed people, and hell--I remember how
I had laughed when she said, "Why, Jack, if there is such a place, it's
a low jockey-yard filled with scrubs!"
Pedigrees, I am certain, was her gauge of life. She was more man than
woman, handsome though she was. She should have been a bewigged,
knee-breeched, ruffle-shirted, horse-racing Virginia gentleman of the
old school, as many of her ancestors had been. She still clung to a few
blooded horses, though her immaculate dairy of Jersey cows was her
greatest pride. When my parents died, even before I could remember, she
had adopted me. She intended that I should inherit The Home Stretch.
Then, true to her ideas, she had planned a proper mate for me. She had
been a success in mating everything but herself. Her ribbons won at
State Fairs and in Horse Shows proved it; for her Merino sheep she held
a great cup from the International Exhibit in Paris. The wool of her
Tennessee sheep had gone back across the ocean, and beaten the parent
wool on its own soil. This great, heavy, solid silver cup sat on the
mantel in the library, and every spring, when I had a cold, she had
given me punch cobbler out of it.
She had early paired me off with Eloise Ward, who was an orphan, and a
distant relative of her mother. My Aunt had adopted her, as she had me,
and given her every grace of a fashionable education. At ten she had,
as she expressed it, engaged us. I remember it was Eloise's tenth
birthday and my twelfth. She bought a little turquoise ring and made me
give it to Eloise.
"Now, Jack, Eloise is yours! Eloise, you will marry him when you are
grown. Now kiss each other as sensibly engaged people do, to seal it.
After this no more kissing."
The last advice was unneeded. Up to then we had never kissed, but had
fought continually. Knowing Aunt Lucretia, and that if we did not do as
she said, something uncomfortable would happen to us, we screwed up our
mouths, each trying to outdo the other in mock martyrdom, and complied.
After that Aunt Lucretia was very gracious. I think we showed remarkable
horse-sense, young as we were, in carrying out her wishes, inasmuch as
we expected some day to own the great farm and house.
To comfort me she used to say--for she knew my love of blooded stock:
"She is beautiful, Jack, well built and coupled just right in the back.
One link more of vertebrae would have spoiled her, turned her up too
sloping between the shoulders, and made her gangling in the hips. If
there's too many links in a filly's back, when the pinch of contest
comes, you know, Jack, as well as I do, there will be a crumpling--and
it is generally in their legs. And Eloise's, Jack--well, you should see
it--thoroughbred--taut as a bow string--holding hip and head together.
And not too short, either, Jack; the little dicky, short-backed ones,
with schooner hips, are a sure sign of several vertebrae being lost by
sitting on them for too many generations at the loom or the wheel, or
carrying home the week's washing on their heads! It's the scrub sign,
my boy. And Eloise is clean-limbed with good flat bones. Jack, as you
love me and your God, never marry a woman that can't span her ankle with
her thumb and forefinger--that kind of a fetlock is a scrub of the most
pronounced type! It came from ancestors before them for a thousand
years, who had all their weight on their ankles--just hauling plows like
beasts of burden. And Eloise has great style with a fine sweep and
action. Look how boldly she steps and clean and true! No loblolling,
lazy ambling there--hitting even on the ground--and her hair,
Jack--red-chestnut--it is beautiful and not too much. Shun the
brood-mare with mane thick and heavy. It is pretty but comes from the
scrub Shetlands or Andalusian jennets. Look--look, Jack--isn't she
beautiful?"
I watched her myself, tall, her scornful, daring head thrown back, her
fine braids of sorrel, silken hair flying out, as in a long-limbed,
leaping sweep, she chased the collie across the yard.
The comparison was fitting--as a thoroughbred, Eloise was superb. My
Aunt had copied it all by herself, tabulating for me, most elaborately
and artistically, on a great sheet of parchment, Eloise's pedigree. It
was such a tabulation as I had seen her work over night after night,
often for months, handing down volume after volume of the English and
Bruce's Stud Book and the Trotting and Pacing Register. In bold, block,
decorated letters, she gradually evolved Eloise's sire and dam, as she
grimly called them, and thence on to granddams and g. g. dams (every g.
as I learned standing for another generation) until it looked, when
finished, like a great river, with a hundred branching streams flowing
in, and an endless row of g. g. g. g. g.'s
Under each sire and dam, and in red ink, in contrast to the black of
their names, she had written their records, short and pointed, and often
with astonishing frankness. I remember that under her grandsire--a
Governor of Virginia--the red ink ran: _Died of a wetting, while drunk
at a horse race! Watch your children for too much crude liquor!_
Under one of her dams, daughter of a Carolina judge, she had: _She had a
streak of common, for she ate onions. If you have daughters, don't
plant the things in your garden!_
Another of her great Virginia ancestors was a preacher, noted for his
zeal in proselyting; under him was: _Too religious--the reaction may
come in your grandson, who is likely to be an infidel, Nature
maintaining her balance in morals as in matter_.
Now that I had come home from Germany it was evidently my Aunt's
intention that Eloise and I should marry.
"Come, Eloise," said she, after our guests had left, and my grandfather
had retired, "we will light Jack to bed in the old way."
Eloise jumped up, slipping her arm into mine. Then she two-stepped with
me up the hall, humming "A Hot Time In The Old Town To-night."
Aunt Lucretia looked on, her stern face relaxed into a satisfied smile.
I slipped my arm around Eloise's slim waist, and, bending over, tried to
kiss her cheek. But she drew back laughing, and Aunt Lucretia's voice
came sternly from behind. "Jack--Eloise!"
We stopped instantly under the chandelier. Aunt Lucretia shut the heavy
doors, and came up with all the sternness of a Roman lictor in her face.
"Turn her loose, Jack. Listen, both of you: I had intended to inform
you to-morrow finally, but this is as good a time as any."
We stood silent before her. Eloise's pretty mouth drooped in pretended
humbleness.
"You know how I love you both, and--well, how you respect each other.
You know that I have planned and dreamed for you both, ever since I
brought you together here. Now let me see. This is April--well, I am
going to marry you to each other in the fall, and until I marry you
off," she went on sternly, "I have only one rule--no hugging--no
kissing. It is bad before marriage, and after you are married," she
added with becoming stiffness, "you will not want to."
"Don't you think your conditions are awfully severe for engaged people?"
asked Eloise demurely.
"And I may seal it with a kiss surely, Aunt Lucretia," I said, "for
once."
"No, not for once. That silly performance has caused more trouble in
the world than all the sins of Satan combined. We will never have a
decent race of people till kissing is cut out," she exclaimed. "There,
no more at present--march!"
And she marched us into my room.
"Isn't this fine!" I said, looking around at the old room, glad to be
home again.
It was twenty by twenty, the pioneer size, with a great fireplace, built
of oak and ash. In a corner was my old mahogany tester bed, big posted
and canopy-topped. The little cherry writing desk stood near, and so
did the quaint mahogany bureau, resting on dragon claws, with great
drawers for a base, and ending pyramid-like in a top of granite finish,
set off by a little mirror, and with a tiny shaving drawer for my
razors. Big windows looked out on all sides.
After Eloise had left Aunt Lucretia sat quietly thinking, looking now
and then at a pedigree of Eloise which she had once made and hung over
my mantel. It was framed in walnut and decorated with fancy letters.
At last she smiled.
"Isn't she a thoroughbred, Jack?"
"I haven't really got my breath yet, Aunt Lucretia," I answered. "I
never dreamed she would grow into a being so beautiful. Don't you
really believe you might er--er--hurry up this--er--affair--" and I
stopped, blushing.
Aunt Lucretia broke out in her rare, good-humored laugh.
"Poor boy! Jack, you must be careful. You talk as if you had a real
case of the silly, unsensible thing."
"Always had it, Aunt Lucretia," I smiled weakly.
"Jack, that would be very unfortunate. I want you to marry on common
sense--not love."
"You know how I have always loved her," I went on. Aunt Lucretia
glanced sharply at me. "I mean how I've cared for her," I amended. "But
do you--do you honestly believe, Aunt Lucretia, that she loves me--cares
for me that way?"
"Tut--tut," she said sharply, "what nonsense you talk! What does it
matter? This silly love business has spoiled more good pedigrees and
brought more fools into the world, I tell you, than anything else under
the sun. What a fine breed of folks we'd have had in the world by now
if so many idiots had not fallen in love and married without a moment's
thought of results. You ought to be grateful to me, Jack," she
continued after a while; "you will be grateful, I am sure, some day,
that you had me to select a wife for you and didn't just happen to fall
in love. That's an accident often as fatal as happening to fall down
the steps.
"It is awful, Jack, this haphazard of humanity!" she went on in a
moment. "No wonder only one in a hundred is born who has got any brains
in his head. Think of it, Jack, our race is so pig-headed from
thoughtless marryings that it took them three hundred years after they
invented a saddle before it dawned upon them that they needed stirrups
to complete it. Rode three centuries on bare saddles for lack of sense
enough to invent stirrups! Some day for the benefit of humanity I am
going to open a human Registry. I want to do this because I think it is
our duty to try to teach people to take as much interest in their own
children's pedigree as they do in their horses' or dogs'. Many a man
falls in love with and marries a woman whose qualities and character,
and pedigree, if she were a horse, he wouldn't be caught trading a blind
mule for! And many a woman, under the same divine influence, marries
some vicious brute of a man for no other reason than because she has
just fallen in love with him, or maybe wants to reform him, who, if he
were turned into a buggy horse she wouldn't be caught risking her neck
behind.
"And this is the way I'd go to registering my people," she continued.
"In all registration there must be a foundation stock. For man, I'd let
Truthfulness, Bravery, Honesty, Manliness, and Ability to Do Things,
count as Foundations. This would change the present social system
radically and let into good society and life a flood of good blood that
is at present badly needed but is shut out, unless it suddenly happens
to get rich and comes in under a dress suit. I would make
accomplishments, the _Ability to Do Things_, from the Ability to do
Poetry, Art, Drama, Music--everything that is worth while--to the
ability to make two blades of grass grow, the greatest of them all,
count as my classes, and it wouldn't take me long to straighten out Old
Humanity and breed a race of people, who, in a few generations, as old
Horace says, would strike the stars with their uplifted heads!"
She laughed. "Look, Jack, here it is. I have worked it all out, just
for fun." She unrolled a parchment, as immaculately executed in
decorated letters as Eloise's pedigree had been. Then she read,
glancing over her glasses now and then to emphasize her remarks.
"_A STANDARD OF HUMAN REGISTRATION_.
When white men and women meet the following requirements and are duly
registered, they shall be accepted as standard bred, and shall be
permitted to marry:
FIRST: Any white man, who has a home of his own and is honest,
industrious, and truthful, and sound in wind, limb and eye.
SECOND: Any white woman, who can cook a good meal, make her own clothes,
keep a home clean, lives a pure life, and has some moral standard for
herself and children, and will agree to raise them under it.
THIRD: Every man who is the father of a great man or woman.
FOURTH: Every woman who is the mother of a great man or woman.
_NON-STANDARD_:
The following shall be Non-Standard, and neither they nor their children
shall be registered.
FIRST: Fools.
SECOND: Liars.
THIRD: Cranks.
FOURTH: Idiots.
FIFTH: Geniuses. They are freaks merely, and fools in another form.
SIXTH: Sissy men.
SEVENTH: Consumptives, the cancerous, the insane.
EIGHTH: Impure women.
NINTH: Society people wherever found, and their one child.
TENTH: Married men who lead Germans.
ELEVENTH: The children of women who play cards for money and prizes.
TWELFTH: Evangelists who preach slang from the pulpit.
THIRTEENTH: Praying lawyers.
FOURTEENTH: Trading preachers.
FIFTEENTH: Professional politicians.
SIXTEENTH: Bank cashiers who run Sunday Schools.
SEVENTEENTH: Doctors who cut open people quickly, or dope them with much
medicine.
LUCRETIA RUTHERFORD,
Registrar."
I laughed. "It wouldn't do any harm to try it awhile, Aunt Lucretia;
but--referring again to Eloise--"
"We'll not refer again to Eloise," she said, seeing what I was coming
to; "this thing is settled. You two will marry this fall, and until then
I want no foolishness around me."
"But, suppose she--" I began.
"She is not to suppose anything--nor you. Get her a beautiful ring the
next time you go to town. I'll attend to the rest of it."
We talked for an hour or two. I could see how glad she was that I was
at home again, for, with all of her stern ways, my Aunt Lucretia was
very fond of me.
"And to think of your being the man you are, Jack," she said finally,
"and that lameness all gone. Ah, but that is what I'm telling you--the
Germans are the greatest thinkers in the world--because--well, because
they have been bred to think. Yes, it is good to see you here again,
Jack, and sound, and you will earn your oats from now on, young man,
remember that."
*CHAPTER VI*
*THE MAKE-BELIEVE*
After Aunt Lucretia had gone there was a faint tap at my window, which I
knew of old. When I raised the sash Eloise stood outside, smiling at me.
On the veranda she slipped her arm through mine, and led the way to our
old seat under the hickories.
"Jack," she began, and her serious tone seemed to bode no good, "I just
couldn't go to sleep until I had talked with you. Aunt Lucretia thinks
I'm in bed; just as she used to think we both were when we weren't,
Little Brother." She smiled half tenderly. "I think I ought to speak
to you. This thing is getting serious, don't you think?"
"It's been that way with me all the time," I said earnestly, "if I could
only get you to look at it seriously--"
For reply she thumped my cheek with her thumb and forefinger. It was a
trick Aunt Lucretia had used when I had been naughty as a boy, and
Eloise knew that nothing made me madder.
"Now, Jack--no nonsense--listen. We must do something--about--"
"Our marriage this fall?" I interrupted.
Eloise laughed. "Isn't it nonsense?"
"Well, I don't know," I said. "She has always said so, and we have
always done as she said. I have always found it was the best thing for
me," I added.
Eloise pretended indignation. "Well, now, let me tell you, Jack, this
is my funeral as well as yours, and for once this isn't the right idea!"
"Oh," said I, "maybe you've grown big enough since I saw you to defy
Aunt Lucretia. Well, _I_ haven't; and dear, dear Little Sister," I went
on, taking her slim hand in mine with more warmth than she seemed to
like, "I have learned to hold my own among men, but Aunt Lucretia is a
very different thing! I am not going to defy her, or go contrary to her
wishes--I've tried it and know better! And you?"
"Of course I am," she said, moving a little away from me; "the idea!
Why, Jack, it is absurd! Jack--" and instantly she stopped. Her voice
dropped with a sad little wilt, and she laid her head upon my shoulder.
I knew that she was brave and never cried, or else I would have believed
she was in tears.
"Dear Little Sister," I said consolingly, "why, what is it? What has
happened since I left? This has been Aunt Lucretia's dream all her life,
and mine too," I said, tenderly kissing her cheek.
Eloise sighed; then after a while she answered. "Of course, Jack, she
has said that always, ever since we were children, and being children,
why we couldn't say anything, for our very home and living depended on
it. But Jack, I see it all now. I'm ashamed of it--though I couldn't
help it--this--this awful buy-and-sell way, this bartering me because I
am poor and an orphan, this closing the chance of the great dream of my
life for me--that one dream which every woman loves more than life,
Jack. It's--why, I've treated you so badly. I wonder that you care for
me at all. But--oh, Jack, I had such ideas of love, and now to be mated
off like her cattle!"
"I know it," I said, "only you were never as mean as you say. Young as
we were I felt it, too, and that is why I didn't blame you. But it
never made any difference with me, Eloise--I have loved you always, and
I'm as proud of you now as anyone can be."
"Oh, you dear boy," said she. She laid her head upon my shoulder, then
reached up and kissed me on the cheek. She was silent and I was never
so happy, with her head lying there, and the perfume of her hair in my
face.
At last she laughed. "Jack, you neglected me shamefully while you were
away, studying."
"I wrote you a love letter every week!" I exclaimed.
"But people in love write to each other every day," she said. "You
don't really love me, Jack!"
"Eloise, I couldn't write every day, but I thought of you the last thing
every night before I went to sleep, and I slept with your picture under
my pillow, and I used to play that we were married, and that my dressing
gown in the chair was you."
"O, Jack," and she clasped my hand in hers, "you dear boy! And I must
say I never dreamed you'd be so big and handsome!"
I seized her hands, holding them in mine: "And let me tell you, Eloise,
you almost took my breath when I saw you for the first time this
morning!"
There was a long silence before Eloise spoke. "Jack, what are we going
to do about--about--Aunt Lucretia?"
"Why, I tell you there is nothing to do but to do as she
says--marry--you know how she has planned this all her life. It would
break her heart; and mine," I added softly.
"Listen now," said Eloise earnestly. "Jack, that is nonsense. I don't
love you that way nor you me. I don't care what she says. Love is made
from higher, nobler motives, and true marriages should be made in heaven
as they say. I," she went on with a sigh, "Jack, I have given up; I was
not made for love like that--as you want to love me. I am too selfish,
I care too much for the fine world around me, for my own self, for
pleasure. I love to will, to conquer, Jack. I don't want to love, to
give myself up to any man and his whims unless--"
"Unless what?" I asked eagerly.
"Well, two things," she said. "First; unless I loved him--oh, if I only
could! How I would love him! And if not that--well, for--for--it would
have to be compensation of another kind, such as great wealth, and all
that, to have a great name like that of the Countess of Carfax."
"The Countess of Carfax?" I asked.
She was looking at me very earnestly. I felt her eyes on my face.
Something unpleasant began to dawn upon me.
"Jack, I cannot deceive you. I do not, I cannot love anyone that
way--that one sweet way. It is not in me. I might have loved you that
way, Jack, it is the truth, but Aunt Lucretia has thwarted the chance
you had with me, with her blooded stock idea of it. That is why I've
treated you so all my life; it was not I, it was Love resenting this
profanity of itself."
I could not speak. Eloise, I saw, had much to tell that I did not know.
"Four years is a long time to be away, and after you left I was so
lonely, I had no comrade, no Little Brother in my summer vacations. And
you were far away, and Colonel Goff--you know how queerly he has always
persisted in wanting to marry me some day--not quite as bad as Aunt
Lucretia's way, but almost as bad--because, well, I think for no other
reason than because I ride well--" she was speaking brokenly. "Aunt
Lucretia wants me to marry you because I've got a good pedigree, and
Colonel Goff wants me to marry him because I ride well, but I want to
marry someone because I love him. You know how grandfather is about
Colonel Goff, Jack? Oh, I can't tell it all, but he has made it so
unpleasant for me since you left, worrying me about--that I should marry
Colonel Goff--that I had nothing, and how great a man Colonel Goff
was--and--oh, he has seemed to become childish of late, so irritable and
strange, and so he has almost driven me away from home or into marrying
Colonel Goff; and you were far away, Jack. And so when Colonel
Goff--well, he was as persistent as grandfather, and so kind always and
good to me--Jack, you see how I was placed between them--"
"Well?" I said bitterly, "go on."
"And so when Colonel Goff asked me, I--"
The great trees above me seemed to reel, and my heart to stop, and then
thump fiercely in my throat.
"Eloise, please don't," I begged. "Do you--you don't love that man!"
"Of course not," she answered coolly, and very quietly, "but--and this
is my secret, Jack. Promise me--it isn't known yet, but it will be
before long. You know since he came home from the war with grandfather
and lived here he has been at outs with his people in England. You know
how he had to leave them. Well, it seems that all of his brothers over
there have died but one, and that Colonel Goff is next heir, and that he
has received a letter from the physician asking him to come and see his
brother before he dies, that he wants to arrange about the estates, for
they are large, and the brother is the Earl of Carfax."
I had dropped her hand, and my head was bent. I knew what was coming.
"But you don't love him, Eloise, surely--" I arose, the stars whirling
above my head, the great trees soughing as in sorrow. She came up in
the starlight and put her arms around my neck. She tried to laugh and
pull me back to our seat.
"Jack," she said, "I want you to help me--will you not do something--the
last something I shall ever ask you for?"
"I love you enough to give you my life," I said.
"You were always so good to me. It is this, Jack--our secret: Colonel
Goff and I will be married as soon as he can arrange to go back to
England, in a month or two. I don't want any scene with Aunt Lucretia,
and so, and so, Jack, we'll just make-believe--let her believe it is all
right--that we are carrying out her plans up to the very day."
"I'll say nothing," I answered; "you and Aunt Lucretia can arrange it."
"You'll have to act as if you loved me, Jack."
"I cannot act any other way," I said.
She laughed, her voice floating up triumphantly. "And you will have to
send me that diamond ring, you know--"
"Eloise," I said again, after a moment, "this is desecration! You know
you don't love that old man!"
"I like him enough to be the Countess of Carfax. If I've got to be sold
to anyone, Jack," she said with bitterness, "got to be traded off like a
Jersey, why I'd rather be traded off as the Countess of Carfax than any
other way!"
I flushed hot.
"But Jack, think of grandfather. It is that or be turned out."
"Eloise," I cried, "you know I wouldn't stand for that!"
"No," she whispered softly, "not if you could help. But Jack, I forgot
to tell you, you are already out."
I could only look my astonishment.
"I wanted to write you," she went on, "but I was afraid. I learned it
all from Braxton Bragg."
"What did he have to do with it?"
"You know he has had a silly idea that he was going to marry me himself
some day, though you know how I have always despised him. Well, Jack,
you'll never know what he has done; because you don't know the
conditions on The Home Stretch. I, myself, didn't, till Braxton Bragg
showed me the papers the very month you left. You know how grandfather
has always kept that secret drawer in his safe locked? But you remember
how we children learned all about it?"
"I remember Braxton showed it to me," I said. "I never knew how he found
it out."
"Nor I, nor how he stole the parchment from it, the one that grandfather
kept from all eyes, even Aunt Lucretia's, for she knows nothing of it
yet. But he did, and he showed it to me, thinking--well, you'll guess
why. Jack, we're outcasts, you and I, we have nothing."
She hesitated a moment, then went on. "It seems that the first John
Rutherford, the Old Indian fighter, who was killed at New Orleans, left
a secret paper with his will, in which he begged the heir who inherited
from him, your great-grandfather, John Rutherford, second, who fought in
the Mexican war, you know, to bequeath the estate to that son of his who
should be a soldier, and that it should be passed on in that way
secretly to each generation. Now John Rutherford the second, had only
one son, your grandfather, and his son, Braxton's father, was killed in
the war.
"Oh, I see now," I said amazed, "and that was why he wanted me to go to
West Point."
"And why Braxton Bragg, who is a coward," she cried indignantly, "did go
to West Point, after he stole that parchment and read it. And as proof
of it, when grandfather was trying to persuade me to listen to Colonel
Goff, he told me he was going to leave The Home Stretch so that it would
go to Braxton Bragg after Aunt Lucretia's death."
In an instant I saw it all. I understood things that I had given no
serious thought to before.
"Yes, I am out," I agreed.
"Jack, Little Brother, I hope I haven't made you unhappy on your first
night at home."
I did not speak; she sighed.
"And so I am going to marry Colonel Goff, Jack, and be the Countess of
Carfax, and you'll do as I say--you'll make-believe with me. I'd so
hate to have Aunt Lucretia know now."
"I'll go on as if it were I," I said bitterly. "I'd do anything for you,
Eloise--and--and I do hope you'll be happy yet."
She shook her head: "Jack, you do not know me--that kind of happiness
that I have craved all my life is not for me, and it is so hard that it
should be, for I have always had such beautiful dreams of that kind of
happiness--I, who could love so if I only might--I who wish it so, to be
widowed of it all my life."
"I could make you if you'd only wait--give me a chance to prove mine--to
make you love me, Eloise."
"It is too late. O, Jack, you deserve better of me than this; you do
not deserve so poor return as this make-believe--a make-belief--only
this--a little sisterly kiss," and she held up her face in the starlight
to mine.
But I sat silent. My heart--it would not take such a make-believe
tribute.
I rose from our seat. "Good night, Eloise, I wish now that I had stayed
in Germany," I said as I walked in.
"Jack, come back, don't be angry with me. I've done the best I could."
I saw her turn defiantly, like one who, receiving a hurt, fights back.
I left her sitting under the trees.
*CHAPTER VII*
*THE CHIMES OF THE WISTERIA*
I was up and out the next morning before Aunt Lucretia or any of the
servants. I wanted to get to the dairy in time to see Tammas milk. I
longed to see his whitewashed cottage and the clean, stone dairy under
the hill, near the spring.
I walked through the lot where the Jersey herd had lain the night
before, leaving shimmering shapes of themselves impressed in the hollow
mold of blue grass, crushed and shining for lack of dew. Nearby was the
brood-mare paddock, sloping downward to the meadow. Beyond, the
tree-covered hills.
It was a perfect picture; the sun flushing the green of the hills, the
air damp and tainted with the earth-odor of early day. But I had not
beaten Tammas nor Marget, his good wife; nobody ever beat them up, not
even the cows. He was calling them to the barn in the same way as of
old, in the voice that I had heard ever since I could remember. He
stood squarely in the barn door, blocky and bowed of legs, his broad
Scotch face split wide across with a big, kindly mouth from which came,
like the deep tones of a cathedral's bell down the valley: "Coom,
lassies--coom, noo!"
Like children called into supper they obeyed; silver grays, fawns,
chocolates, red-fawns and pied, crumpled of horns and slim of tail,
marching solemnly down. One, a three-year old heifer, with her first
calf, answered him like a school girl, whirling half around in awkward
romp and elephantine effort to kick up her stiff heels even as she had
seen the standard-bred filly do!
How restful and natural Tammas's cottage looked! I could see Marget
bestirring herself for greater cleanliness of an already over-clean
cottage. She was humming, and I guessed it was one of her old kirk
hymns or maybe Bobbie Burns. For it was Marget who could read Bobbie
Burns! How rich and grand the lines came in her broad dialect! I was a
child when she had begun to read Bobbie Burns to me; and though I knew
not what she said I hung upon her numbers, and a queer, fine feeling
swept over me. I was nearly grown before I learned the dialect myself,
from hearing them talk to each other, and knew the greatness of Bobbie
Burns in the original.
Tammas and Marget were good people, as genuine as the rocksalt they gave
the herd to lick, hiding it in the deep grasses of the meadow, where the
thirsty cows would come upon it in unexpected places. Once when I found
a cube of it, gleaming in the grass for the cows, I thought how much
their own lives were like that pure cube of comfort, doing their work in
kindliness and obscurity. Then the clamoring tongues of the beagles
thrilled me as of old, as the game little fellows came down the slope of
the hill. They had followed me from the house and struck the trail of
an early stray rabbit. Across the hills they went, their little piping
tongues echoing slowly as they nosed along.
For many years Tammas and Marget had run my Aunt's dairy in the hollow
where the great stream came tumbling down from the hills. I looked at
it there in the valley, and I tasted again in anticipation the cottage
cheese, the buttermilk, and the Scotch rye bread.
Now I saw Marget bestirring herself and again up the valley I heard the
call, "_Coom, lassies, coom, noo!_"
In changing their home, Tammas and Marget had changed little else. Even
after twenty-five years of life at The Home Stretch they still spoke to
each other in their native tongue, though to others they often spoke
English with their broad brogue. Even then, Scotch words would break in
on their English with the suddenness and sweep of a tidal wave flowing
in from the firth. Though they could speak English purely, and were well
read in their way, their earnestness might always be gauged by the
number of Scotch words which crept into their talk.
Marget had not yet seen me. I went up the path to the little cottage
porch, over which wisteria, in full bloom, hung in purple bunches, and
whorls of clustering chimes. As I stood there listening, I seemed to
hear their chimes, for the odor of the wisteria is a chime of memory. I
heard the melody of other days, faint and yet so clear, memories that
were almost legendary, of the little boy, motherless, and who had never
seen his father, always a nature-worshiper, and a tree-lover; of his
Aunt Lucretia; of his adopted sister, Eloise; of his fighting old
grandsire, who had been the right hand to Stonewall Jackson when he
swept clean the valley of the Shenandoah; and of these two good Scotch
people who had taken him to their hearts even as their own. Here had he
dreamed and grown up, loving them and the things they loved, and his
dreams had been of writing, of poetry, of music; and not of war, as his
grandsire had wished. Young as he was he had seen war with clear eyes.
How it took the bravest and the best,--and left the weaklings to
reproduce themselves. It reversed all the laws of Nature. If Nature
had done the same thing for the flowers, not a larkspur purpling the
meadows in blossoming ladders, not a wild lupine in whorls of stars, not
a nodding head of clover blossom, not a stone-crop of the early spring,
nor the flushes of wild hepatica would have survived to-day.
Dog fennel alone would inherit the earth!
Marget, her keen black eyes lighting up with that joy I knew so well,
came to meet me. She seized my hands in both of hers, and shouted to
Tammas: "Tammas, whaur are ye, Tammas? Come quick an' see whit I hae to
show ye!"
"Weel, weel, I'm comin', wumman," said Tammas, wobbling up in his great
awkward way, his broad mouth smiling. He grasped both my hands in his.
"It's Jack, oor Jack! Whit wey did ye no' tell me ye were here? Eh,
Marget, but jist see whit a man oor Jack is!"
I felt Marget's keen eyes sweep over me. "Ay, Tammas, but is na he a wee
bit shilpit like? I dinna like to see him sae pale like."
I laughed. "Oh, Marget, you and Tammas, come, you make me think of the
lecture room and the discipline of the German drill-master. I smell
those Scotch scones right there upon the table, and the cottage cheese,
I haven't had any for four years."
"Oh," laughed Marget, "he's jist like he aye was, oor laddie. His
appetite and his heart were aye the biggest pairts o' him. Eh, but I'm
that glad tae see ye laddie, if ever I kissed ony that was o' the male
gender, it's you I'd be kissing. Come on ben."
They led me in, Marget holding my hand and beaming up into my face.
"Wha ever wad hae thocht it, oor wee Jack," she kept saying proudly to
Tammas.
"Wheest," said Tammas, vainly trying to say one thing and mean another,
"Wheest wumman, it's Mr. Jack noo."
For answer I stopped and looked at him with feigned pain, and Marget
clapped her hands and laughed.
"Where is Elsie?" I said, suddenly remembering. "Has she grown any?"
I thought Tammas's smile would spread over the rest of him when I asked
for his granddaughter.
"Has she grown any? My, my! Why listen, Jack, 'tis four years since
you saw her--she was twelve then--our little lassie, and four years make
a deal o' difference in a lassie."
"She has jist gane oot to the dairy to get some cream for breakfast,"
said Marget. "See, yonder she comes. Look an' tell me if she's the
same," and Marget pointed with a smile.
I saw a tall girl coming down the little path, carrying a pitcher of
cream in one hand and twirling a Scotch sunbonnet in the other. Her
dark red-brown hair fell in two school girl braids down her back. Her
every line showed gentleness of breeding; and her beauty of face was
really wonderful.
"She's jist pat on ane o' her low necked morning gowns, an' she's that
thin that they show ower muckle o' her neck," said Marget
apologetically.
"She is lovely," I said; "you should have named her Annie Laurie," and I
hummed the old song:
"Her cheek is like the snow drift,
Her neck is like the swan."
"Dae ye really think she is that bonnie?" Tammas smiled, pleased that I
should have compared her to Annie Laurie.
"It is not exactly beauty so much, Tammas," I said; "it is something
like royalty. She looks like some Greek nymph of the woods that has
stepped out of a water lily."
Marget was smiling at my praise.
"Ay, but it's jist as ye say, Jack," said Tammas. "Oor lassie looks
that way." He stopped and his voice dropped. "An' her bonnie mother,
oor daughter,--it is that like her that Elsie is,--aye, the very twin
star o' oor ain bairn, Marget."
"Look," said Marget, "dae you ken I canna mak her wear her shoes yet,
when there's nobody aboot, and the pools o' the spring sae inviting.
Look ye, if ever there was a child," and she laughed, pulling Tammas and
me to the door to see better.
Elsie had stopped, and sat down on the grass above the pool, her pitcher
beside her, and was splashing her feet in the water.
"She may be grown, Tammas, but she is the same child I've known always.
I remember the funny little thing when she was two years old."
"Three," corrected Marget, "that was when we took her after the passing
of oor bonnie lassie."
"And how she loved to follow me around like a kitten."
I had never asked Tammas and Marget for Elsie's history. I knew it had
been sad to them.
"I did not tell you about her. I did not tell you, lad, it was all too
sad," said Marget, as if guessing my thoughts, "but noo that it is so
long ago and you have grown, you and Elsie, I think it only fair that we
tell you only a bit of it, so that you may not misjudge her, nor us,"
and she looked inquiringly at Tammas.
Tammas nodded.
"She was oor only daughter," she said, "we never saw him. He stole oor
lassie when she lookit jist as ye see yon ane, and nae aulder, an'
because she wasna' o' his station, his graun' folk scorned her and her
bairn. Aye, but he was true, tho', standing up for oor lassie
till--till. Weel, there was a tragedy, an' he had to flee for his life.
He gaed to the war somewhere--we never saw him--an' we dinna ken. Then
she died, and syne we cam' here wi' Elsie."
I saw the tears start into her eyes. "E-lsie, E-lsie, here's our Mr.
Jack come back," she called.
Instantly there was a flutter of feet withdrawn from the pool. The
pitcher was left on the bank, and the hat also. She came running, her
blue eyes smiling at me, quite unembarrassed, and even singularly calm.
She came up, put both her hands into mine, and her blue eyes flashed at
me.
"Kiss him," laughed Marget, "it's oor ain Mr. Jack."
She instantly obeyed, touching me lightly on one cheek. Then in an
earnest little voice she said, "Mr. Jack, I'm so glad you have come
home. How I have missed you these four years!"
"If I had dreamed that you had grown to be so beautiful," I said
teasingly, "I'd have come home sooner."
She glanced at me quickly and seriously. "Oh, I've forgotten my cream
and it's time for breakfast," she said hastily, and ran back down the
path.
"I should say so, Marget," I said. "How hungry I am!"
"It's good to be here again," I added, as I sat down to the little
table; "and, Tammas, there is Elsie back with the cream. Put on some of
that clotted cream in the pot, cream thick, for it is a long lost
brother that I've been separated from."
"Ay, but the cottage cheese. Don't forget that is your appetizer,"
cried Marget authoritatively, as she pushed a great saucer, flaked up to
white foaminess, toward me.
For answer I fell to.
"Hold!" cried Tammas, his hand going up and the great fun-loving mouth
changing to quick solemnity. Often as a boy I had seen his hand raised
most unexpectedly, and never had I failed to obey. My head bent. Then
Tammas, his great knotted hand uplifted, prayed in Scotch, as was his
wont:
"'Oh, Thou wha kindly dost provide,
For every creature's want!
We bless Thee, God o' Nature wide,
For a' Thy goodness lent:
An' gin it please Thee, heavenly guide,
May never waur be sent;
But whether granted or denied,
Lord, bless us wi' content!'
And to-day thanks be added, greatest of all, that our Jackie is with us
again. Amen!"
"Amen," chimed in Marget.
I looked over the table at the Scotch scones, the poached eggs, the
funny little cuts of butter, miniature loaves of it pressed and
decorated. "I see you've got the same bill of fare, Marget," I said.
"Well," she answered, falling again into English, "we are two old people
set in our ways, and it seems to suit us."
"Noo, if you'd only told us you were coming," said Tammas, trying to
speak ironically, "I'd 'a had some o' thae auld things ye're sae fond
o', Jackie, such as sliced Indian turnips like ye got up in the lodge of
the rocks on the hill yon day," and he laughed as he recalled the
burning my lips got from the raw turnip.
I laughed. "Tammas, it must not go back to Aunt Lucretia that I ate my
first breakfast with you."
"It's a mile to the hoose," said Marget, "an it's only sax o'clock, sae
there's a graun' excuse for ye to eat anither breakfast, when ye gang
back." She smiled with that funny little smile I had known of old when
she wanted one to know that she was meaning the opposite, but was too
Scotch to express it.
"Weel, we winna say onything about it," said Tammas. "Jackie, lad, if
ye've got onything like ye're auld appetite, ye'll be ready for anither
at the hoose when ye get back. Dae ye mind hoo ye used to dae that when
ye were jist oor wee laddie, running aboot the dairy an' dipping your
fingers on the sly in oor cream pots?"
So I let him launch into his favorite subject, the cows, and the
wonderful record they had made since I left. Of Gladys Gaily, who had
made her pound of butter from less than five pounds of milk.
"Aye, lad, 'tis the ould Top Sawyer bluid that's doing it," he said
proudly. And that I would find it all in the last "Butter Tests of
Jersey Cows." Several of my old friends had died and one--"Ou, but it
hurts me sadly, my boy, to tell it--Gladys Gaily, herself, has passed
with that milk fever. Aye, but it takes only the rich ones."
*CHAPTER VIII*
*THE STONE-CROP*
I remember that April day when I first saw the stone-crop in bloom.
Across the valley from the dairy is the blue grass pasture of the cows;
and on a hillside studded with dwarf cedars, Nature's first efforts to
cover up her nakedness after man's ax has passed, runs a streak of bare,
brown limestone, winding across the hills an acre wide. Above it the
grass and cedars grew down to the bare rocks, and then they stopped
short, for no soil was there. Years before, pioneer men, fighting,
unthinking, world-conquering, with the primal instinct of the Aryan
_wander-lust_ in their blood, had stripped that spot of earth of its
clothing, leaving the naked ground beneath, lifeless and bare. In all
the beautiful blue grass pasture this was the one scar: on this green
shield of Nature, the one rent. The birds, which love the deep shade of
the cedars, stopped at its borders and flew back from the strip of brown
desert.
The rabbits, hiding in the tangled thickets above, and whose
spring-water ran in the glen below, made a path around it, through the
concealing grass and cedar boughs that brushed their furry coats. None
would cross this bare spot, hot to their feet in summer and freezing to
them in winter, where they would be stared at by every bird, or hunted
by the eyes of men.
Even the crows drew their line there, and would not fly over it; for the
crow makes no path in the sky above that does not parallel a path of
supplies below. Often had I seen the Jersey herd, brown and gray and
chocolate, browsing in a phalanx, following the earliest grass which
grew closest to the rocks, come to the very border of this scar in the
cheek of the earth and then in sudden anger plunge in and seek the
cedars on the hill, anywhere to forget this outrage on Nature!
I remember the spring I first saw the stone-crop. The winter had been
long and raw. Even the blue grass had had a struggle to keep green, and
the cedars' stems had become black under the bite of frost. But blacker
yet lay the earth's scar beyond them.
Then one day in the spring I went over the hill to Tammas's home. As I
came up from the slope and out from the great lindens, and looked across
at the other hill for the ugly scar, I stopped thrilled with a strange
and nameless beauty. I have no word for the exultation that swept over
me.
But I remembered when Elizabeth Browning was dying--she so unbeautiful
in face and so star-like in mind,--she uttered a poem which seemed to me
to surpass all that great woman ever wrote. For the characters in it
were she, her husband, and her God: and the subject was The Beauty of
Immortality.
"How do you feel, dearest?" he asked, holding her in his arms and
looking into her dying face.
"Oh, I feel beautiful," she said, as she smiled back into his face and
died.
Oh, frail little woman, who never wrote a weak line! O, earth-bound and
earth-found one, who never created save of heaven! O, little homely
one, whose portrait I did not till then even love to recall, so
different it seemed from the soul which could write as it wrote: now it
hangs the most beautiful thing on my study wall.
I stood there, looking, steeped in the thrill of it. I thought a pink
rainbow had fallen across the hills.
Then the nobility of this pink flower went into me, for there is
nobleness even among flowers and trees. The blue grass is the
aristocrat, who sits only at the richest tables, with cedars to wait on
him, refreshed with the waters of a thousand hills. The bermuda runs
hither and yon, sending its stolons after the fat things of earth; and
the redtop grows only where it can reach the richest granaries. The
stone-crop alone clings to this bare brown rock, shielding its poverty.
Seeing this, I gloried in the chance that faced me, the chance to be
another type of pioneer, and to undo the wrongs and ravages of my
forbears. For this I had sacrificed the love of my grandsire, the
General, who had wanted me to be a soldier, and of my Aunt Lucretia, and
even of Eloise, it seemed, that one sweet dream of my life. For in the
four years I had been gone from her I had lost my chance to win her.
What did her talk of the night before mean but that she meant to wed
another?
*CHAPTER IX*
*THE TRANSPLANTED PINE*
Tradition, that greatest of all historians, had it, that the first
settlers on the lands of The Home Stretch had been a young pioneer and
his bride from Virginia; and that she, leaving her old home for a new
one in the wilderness, yielded to the pretty sentiment of her girl's
heart, and brought away with her a young pine from under her own roof
tree. Nursed and watered through all the long journey, over mountains,
wilderness and river, she planted it among the great oaks and poplars of
her western home. Tradition told how, when the young husband had built
his double log-cabin from the solid trunks of the black walnut and
thatched it with the rich red hearts of the cedar shingles, the little
bride cherished the pine. The story was full of pathos; she and her baby
had died that first year, and both were buried in the same grave under
the little pine. It was a great pine now, but lonely. It had been a
great pine since I could remember. It had always appealed to me,
standing alone amid the other trees. For miles I could see it, towering
above all the others. And always a little tremor of loneliness came, as
one who passes a deserted schoolhouse door where once children have
played. The great trees around it, oaks, elms, poplars, maples, seemed
at home. This was _their soil_, these were their friends and kindred.
But the pine was not of them. It had been transplanted. Were trees
men, the pine would be a Highlander of the clan McGregor. And away from
its clan, in a valley where it belonged not, in soil that made for
fatness and richness but not for religion and art, it was lonely. For
trees are but men who are dumb.
Often, as a boy, staying with Dr. Gottlieb in his cabin, I would awake
at night and hear the pine sighing. Once I remember there had been a
fierce storm, and as it swept through the forest it maddened the other
trees until they roared in their wrath. But the lonely pine tree had
called above the roar of the others. One would not look in the Swiss
mountains for the cherries of the valley, nor for the cedars of Lebanon
in the rich loam of the rivers. This pine was the Scotch McGregor in an
English court. It was Bonaparte on Elba. It was Thomas Carlyle in
Gaiety street. It was a tree without a country....
Dr. Gottlieb lived among the trees in a double log-cabin, and had lived
there since I could remember. My Aunt Lucretia's heart was as big as
her farm, and for many years she and Dr. Gottlieb had been friends. He,
being a scholar and a botanist, a very babe in a strange land in spite
of all his learning, had been easily parted from what little he had
brought to America, and had actually come to sickness and want. Then it
was that my Aunt Lucretia took him in and gave him this cabin on her
farm. Since then he had grown famous, and was known over two continents
as one of the greatest living botanists. In fall and winter he was dean
of that department in a noted college, but in spring and summer nothing
could keep him from his walnut log-cabin by the great pine in the little
valley, where his wild flowers grew in the hills behind him and the
trees were his friends and comrades.
His story was like that of many who claim America as home. In the
discontent of the Bavarians in their struggle for a more liberal
government, many republican ideas were advanced. Gottlieb, then a
student in Munich, with a number of other young men, attempted to
celebrate Washington's birthday in the Bavarian capital with speeches so
revolutionary that they brought on a riot. In the fighting his roommate
and best friend killed a police officer. Gottlieb's family was
influential and stood high in royal favor. But the boy who had done the
killing was not so fortunate. To be found out meant certain death for
him. So Gottlieb pleaded guilty for his friend's sake, and would have
been executed, but for the influence of his family. Even they could not
save him from banishment, and so he had lived with us, as great a
patriot as I ever knew, loving his country so that the thought of it
would bring tears to his eyes, loving his Fatherland, and yet himself a
man without a country.
Now I stood looking down on the double log-cabin that was his home. All
around it was peace and calmness. Here had I learned under Dr. Gottlieb
to love the flowers, and the trees, and his books.
What a picture his home made! A great wooded blue grass hill rose
gradually, slope on slope, above it, and on a little plateau sat the
solid log-cabin. At the foot of the slope and running like a horseshoe
around it, was a bubbling stream, coming from the hills to the north,
circling around and running into the valley below. Over this, a rustic
foot-bridge led to the house. The meadows lay in front of it all. I
stood back and wondered how that young pioneer had known so accurately
and artistically where to place this cabin? Had it been placed ten
yards either way, to right or left, it would have ruined the center of
the background of trees beyond, and fifty feet further in front would
have placed it too far down the dead level of the center.
In stately distances around stood maples, beeches and poplars, some
towering high above the cabin. Lengthwise to the rustic bridge it
stood, a beautiful, solid home of walnut, and the red heart of the
cedar, its dark, rich logs chinked with the white cement of the lime
hills. Clear across the front ran the big porch, solid floored; both
ends flanked with purple stars of clematis, hanging overhead, and
drooping low over the entrance its great masses of bloom.
The orchard, of apple, peach, plum, and cherry trees, lay off to the
right. The old-fashioned flowers were all to the right and the pine
tree towered over them all.
I raised the latch and entered. Dr. Gottlieb stood before me, framed by
shelves of dried flowers and herbs, a small man with a large head, kind
blue eyes. The broad brow wrinkled into its smile as he saw me. I
pointed to the stone-crop running across the hill. "Oh, Dr. Gottlieb,"
I cried, "what is it that in one night makes the bare spots so
beautiful?"
He quit his books and came forward, taking both of my hands in his.
"Jack, Jack, my boy, you have come back to us again--and from the
Fatherland--the Fatherland! ... Let me hold your hand--it has touched
the soil of the Fatherland--let me look into your eyes, they have seen
the Rhine!" There were tears in his blue eyes.
"Do you remember how it changes every spring, Dr. Gottlieb?" I asked,
pointing to the distant crowned hills, the rainbow of stone-crop
beneath, and the level stretches of pasture land.
He smiled as he looked across at the crimson covering of the bare
hillside. "Ay; but I've not been idle, Jack, since you left. You
remember what I had done before you went away--fifteen hundred species
all catalogued in my book." He turned and pointed to the glass shelves
around. "Now I have added four hundred more."
We talked long over our pipes. He had saved some rare old German ale in
cobwebbed bottles, and these we broke in honor of my return. I had to
go over my entire life in Germany, and all the four years' work there.
As I dwelt on this, as I told of the old places and scenes, he sat with
his head down, and I suspected tears.
I cannot remember when Dr. Gottlieb was not in love with my Aunt
Lucretia, though he had never spoken to her on the subject. He spoke
only to me, and that always in the same way. So I knew what was coming.
I had heard it before, and when I arose to go I could not help but smile
as he said, "Ah, Jack, but your Aunt Lucretia! That most beautiful and
charming of women! Did you know that each of us has our prototype in a
plant or flower; did you know that she resembles the great red wood
lily--_lilium Philadelphicum_? Ah, Jack, it has always been my
favorite."
*CHAPTER X*
*CONQUERING SATAN*
Eloise and I had always enjoyed riding over The Home Stretch with Aunt
Lucretia. Since I could remember she had ridden the same horse, a great
raw-boned sorrel pacer, full seventeen hands high, and so powerful that
he carried my aunt, large woman though she was, as if she had been a
child. "His beauty is in his gait," she used to say; "there is but one
saddle gait fit for business, and that is the nodding fox-trot, and
Tempest has that perfectly."
It was amusing to watch them in action. With his head down and nodding
with every stride, Tempest seemed fairly to butt his way into space,
reeling off the miles like a great machine in motion, and Aunt Lucretia,
in her great, high-pommeled side saddle, double girthed and double
decked, sat him as comfortably as if she were in her rocker.
Her saddle-bags, thrown over the saddle, were in themselves unusual, for
they held everything needed in an emergency on the farm. In one pocket
were the hatchet and nails, for she never rode by a loose plank but she
nailed it on again, and in the other were her medicines, everything
needed on the farm from a hypodermic syringe to a package of salts.
The day after I came home I rode over the farm with her. "It's good to
ride Little Sister," I said, stroking her crest. "What a beautiful
saddle mare she has made."
"Eloise did it," said my Aunt. "Jack, do you know she was always
foolish about that mare after you left?"
She squared her big horse up to me. "Jack," she whispered, "I don't
believe in the stuff, of course. It is all foolishness and not fit to
marry on, but there is a great vein of sentiment in that girl in spite
of her make-believe and her indifference. After you left she wouldn't
ride anything but that mare and I knew it was because of you, and the
clever way you did up those two old braggarts of ours in that race."
"Did she, Aunt Lucretia?"
She looked at me cuttingly and then burst into a laugh. "Jack, what
shall I do with you? You are so in love with Eloise that it's
positively painful. You must overcome it before you marry her; it's not
good policy, not manly nor becoming. The greatest race of men was in the
days when a man took his wife by force, conquered her and beat her into
submission. He couldn't own her until he proved he was a better man
than she. Now, the woman rules in everything. Take your silly weddings;
they're a glorification of the bride. To see them one would think the
poor devil of a groom was a kind of matrimonial valet, a second fiddler,
used chiefly to make a background for the bride to show off on--he is
not marrying--oh, no, it is the woman--and it's the same everywhere.
The women are writing our novels, our magazines, our poetry, running our
conventions, starring in our theatres and churches, and doing everything
else worth while except making the money. The men have become
unconsciously so enslaved that the few of them who do write novels or
poetry write effeminate things because the age is under the influence of
woman. There is no man-poetry any longer, that's why I never read it.
If we don't get a man-age into the world again," she added vehemently,
"we are all going to the devil, going to be wiped out by some heathen
man-race of the Nibelungen woods, not yet born!"
I smiled guiltily, for I saw Eloise coming out of the house and my heart
fluttered queerly at sight of her. She came forward and I saw Goff's
roses pinned on her breast.
"This is like old times, Jack," she said laughing, "but where is my
horse?" She looked around, glancing at the little pony-mare we had
saddled for her.
"I thought you'd like to ride the pony-mare again," said Jim, who stood
holding the reins, "like you useter ride with Mr. Jack," he added.
Eloise tossed her head. "No, no; now, Jim, you may saddle Satan for me.
Why, I've been dreaming of this for months, a chance to show the
splendid fellow and his paces to Jack. I wouldn't miss it for
anything."
Jim stood scratching his chin thoughtfully. "Dat devil horse, he ain't a
good horse, this mohnin', ma'am, 'specially for ladies."
"Jim," she said sternly, "look me in the eye! What have you been doing
to Satan?"
Jim grinned apologetically. "I had to ride him las' night for some
med'cine for my sick chile."
"And I told you never to ride him, that he hated the very smell of a
negro."
Jim still grinned.
"But you tried him?" she went on.
"Yes'um, and he flung me!"
Eloise laughed. "Served you right. You know that horse doesn't like
you."
"An' when I went into the stall to saddle him, he remembered it."
"Of course he did. I told him never to let you or anyone else ride
him--no one but me."
"That horse," said Aunt Lucretia, as we followed Eloise to the barn, "is
dangerous. I have been expecting to hear of him killing her. It's all
in his pedigree, Jack; he can't help being mean. His sire was a
rattle-headed but game and iron horse--fast, but utterly unreliable.
You may remember how fast he was, but would go crazy, and ran away in a
race, running into another horse and getting a sulky shaft driven
through his heart. All of his colts I ever saw are crazy, fast and
game--but cruelly mean when roused. Still I'm to blame for this one. I
thought Little Sister's brain and sweet temper might overcome it in the
sire."
"Little Sister is his dam, then?" I said, patting the neck of the mare I
was riding.
"Yes, he was foaled the year after you left for school, and is now
three," she answered.
I heard Satan before I saw him. He was walking the length of his
halter, now and then neighing, then whinnying to Eloise softly. It was
the sound of her voice that had softened him. Above the anger which
shook his frame, maddened at the sight of the groom who had offended
him, he had heard the soothing voice of Eloise, and responded with a
gentle whinny.
She smiled. "Just listen to him! Dangerous--he's an angel! Bring him
out, Jim." She winked at Aunt Lucretia and me.
Jim grinned sillily. "'Scuse me, Miss 'Leeze; you's jes' sayin' that to
guy me. He loves my leetle boy, an' he feeds him an' keers for 'im," he
added, "but it looks like he thinks I put an insultment on him. 'Scuse
me, Miss Leeze, but I wouldn't go in there for no money."
It was true. At the sound of Jim's voice, Satan's eyes had kindled, and
he threw back his head, trying to break his halter to get to him.
"You try him, Jack," said Eloise; "I'm sure he loves you. I never knew
one that didn't."
I opened the door. Never had I looked upon so superb a horse: a great
star stood out beneath the tangled foretop of his mane, on a great
square, broad forehead, so black it was silken. The rest of him, too,
was midnight, except one white satin foot. His tail was a heavy hemp of
black, shiny silk; his shoulders sloped in the line of strength. His
chest was splendid, his muscles, fore and aft, bunched above the
cleanest of bony legs. There was great strength, brain, and self-will
in his head.
He was watching me keenly, as a wild beast eyes a new keeper. An animal
knows friend or foe instantly. Their instinct is unerring and surpasses
man's reason. I saw his eyes light up doubtfully, hesitate, and then
gleam when I put my hands out and rubbed his cheek. "You splendid
fellow; mean? It's not true. Did Jim put an insultment on you, old
boy?" I laughed.
Then he rubbed my shoulder with his clean-cut nose.
Eloise laughed behind me. "I knew he'd love you, Jack."
Satan came out playing. Rearing, he stood on two legs like a great boy,
showing off before another. Then he came up, rubbing his nose on my
shoulder and reaching for the apple Eloise had for him. Meanwhile Aunt
Lucretia sat smiling doubtfully.
I saddled him, and when Eloise sprang up they looked superbly splendid,
the horse proud of his rider.
"Well, we'll go," said Aunt Lucretia, starting off.
We turned to go to the left. Satan made two quick leaps, playfully, as
if to follow, and then, taking the bit he wheeled to the right despite
Eloise's protest. He saw Jim holding the gate open for us. He wheeled
and refused to go through it; he laid back his ears and quivered with
rage at the sight of the negro.
Aunt Lucretia stopped. I pulled up sharply. Eloise sat white with anger
on her uncontrollable mount.
"Oh, don't be angry with him," said Aunt Lucretia. "You will have to go
as he says."
Eloise touched him with her whip and he reared, leaping high into the
air. I caught my breath when she came down firmly with him. He stood
backing his ears at Jim. Again she urged him, again he refused. She
brought her whip down sharply.
"Don't, Eloise," I cried, "he's dangerous."
Again he leaped high in the air, tossing his head.
Eloise slid down, white with anger. "Jack, put your saddle on him," she
said quietly.
"I think we'd better," I said. "I'll ride him for you for a while.
It's Jim. He'll never forget him."
"You have a sharp knife?" asked Eloise, after I had put my saddle on the
horse. She took the reins in her hands. "No, no, I'll hold him. Don't
put my saddle on your mare. Wait."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Eloise," said Aunt Lucretia, "you shan't get up on that horse again."
But Eloise did not notice her; her lips were set; her face white. I
knew the meaning of old.
"Jack," she said quietly, "grasp my skirt at the hem, petticoat and all,
and cut it clean down from above my knees. Don't listen to Aunt
Lucretia. Please, Jack, it is life and death with the horse and me.
I'd rather die than have him conquer me."
I knew from her voice that she meant it.
Grasping her skirts at the hem in an instant I had ripped them through.
"Now behind," she said; "it's my old riding skirt, Jack."
In an instant it, too, was split.
She smiled, a flash of her old humor behind her sternness. "Now, turn,
Jack."
When I turned back again she had slipped both her garters over her
divided skirts, so that they were held firmly to her ankles. The next
instant she was in my saddle, astride.
"You, dear, sweet, old, stubborn Satan," she said softly, "I am sorry I
must punish you. Shut the gate, Jim; I am going to make him do his best
stunt to pay for this."
At the first blow from her whip he sprang up in anger, but the whip fell
fast and with fury. Her lithe body sat him easily, like a part of him,
her two heels buried in his flanks. He made leap after leap, but still
she sat him, cutting his sides into whelks. He leaped high to dismount
her; he wheeled suddenly, but never caught her off her guard. The whip
never let up. Frighted, angry, he bolted for the plank fence. The gate
was shut, but Eloise gave him the whip at every jump.
"Stop her--he'll kill her!" I cried, as I saw him rise for the leap.
[Illustration: "STOP HER--HE'LL KILL HER," I CRIED.]
I expected to see him strike the fence midway, and come back on her in a
heap. Instead I saw Eloise lift him, with a quick firm hand, straight
up towards the sky and I saw the horse land on the other side clean, and
clear, without losing a stride. Then they vanished in a whirl of dust
up the pike.
"I'll ride after her," I cried to Aunt Lucretia. "He'll kill her yet."
"Don't worry," she smiled, "she's more apt to kill him. But that jump,
Jack, that jump--did you see it?"
My Aunt's eyes were ablaze with a kindled fire. I had seen it often when
a race was on. She rode up to the fence. "Five feet six, Jack," she
said laughing; "why, the record cross-country is five feet six--that's
the record held by Colonel Goff's horse--" and she laughed again
meaningly.
It was fifteen minutes before we saw Satan coming back! He came in a
gentle canter, his great head held high in pride, because Eloise was
laughing and joking with him, patting his mane and calling him sweet
names. "You darling Satan," she cried, as she leaped down, "I did so
hate to punish you!"
They say horses do not weep, but there were tears in the eyes of Satan
as he rubbed his head against her breast, and nibbled the apple she held
out to him.
Up the road cantered a horseman in haste, riding an English hunter.
Eloise looked up and smiled. "I can't go with you to-day, Jack. Here
comes Colonel Goff. I wanted you to see that jump. Isn't he great?
He's done it a dozen times, and yet Colonel Goff really thinks he owns
the champion." She laughed, her eyes shining. "I must run in and change
my habit for the scolding I know is coming."
I turned sullenly in my saddle and rode off. I did not wish to see Goff
take her away from us.
I did not enjoy the ride over the farm. The sick brood mare, with the
young colt, which nickered so distressingly for Aunt Lucretia, alone
excited my sympathy. I was heartsick myself. I did not even enjoy
seeing Tammas and Marget.
As we rode away from the dairy we met Elsie coming down the wooded path,
a smile on her pretty lips.
"That girl," said my Aunt, "is a fine creature, and do you know, Jack,
if I know anything of breeding, she's got rare blood in her. It shows
in a hundred ways. Now, watch her."
She was dressed in white, her hair hanging in two plaits down her back.
"I am playing at being in Scotland," she said as we came up, "and I have
gathered these Scotch wild flowers for Mr. Jack." She handed them up to
me, and when my eyes met hers in thanks Aunt Lucretia saw the blush that
flushed her face. She looked sharply at me a moment and then smiled. I
walked to the barn gate, Elsie going with us, and telling me of the
Scotch flowers and trees. "I would be quite happy here," she said, "if
we only had the heather on these hills."
Aunt Lucretia turned at the gate. "You must come up to the house some
night this week, and we'll have a Bobbie Burns evening," said she.
"Oh, thank you," Elsie answered, smiling at me instead of at Aunt
Lucretia.
"Who was that you were talking to before we met you?" I asked. "The
gentleman who rode off when he saw us coming?"
"That was Captain Braxton. He has asked my hand in marriage, but I
dinna think I shall," she added, with a little sigh. "I dinna like him
as I should, but I dinna say yet, for I shall think it over. He's noo
like Mr. Jack." Her little Scotch words would slip in now and then.
I flushed and looked at Aunt Lucretia, who sat biting her lips as if in
anger. Elsie was all frankness. She put her hand in mine trustingly,
and instantly I knew why she had told me.
"No brother could love you more than I do," I said. "Tammas and Marget
raised me, too, so I'm really your brother." I laughed to hide my anger
at Braxton Bragg and the turn affairs had taken.
She had lifted my hand with a loyal little gesture and pressed it to her
cheek before I could withdraw it. "You'll come to see me, often, won't
you, Mr. Jack? I need you to help me."
"Jack," I said, smiling at her, "just Jack from now on."
"Oh, but that's not respectful, and I'd not be wanting in respect for
you for the world."
"I'll not call you Elsie then, any more," I answered, "nor make the
request of you I'm going to make."
"Jack, then," she said. "And your request--it is already granted."
"That you'll not see Braxton Bragg alone until--well, until I have
talked with you," I said earnestly.
"O--h," and her eyes opened wide. "Jack, why, of course. If he writes
to me again I'll send the letter to you before I answer it."
"Bring it," I said; "I want to see it right away."
We rode back to the house.
"Jack," said my aunt, "he is the most contemptible reversion to a scrub
that ever came from a good pedigree! But if he tries that game on that
child--he has played it recklessly since you left--I'll kill him
myself--damn him!"
I soon forgot Elsie. I caught sight of Eloise entertaining Goff in our
old bower, and I could see that as he sat there, smoking and watching
her, he already thought she was the Countess of Carfax.
*CHAPTER XI*
*TWO WAYS OF LOVE*
I knew that Colonel Goff would not only stay the afternoon but the
evening also. He had been doing it ever since the war, for he regarded
his General's home as his also. The assurance of the man incensed me.
The divine right of his old kings seemed to have been born in him; and
now that he had won Eloise, she and The Home Stretch and all that it
contained were his whenever he chose to have them.
Eloise would tease him in pure wantonness, and scorn him, and even
ridicule him; for all of which he worshipped her, as is apt to be the
way with men. Yet I very quickly noticed the little touch of sadness,
which, despite her efforts, fell over her so suddenly. To her wit and
repartee, her fun and humor, his only answer would be flashes of his
fine teeth, and his favorite exclamation, "Fawncy now, but isn't that a
blooming good one?" I was convinced that he loved Eloise and was proud
of her; but I thought it was such a feeling as he might have for any
beautiful animal, the same worship he might easily have bestowed upon an
Arab mare of the desert.
It was not long before Colonel Goff and Aunt Lucretia were in their
usual dispute about horses and he was scolding her for letting Eloise
ride Satan: "Ah, that unregistered fool! Really, my dear madam, you
should not let her go near him, he'll be the death of her yet. Now,
there is my imported Irish hunter; he's got a head as well as legs; say
now--suppose I just send him over for her," and he looked at Eloise to
see what she would say.
Eloise threw up her fine head significantly.
"The idea, Colonel Goff! Why, I wouldn't be caught riding him! That
big thing better than Satan! Why His Satanic Majesty can gallop rings
all around him."
Colonel Goff laughed. "Fawncy!"
"Yes, fawncy!" said Eloise, mimicking him, which made him flush again
and then look at her admiringly.
Aunt Lucretia broke in. "He can," she said very firmly. "I wonder,
Colonel Goff, why you should send to England for a horse when you have
better ones at home?"
Colonel Goff laughed loudly.
"Why you even think that bang-tailed son of Nestor can jump," went on
Aunt Lucretia, laying her trap quietly for him.
This was the one strong point of the son of Nestor, and the one thing
about him that his owner had published on his arrival.
"Madam," he said with great seriousness, a bit offended, "madam, I think
I told you before that he held the championship for cross-country at
Melton-Mowbry."
"Oh, so you did," said my Aunt Lucretia, ever so sweetly, "and yet I
believe Satan can beat him both at the distance and over the hurdles."
Goff laughed, but not as though pleased. He was too well-bred to reply
to Aunt Lucretia in her kind. So he only tapped his boot, and looked at
Eloise, who smiled sweetly at him, as if urging him on.
"I was talking the other day to Secretary Roswick of our State Fair,"
went on Aunt Lucretia calmly, "and was entering some of my own things.
Now, Roswick, you know, makes me put up about half of his programmes.
He has asked me to get up some novelties on the side. We'll just have a
hurdle race if you say so."
"Capital, capital!" said Goff, for the first time showing excitement.
Then he quieted down suddenly. "What am I thinking about? What, in
this unregistered country, could go against Nestor, champion hurdler of
his class?"
"Satan," said Aunt Lucretia, smiling sweetly.
"Fawncy!" shouted the Colonel decisively.
"I'll lay you five hundred that he can," said my Aunt, "and I don't know
a thing in the world about your game."
"Madam," said Goff, quietly, "I have never taken an unfair advantage of
a woman."
"Colonel Goff," said my Aunt very seriously, "you know as well as you
know anything, that if I know anything it is horses, that I am of age,
and that I am good for all my obligations. I'll bet you five hundred
dollars that Satan will beat your horse at his own game."
"Do you know, madam," said Goff, "that a jumping horse is born to jump?
Not one in a thousand can go over a three-foot hurdle, and this brute of
yours--"
"Brute?" said Eloise, icily. "Brute, Colonel Goff, he is an angel! He
can do anything."
"And you will ride him?" he asked.
"Nobody else can," said my Aunt. "Yes, she'll ride him and beat you,
too."
"I'll take your bet," said he. "I'd give five hundred dollars to ride
once in a race with the only girl in America who is really English. How
she ever got into this blooming country I can't see!"
I left my Aunt and the Colonel arranging their new game for the
Cumberland meeting. I did not take much interest in Eloise riding
against him!
I had ordered my horse, intending to ride over to Ned's; I wanted to see
my pets there, Little Sister, and Captain Skipper and the new arrival.
Eloise followed me through the wood lot. She came up and slipped her
arm through mine, and its very touch carried a sadness, it seemed as if
the quick electric pulse was gone. In her eyes there was a weariness,
an indefinable longing. It touched me to see her so, my live,
light-hearted, foster sister of old.
"Jack," she sighed, "I am--I am--" She stopped and looked up into my
face.
"What?" I asked. "I should think you would be happy, so soon to marry
an Earl."
"It is sooner than you suppose," she said seriously. "He does not wish
it known yet because the proper notification has not come from his
attorneys in England, but--but--Jack--Jack, his brother is already dead
and he wants me to marry him. I have already promised to marry him next
month."
I knew she saw me pale. I could have cursed myself for the weakness.
She went on. "When I promised him six months ago it was all so vague,
so far off, and I was so miserable, Jack--so homeless and badgered, and
dependent, it was all so far off, I thought--waiting for his brother to
die, and now! You know how these English are, they take these things so
seriously, their marriages and promises, they are so matter-of-fact
about it, and so consistent: why, Jack, he looks on me already as his
bride. He is just as busy planning for our future, arranging how the
estate is to be remodeled, what home we are to have, I couldn't get out
of it honorably even--Jack, even if--"
"Even if you should happen to love me?" I said, looking very earnestly
into her eyes.
She nodded, her head dropped low. For the first time in her life I saw
tears in her eyes.
"Oh, Jack, I am miserable! It was all so far off once,--now--only next
month,--and you know I'd die before I'd deceive him--big boy that he is,
and trusting and worshipping me, Jack. Yes, that is what hurts
me--worshipping me as he does--I couldn't. I couldn't, Jack! If I have
any one strong thing in me, you know it is--"
"Keeping your faith with your friends," said I. She nodded. "Do you
think I am wicked to marry him this way? Won't you come, in after
years, to despise me?"
For answer I stooped and kissed her. She put both her arms around my
neck. "Please stay with me," she cried, "I do so need you. I just
heard it to-day. It was why he came and stayed so long. Please stay
and be with me till he leaves. Just stay with me, Little Brother, this
time."
"Why," I said, "this time? Surely he will resent it. Any man would
want this night of all others to be with you."
"Jack, you don't understand. I am miserable. That is why I rode Satan
as I did. When I put him at that fence I hoped--it is wicked I
know--but I hoped that he would kill me."
She was sobbing in my arms.
"Eloise, don't," I said; "let me go. Don't you know that it is harder
on me than it is on you? Do you think I am made of stone--of wood--to
come home expecting sweetness and find it all rue--my dreams about
you--"
"Just to-night, Jack. You'll--you'll laugh at me when I say why, but,
but, you know how punctilious these Englishmen are, and he thinks I must
kiss him to-night when he goes."
I felt the hot blood rush to my heart. It was instinct, the reversion
of a past ancestor who fought another man for kissing his wilderness
bride.
"Eloise, you wouldn't?"
"If you'll kiss me again, Jack, as you did just now. I never felt so
before--until--but it you'll kiss me again--that way, I'll never kiss
him--never!"
I held her in my arms. I kissed her eyes, which were moist. I kissed
her mouth, and it seemed as though my soul went into hers; for when, in
desperation, in an exhilaration which was all but madness I broke away I
heard her cry faintly, "_Jack, Jack!_" ...
I saw her arms around the great fatherly tree, her head against it.
*CHAPTER XII*
*WORK AND MINE ACRE*
There is but one balm for a heartache, and that is work.
Nothing in all my life had left me so stranded; had killed so utterly
the sweetness of all my dreams as this giving up of Eloise. And with no
dream there is no life.
I felt that she was lost to me now: if she were not engaged to Colonel
Goff, there was nothing in me now, I thought bitterly, that could awaken
in her the real love she had never felt for anyone. Yet with all her
spirit, her apparent indifference, and even recklessness, I knew she had
a throne in her heart of hearts for love on a higher plane than those
who love easily. I knew that only one side of her had ever been
revealed, either to herself or to the world; that beautiful as she was
there was a yet more beautiful side to her; and that brave as she was
there were yet deeper depths of bravery within her, a moral bravery
which under the spur of her soul would take another leap, as far greater
than that she took on Satan as the brave leap of Pegasus over the
clouds. I had known her always. I knew what she did not know: that I
was loving an Eloise that was yet, and forever would be, an unseen star
in an unknown heaven, above the head of the man who had never yet
learned to look up. Should I sit still and let him take her, let him do
this irreparable wrong both to himself, and to her and to me? My heart
cowered a moment at the thought of its hopelessness. Then--how
wonderful is the word of the soul unto the soul, the passed soul to the
passing soul, the absent soul to the present soul,--I thought of the
words of Aunt Lucretia: "What would Andrew Jackson do, Jack?" Into my
soul came the steel of Andrew Jackson. With the quickness of the
thought came the change. "_Aye, my unseeing old grandsire," I said,
"you shall see whether I am a fighter or not! ... For Eloise._"
From that moment I resolved to fight. God's blessings on the memory of
Andrew Jackson!
But I would fight in my own way. For I knew that Eloise's idea of love
was a love of life and death: she who would ride a mad horse over a
five-foot fence for the conquering instinct of a mastering nature, what
would she not do for love--_her love_--and she a woman? For let it be
writ both of history and life, 'tis woman at last who loves. Man knows
not love. Even as his own life came to him the babe of Love and
Passion, so only can he give that unto another. But she who gave it
being, _her name was Love_! Oh, to win such a love as I knew Eloise
would bring to me; which she herself knew not was there.
I lost my bitterness of it all when it came clear to me. Before, I had
been maddened to think she would barter this love of hers for title and
wealth and the place it bought. But now I saw clearly, now I knew that
she was blameless, because never having had that love, she knew not what
she was giving away. Like an Indian princess, who owned an island of
pearls, but did not know their value, she would give them to the first
foreigner, coming down in ships, for the baubles of his forecastle.
But I would show my Princess what her pearls were worth. I would string
them in globes of beauty around her neck, and brow, and belt, and I
would put my crowning Great Pearl of Sacrifice into the diadem of her
hair, and then I would lead her down to the sweet glassy sea of her own
unbartered, unbought home, her own sweet kingdom of kindness and
content, and by the still waters, in God's own groves, I would lead her
until her feet dipped into the mirroring pools, and, kissing her, bid
her look for the first time and behold Love crowned.
Would she barter herself for baubles then? Would she not know the
difference between pearls and paste beads? I, yes, happy I, would show
it to her; I would introduce Eloise to herself--Eloise loveless to
Eloise in love.
I laughed now in the happiness of my little conceit. Very distinctly I
could hear my Aunt Lucretia say: "_Sure, Jack, that is the way Andrew
Jackson did--took her from the toad who had deceived her, right out of
his arms, and then killed every other toad who croaked about it.
Sure!_" ...
There was much for me to do, both of love and duty. My duty was work,
and that came first. For I had faith both in God and myself, and if I
did my duty and my work, God would give the rest to me.
Work--the glory and sweetness of it! And to find one's work in one's
life--that One Work which fits the One Life: this to me has always been
the greatest gift of the Giver.
There was so much for me to do. I was the pioneer of a great truth in
the world's greatest country. In all great causes it is the pioneer who
is the sacrifice, it is he who is held up to contempt and scorn.
Strange that it should be so! That he who sees first the Great New
Truth, the Blessing that has been withheld because of no one to see it,
the Great Invention uplifting through one man all men into a new world,
that it is he who must suffer....
The hurt does not matter from those who love us not. I was willing that
the herd should think of me as it would, as its own little light
permitted, but I had that pride of race which every honest man has, and
I wanted the love of my fighting old grandsire. And he openly despised
my profession, and he secretly despised me. "What's the use of worrying
about making more on an acre of this rich soil?" he would say. "Ain't
The Home Stretch rich enough? And fiddling about saving trees--why damn
it, ain't there too many of them already? Didn't I have all the hard
work of my life clearing some of the land, and my father before me, that
it might make us a living!"
He would never understand me, of course. The discoverer is never
understood, and the forester falls in the same class, more maligned than
any of them. He would never understand that it was not a sentimental
dream to save trees because they are trees, but to grow them and harvest
them in the right way, even as wheat is harvested: that we did not want
to see rich acres, the homes of unborn people, covered only with trees,
when the land was needed for bread, but the unfertile hillside, and the
heads of our water streams. There, we insisted, trees should remain
because that was Nature's own way of protecting the land from droughts
and floods. Nor could I hope to make him understand that rich as the
land was--even as a man of genius--it should have a chance to bring
forth all the fruit that was in it. That our waste was something
appalling, our methods crude, and that our people, with all their
plenty, were only half fed; that while we were rich and The Home Stretch
was a garden, the poor farmers of the hills and less fertile places were
living only half lives, they and their families, because there was no
one to show them something better.
My Aunt I knew was sorry for me; but I could see she hoped and believed
I would yet get over it. And in my own heart I felt that if I had
chosen West Point, perhaps Eloise--
I flushed, ashamed. How prone our little weak Self always is to play
Arnold with our Soul!
I began at once to work. It is what one does with one's own acre, not
what one preaches should be done to the acres of others, that convinces
his neighbors at last, and settles the standard of his life's text among
them.
I started it on a gullied hillside of The Home Stretch. These gullies I
filled. Young trees were easy to transplant from the over-crowded
growth of the woodland. Nature is at last her own greatest doctor. I
gave her the soil she had been begging for, and very quickly she studded
it with little pioneers of the game black locust, to hold back that
which she had, to shadow it with coolness and damp that grass might grow
beneath, and mold form, and the blistered soil have yet another chance,
and that later the trees might rear their great heads high, stealing
from the clouds the moisture for the earth.
My neighbors knew me, had known me from a boy, and it was not difficult
to get them to meet me at the little schoolhouse once a week and hear my
talk. Now talks all depend upon one's honesty and earnestness, not on
one's brightness; in a month they became interested and were one with
me. They had always looked upon a forest as a necessary evil, as a
great wood put there to be cut down, burnt, destroyed, that man might
till the land. Indeed, from their pioneer fathers, whose greatest
burden was clearing the land, there had come down to them the instinct
of forest hatred, just as had come their instinct of Indian hatred, bear
and wolf and panther hatred. But at the same time I knew that they had
in the heart of their pedigrees another and sweeter instinct, and that
it came from their forest-loving Briton and Saxon and even remote Aryan
sires, whose ancestors before them, had long ago gone through the same
fight with the primeval forest, but whose children after them for a
thousand years, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, were forced to
go back to tree-planting, to forest preservation, or die with their
soil. It did not take much to make this forest preserving,
land-preserving, life-preserving instinct outcrop again among their
children here. It was a revelation to them when I explained that the
true forester was he who assisted the farmer and the lumberman in
rearing more trees and better trees where they should be, and destroying
the worthless ones, even all of them if need were, where they should not
be. In their prejudice they thought a forester was a dreamer, an
impractical person, who preached forest preservation from sentiment, and
would let the trees grow where children ought to grow. I won them all
when I explained that a tree, when ripe, should be garnered, just as
corn or wheat, or any other product of the soil. But during the years
while it ripens for the saw, the young things beneath it, which should
take its place, must be protected, and their life preserved in the
harvesting of the ripe trees; or if the land was to be cleared for
tilling, other places on the farm, especially the unproductive hillside,
and the sources of the stream, should be given over to forestry. This
would save the hillsides from washing and depositing their flinty soil
over the rich valleys below, and guarding the water head, preserve the
springs. But when the tree is ripe it should be harvested, unless it
stood in some park or yard or town for a street ornament or shade. If
it were in any of these places it should die in the ripeness of
beautiful old age, a younger one taking its place. It was not long
before I had a class of forestry, and there was much of the German
methods I had learned in every branch of farming which I gave them for
nothing, that helped me greatly. It is what one gives for nothing that
brings in the greatest returns at last.
But my greatest help was in a flood early in May. The headwaters of the
Cumberland lie in the Appalachian range, that great wooded mountain
strip which mothers the headwaters of the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the
Cumberland, and so of all the states they water. That long ridge of
wooded slope had been a sponge, the gauge that controlled the flow from
half the tillable Union. On the Tennessee, the forest had been brutally
butchered, and on the Cumberland as badly treated. The flood came.
There was but little to hold, and check it, and we had a deluge such as
was never known before. Even my grandsire, seeing it, admitted what I
said. The seemingly wasted word had fallen as the drift of the elm
tree's shaft had taken root in a corner of the old field.
*CHAPTER XIII*
*THE UNATTAINABLE*
My work took me daily to Tammas's cottage. There was nothing so restful
to me as these two good people, and their sweetness and cheer, and Elsie
held my interest. I had always been fond of her, and now that she had
grown into this rare, delicate flower, so sensitively turned, so
romantically original, I found the greatest pleasure in studying her,
and, in humoring her, as everybody did who came into her sphere. She
commanded obedience as readily as she gave it. Every day was a different
mood, and always a romance with her. One day she had on a large white
apron, and was helping Tammas with the churning.
"I am playing a new game, to-day, Jack," she said, pulling me to a
corner of the dairy where the spring water whirled through the stone
troughs. "You'll laugh when you hear it," she added, her eyes shining
into mine.
"I'll not," I said, "I'll be more apt to play with you. What is the
game to-day?"
She laughed merrily. "Well, to-day I am a duke's daughter, who was
secretly exchanged in her cradle with the dairyman's baby. Now only
three people know it; the dairyman, who is old, and about to die; and
who is so sorry that he ever did it, but he did so want his own daughter
to be a lady in the land; and me, whom he has told at the last minute,
and the bad, bold knight, very dashing, who has bribed the dairyman to
tell him, and who wishes very much to marry me. But I want to marry my
own bonny prince, you see."
"I should think he'd be proud and loyally love his dairymaid bride," I
laughed, pinching her cheek.
"But, Jack, you are so stupid," she said, pouting. "You don't catch on.
I can't play a game by myself. I want you to play the prince."
Tammas stood looking on, his face in its favorite Scotch grin. "Weel,
weel, did ye ever hear the like o' that, an' it's no' leap-year either!"
I could see that he was pleased and proud.
"And it is the prince I'll play from now on, my ane braw lassie," I
said, dropping into her own dialect. "Isn't that what you call them in
Scotch?" I asked.
"An' noo," said Tammas, "a' lasses get unco thrang when their lovers are
aboot, to gar them think they are unco worthy."
Elsie laughed and went vigorously to work, molding butter pounds. I
stood watching her while I talked to Tammas. She was not all a child.
There was a certain queenliness, a quiet dignity about her that was very
attractive. In her fine-cut face, deep down in her great blue eyes, in
her very poise there was a quiet naturalness, a pretty aloofness which
spoke of reserve forces, that seemed to soothe me. God only knew how I
needed it!
After an hour with her and Tammas I felt, as I went down the wooded
path, under the great trees of the dairy lot, as I had when I heard for
the first time, in the deep hours of the night, the chimes of the bells
of Munich. I had not cared for the service with all its symbols and, to
me, its meaningless metaphors; but I had loved its music, the great
bells which calmed my soul.
I wish to join a new church. I am tired of these which preach. I want
to join one where there is no preaching, no talking, nothing but music,
music which makes you feel God. Why all this preaching anyway? God and
talk do not go together. Religion is not a science to be proven, not a
thesis to be demonstrated, not a problem to be solved, but a silent
Soul-Force to be felt.
Preachers and priests in their vanity to be heard, or their zeal to
proselyte, or their over-humanness just to talk, talk, talk, have robbed
the church of half its sweetness and power. Will they never learn that
God's house was made for God's children and in it they should do as God
does,--be silent and worship? And if there be a voice to break it, let
it be the Voice of that which is nearest to God on earth--Music.... It
was this feeling that Elsie gave me--of calmness, of restfulness, of
devotion. There are those who irritate us, and they cannot help it;
there are those who provoke us, anger us, madden us by their very
presence. There are others who stir us up for trade and money-making;
the sound of whose very voice makes us wish to own land, or buy stock or
build houses; and there are those--God help them--whose talk, be it ever
so brief, falls over us like an unwholesome thing.
Elsie read much of romance, and her small library was choice; but the
love-poems of Burns she knew best of all, and she always read them to me
when I was about to leave, as if she would hold me longer. Then I would
remember them far into the night and the radiant-faced, spiritual girl
with the deep eyes, reading them. I needed the restfulness which
Elsie's friendship gave. I needed her sweetness that calmed me, her
fresh friendship that was like a great rose at the window of my soul.
In her utter unseekingness, her loyal trustfulness, I saw that she did
not even suspect that I loved Eloise.
I stayed all day at the cottage and she flitted around with her great
white apron on, now and then calling me her bonny prince, especially if
Tammas and Marget were not around. I humored her, seeing how much
pleasure she took in it.
"If I am your Prince," I said, when I had her alone in the butter room,
"I am going to call you my Heart's-Ease."
She looked up quickly and a faint blush came into her face. She did not
reply, but busied herself about the house, while Tammas and I talked of
the new test of Lass o' Lowrie, one of his cows, which, from five
gallons of milk daily was making three pounds of butter.
"Dae ye ken Mr. Jack, whit's daeing it?" said the old man. "It's nae
ither than the auld Top Sawyer bluid!"
Elsie, daintily gowned in a pretty white frock and for the first time
with her hair up in a comical little Scotch top-knot, walked with me
down the wooded path to the parting of our ways. A tiny heart's-ease
had just thrust out its fragrant leaves in the rich mold under the
trees. She plucked the leaf, and there was the faintest trace of a
twinkle in her blue eyes as she came up and pinned it on my lapel.
"Here is your heart's-ease, my Prince," she said slyly.
I felt a flush upon my cheek. She was silent, and then she said slowly,
"Do you know Mr. Jack--Jack, that I believe every prince at times has
need of a heart's-ease friend, and--and--well, maids need a prince to
help them."
I looked at her quickly.
"I am your good Knight always if I can help you, Elsie."
She flushed and turned her face aside that I might not see it.
"And you won't misunderstand?" she asked.
"I don't think I could misunderstand you, Elsie. I don't think anybody
could."
She came up closer.
"Well, it's this, Jack. Sit down here by me. I have no one I can
confide in but you. You know how kind you have always been to me. Ever
since I was a wee bairn in a strange land. I can't talk to Tammas about
it, but I feel there is something strange between Colonel Goff and me.
I feel that there is--"
I started. She was pale, but went on.
"Well, you know, I didn't come here with them. I didn't come here with
them--with my grandparents; that was so long ago I don't remember what
is back of it. Anyway, soon after I came I remember Colonel Goff. And
do you know," she went on, "he has been so good to me that--that I
cannot understand it at all--only I feel when I am with him that I am
drawn to him so! Oh, I have seen so much in him that others don't
see--and when I see him watching me so closely and saying nothing, it
hurts me."
She did not finish, but looked down the path, up which Colonel Goff,
himself, was riding towards us.
Elsie paled and then flushed quickly. He was smiling at us, his little
eyes twinkling kindly. He gave us a quick military salute.
"My word, a _tete-a-tete_, and a bloomin' fool it is who'd break in on
it. Hello, lassie--Jack!"
He got down from his horse, shaking hands with us gravely. I noticed
that he was watching Elsie, and she, knowing it, was reddening.
"You are a good guesser, Colonel," I said, with feigned lightness, for I
felt that he was taking it too seriously, "and pray tell me who would
not like to be with so fine a lassie?"
He looked at me quickly. "If you mean that, Jack," he said, in his
blunt, unseeing English way, "here is my hand."
Elsie broke into a little confused laugh. "The idea of pinning Mr. Jack
down like that," she said, looking bravely into Goff's eyes. "What else
could he say? Now give me that box of candy. I see it sticking out of
your pocket."
Goff pulled out the box of candy, and catching her to him, kissed her on
the cheek.
"She is my own lassie, Jack," he said, holding her an instant in his
arms. "I have loved her since she was so high." He paused. "Well,
perhaps it was because I was an exile in your country, and she is the
Scotch flower I found blooming here. Eh, lassie?"
Elsie kissed his cheek.
"You have been mighty good to me, Colonel Goff. But go your way.
Tammas said he wanted to see you if you came by and--well--Mr. Jack and
I want some candy!"
For a moment he looked at us queerly, trying to smile. He glanced into
my eyes, but I met his squarely and unflinchingly. He was not a man
whose mental action was quick. He saw but one side of things at a time.
I saw that he was embarrassed in his slow way. Very awkwardly he left
us, going up to Tammas's cottage. Elsie walked on with me.
The wind blew her hair around her temples and the reflection of the blue
hills of Scotland was in her eyes. "This is such an inconsistent world,
Jack," she said after a while. "I can't ever learn it, and I get so
lonely up here with only Tammas and Marget, I often wish that they would
tell me more of myself. I should so love to know who my father is."
"Did it ever occur to you that it might not be at all pleasant for you
to know? They love you and they want you to be happy."
She paled. "I had never thought of that. I had never thought of
that--oh, why didn't I think of it!"
"Elsie," I said, taking her hand in mine, and drawing her to me as I had
when she was a child, and I her big brother, "you have no better friend
than I. Tell me what it is that is troubling you?"
"You would hate me, Jack," she said, looking up quickly into my face
with great, earnest eyes.
"Hate you? Nonsense," and I laughed, pinching her ear. "Tell me," I
pleaded, smiling.
"Nay, nay, bide a wee--bide a wee," she said abstractedly falling into
her childhood's dialect as she so often did when she forgot. "And
first," she went on, "why, first I'd have to kind of explain it, Jack;
but it is like this now: suppose one was not satisfied with one's lot
and had those feelings I have been telling you of."
I nodded.
"And suppose--now this is the worst of it--now suppose one really loved
another--one found one's soul dream," she paused, blushing.
"Soul dreams, Elsie, ay, I think I understand," I said. "I too have
them--they are the great, unattainable things of our life. Do you know
I think that their being unattainable is what makes them great?"
She looked up. "If it is worth so much--this unattainable thing--why
then does it hurt so?"
"Ay, ay, that's it. It is the things that hurt which count. 'Our
sweetest love is always sweetest pain,'" I said, quoting the line of a
poem.
"Oh," she said, clasping my arm. "You have said it, Jack."
I looked at her quickly.
"Elsie," I said, "you once told me--do you remember what you said to me
and Aunt Lucretia--about your hand being sought in marriage? Is it the
same person you now speak of?"
"It is Captain Rutherford," she said, her face drawn tensely.
I started, angry, flushed.
"Elsie, this will never do. Do you love him at all?"
"No, Jack, not as compared to the other--the unattainable. Well, I
should say about as the difference between a--well--say a star and a
little firefly."
A dry, fighting anger clinched my throat and I could scarcely speak. I
could have throttled Braxton Bragg then!
"Tell me, Elsie," I said, controlling my anger and trying to speak
calmly, "tell your big brother all."
But she was silent, her face turned from me; at last she said, "It is
all so strange, Jack; those we love, love us not, and those we do not
love want to marry us even if they are not fit to."
"Not fit to hold your shoe, let alone your heart," I added angrily.
She put her hand over my mouth.
"Have I done wrong? Have I said too much? Come, I must go. I see the
Colonel waiting for me."
I took her by both hands, holding her before me, for I was strangely
worried and I wished to know--I looked earnestly into her eyes.
"Do you love me, Elsie?"
She blushed crimson. In an instant her arms were around my neck.
Shamed and stricken with my own thoughtlessness I tore her arms from me.
"Elsie, forgive me, you don't understand!"
In reply she gave me one shamed, hurt look and fled up the path. I saw
Goff waiting for her.
*CHAPTER XIV*
*GOD AND A BUTTERFLY*
I saw a race for life the other day. It occurred in mid-air in a
kingdom not of earth--not of our own; but the air was sweet where the
fight was on, and the fields were green, and the woods lay calm and
soothing beneath, and the great, kind sun was above.
It was the pursuit of a golden-winged butterfly, one of those filmy
creatures that is more of sky than of earth, made of rainbow and a rose,
of light and a lily's blossom. It seemed strange to me that this
beautiful thing, thrown off from the rim of a rainbow, living on the
nectar of a flower, sleeping on the bosom of a nodding lily and floating
on the breath of a zephyr, so spiritual it was, should fall under the
cruel laws of life, and be forced to fight for its brief but beautiful
existence.
Who were its enemies? Two glorious mocking birds that had sung like
spirits from an heavenly choir around the house all spring and summer,
that had been permitted to live and rear their young in contentment and
happiness and should have held no grudge against any other creature.
Golden-Wings was in the garden, and he was content until that which
sustained life gave out--food. Ay, there is the rub! We would all be
angels if it were not for food, we would be saints but for our stomachs.
He had sucked every flower in his pasture, he must go to pastures fresh
or die. The distance was only a few hundred yards of air, but he knew
that in that air was death. He thought of it a long time as he hovered
from flower to flower; of life, of his mate, of death. Had he been all
spirit he would have stayed forever among the flowers, but he was like
all of us, half spirit and half flesh, and the flesh of him was
rebelling and begging for food. He must go. He rose slowly, and with
uncertain wing, frightened, straight up, every sense awake, every nerve
keyed, his eyes on the lookout for his enemy. Up, up he rose,
quivering, scared, frightened, then he winged his way across the ether
in a flight which proved to be for his life.
The mocking bird is a flycatcher, but not an expert one. Compared with
the swallow, the martin, the crested flycatcher or the bold king bird he
is a poor imitation; but the mocking bird is also a poet and everything
is grist that comes to the poet's mill, from the grasshopper on the
ground to the butterfly in the air.
The male bird saw Golden-Wings and gave him the first heat for his life;
up in the air he darted, circled and swooped. Golden-Wings, terrified,
ducked, dived and escaped. The poet dropped to a twig in disgust and
his mate took up the fight. Golden-Wings saw her coming and his heart
swelled with fear; he stood quivering in the air, he knew not which way
to turn. She darted straight and all but caught him; for a moment in
mid-air they whirled, twisted and tumbled, Golden-Wings, panting and
fluttering for a chance once more for home and love and life, and the
poetess for a morsel to eat. It ended in the butterfly getting above
the bird, which always seemed to be his tactics, and the latter dropped
down in disgust to her mate.
Then, maddened, they both started after Golden-Wings, and it looked as
if this flight was to be his last.
It was a terrible chase that the two poets gave him, the tumbling,
darting, circling of the birds in maddened earnestness. Their wings
were often so close that they fanned him about like a whiff of gold
tissue paper in the wind. Twice they got above him, dropped and missed!
Then he was lost altogether, and only by watching the circling of the
birds could one guess where he was. When seen again he had got above
his enemies, and was steadily pursuing his zigzag, frightened,
graceless, paper-fluttering flight for the distant trees and life!
"Luck to you, O Golden-Wings!" I cried. "For already you have taught me
a lesson for Life. Let us keep _above_ our enemies if we would be safe,
not beneath them--for there we are a prey to their talons, besmirched
with dirt; nor on their level, for there we are no better than they; but
_above_ them where they cannot reach us, and where we may go on to our
destiny with only the sunlight around us and the unseen stars above."
The birds dropped down, baffled, to rest in the top of a sugar-maple
tree. Like all poets, in losing their game they had lost their temper,
and now between panting and hard breathing they could be heard
quarreling. "It was you," said the wife, "you conceited thing; it is
all your fault! I had him once if you had let me alone." "Oh, you had
him, did you," sneered the mate; "if your talents only equaled your
tongue you would be better off!" They almost spat upon each other; they
were beaten and angry and they took it out that way.
Golden-Wings was safe. He was high up in the air. His very flight was
now the flight of victory. Twenty yards more and he would drop down
into the great splotch of green below where his wife was waiting him on
the blossom of a wild cherry.
I was about to cheer him with the silent approval of true applause when
I saw a lightning bolt of red drop from the jagged bar of the dead limb
of a great oak near by, in the midst of the forest and high above the
weary, yet happy Golden-Wings. I paled at the sight, for I knew that no
butterfly would ever escape this new-comer. Even Golden-Wings
recognized his fate, and, paralyzed with fear, stopped his flight in
mid-air in a few yards of his home, and lay quivering in hopeless fear.
Well he might, for the red and white bolt was a red-headed woodpecker, a
very king in the tribe of the flycatchers. Often I had seen him poise
above an air-bound moth, then drop like a dead bird in the air and no
moth would be there.
The hand of the world is against the marauder, be he bird or man. But
they revere the man who robs by rule.
Straight at Golden-Wings he went. The race was up. He used the same
old tactics: above the butterfly he soared, then, gauging the distance
from his own great beak to butterfly beneath he folded his wings and
dropped like a plummet of lead.
I was out that morning with the twelve gauge, smokeless shells and seven
and a half chilled shot. It was thieving crow I had come after, thinking
I might get a shot. To the marauder my thought was as lightning, for
when I caught the first flash of his crimson head, this went distinctly
through my mind: "_Nature is Nature even to tooth and claw, and yet
there is that which says even when a butterfly shall fall. He makes our
lives and marks out our destiny. Sometimes amid injustice, He calls
himself Retribution. And then He has been known to raise up a man, and
a gun, invent smokeless powder and deadly chilled shot, give accuracy of
aim, and, most wonderful of all, the Voice of a Purpose to say that harm
shall not happen to a Butterfly._"
There was no smoke from the report, and so I distinctly saw Golden-Wings
drop joyfully among the green leaves. But a red marauder lies in the
field where he fell.
*CHAPTER XV*
*HICKORIES AND OLD HICKORY*
June, and June as it breaks only over the Middle Basin.
There had been great rains, saturating the leaves and grasses until they
were almost blackened in their deep greenness. There had followed,
flushing the grass on all the hills around the Hermitage, the mauve
tints of coming dandelions, followed by the red, white, and blue flags
of the clovers, until across deep valleys and on distant slopes there
was a pale light much like moonlight.
I had been very busy. There was much for me to do, and I sought it
eagerly, for I wished to forget and not to see. It is what we fail to
forget that hurts. And so I worked.
Colonel Goff, as was his race, had acted straight-forwardly in the
matter of his marriage to Eloise. Over a month ago he had sought out
Aunt Lucretia and told her frankly that he sought the hand of her ward
in marriage, that he wished to marry her and take her at once to
England. He said that his brother, the Earl of Carfax, had died without
heirs, and that he inherited the estate. The family name, he told her,
was Goff, and he had kept it while in America. In the early fall his
attorneys would have every legal provision complete for his return, and
for immediate occupation of his estate. And he told her with equal
frankness why it could not be done sooner, that in his younger days he
had married out of his class, and had been blacklisted by his family for
it, especially by his elder brother; that they had had not only hot
words but a stand-up fight in which he had all but killed, and had
really maimed the older brother for life. "I had to get out," he said
brusquely, "and get out quick. As it was they tried to disinherit me,
but England's laws are greater than England's men. My wife was to
follow, but she died."
My Aunt was a woman of great sense and said nothing. But I noticed that
she thought much, because she was very silent, and that she grew
suddenly very tender to me. When Eloise had gone to Washington my Aunt
went with her. Two things happened before they left, which I remember
quite distinctly.
My Aunt's admiration for the character and achievements of Andrew
Jackson bordered on the idolatrous. As a boy she would take me often to
the Hermitage, and tell me of the wilderness giant who lived there. She
knew more about him than anyone I ever met. She understood the thousand
sides of this man's great nature, from his horse-racing to his religion.
In the spot where he had lived so long there was, of course, a world of
tradition. It came down from lip to lip. Of these stories my Aunt
remembered all. A few days after Goff had talked with her as my Aunt and
I were going over the grounds she stopped before the log-cabin in the
pasture near the great spring where Jackson lived before he built the
present Hermitage.
"Jack," said she, "Andrew Jackson was the gamest thing God ever gave to
humanity, and the gentlest. It is staggering to think what he had to
overcome to do his life's work. The fights, the sicknesses, the
suffering, the slander, the insults, the lies, the butcheries they
called battles, starvation, mutinies of his own men, all met and
overcome by one tall, slim, sallow, pain-wracked man, on one
thoroughbred horse, with a gun in his hand, and two in his eyes. Talk
of Indian fights--Mills, and Cooks and Custers--they were child's play
to the great Creek Nation Jackson had to fight. And England behind
them--selfish always and forever wanting that of others."
She looked at me quickly, and went on: "But he waited and then hit them
hard. No one, from Hannibal to Caesar and Bonaparte, would ever have
attacked Keane and his troops, just landed and in an open plain with New
Orleans at their mercy before them, in the night-time as did Jackson and
his ragged, half-armed militia. No one would ever have risked it but
Jackson; he was greater than them all! For that seemingly foolhardy
night attack saved him. He cut the very vitals out of them in the dark.
He hacked them as a game cock does when he sticks his gaffs into the
very heart of his foe. That was why on January eighth they could not go
over his breastworks, even with the combined force of Packenham and
Gibbs and the troops that afterwards won Waterloo. He had gaffed them
in the ditch in the dark. He cut them into giblets. It was hell with
the lid on. They say it was a useless battle, but they lie, Jack. If
Jackson hadn't stopped them, they would never have given up the
Louisiana Purchase until we drove them out with another war. There are
two kinds of men, Jack--talkers and doers. The talkers are all
orators--they are all liars. They began with Aaron, whom God made a
mouthpiece to Moses. Moses was the doer, but he could not talk. Aaron,
the orator, talked for him, but it is Moses who lives. Jackson was a
Moses, Clay an Aaron, a dead one, Jack, as all Aarons are, and growing
deader every year. All orators, being liars, fool people while they
live. Dead, they do not even fool themselves.
It was Clay and Crawford who let the British make that treaty of
December twenty-fourth in which they said that they would not be bound
by Bonaparte's constructions. At that time Lord Castlereagh had every
reason to believe that Packenham, sent out November twenty-fourth, with
the best army and navy that ever left Portsmouth for a foreign shore,
had taken the 'crown colony of Louisiana,' as they called it. And under
that treaty they would have held it. It was Jackson who stopped them,
just one day before that treaty was signed.
"Yes, Clay is dead," she said laconically; "he ought to be.
"They wanted New Orleans, and they wanted it bad. 'Booty and Beauty'
was the word they passed down the line when they landed and started
across the Ch
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