man. By turns the most lovingly kind and the most violent, the most
generously magnanimous and the most vindictive of the unreconstructed
minority, Caspar Dabney was rarely to be taken for granted, even by
those who knew him best. Of course, Ardea adored him; but Ardea was his
grandchild, and she was wont to protest that she never could see the
contradictions, for the reason that she was herself a Dabney.
It was about the time when Thomas Jefferson was beginning to reconsider
his ideals, with a leaning toward brass-bound palaces on wheels and
dictatorial authority over uniformed lackeys and other of his fellow
creatures, that fate dealt the Major its final stab and prepared to pour
wine and oil into the wound--though of the balm-pouring, none could
guess at the moment of wounding. It was not in Caspar Dabney to be
patient under a blow, and for a time his ragings threatened to shake
even Mammy Juliet's loyalty--than which nothing more convincing can be
said.
"'Fo' Gawd, Mistuh Scipio," she would say, when the master had sworn
volcanically at her for the fifth time in the course of one forenoon,
"I'se jus' erbout wo'ed out! I done been knowin' Mawstuh Caspah ebber
sence I was Ol' Mistis's tiah-'ooman--dat's what she call me in de
plantashum days--an' I ain't nev' seen him so fractious ez he been sence
dat letter come tellin' him come get dat po' li'l gal-child o' Mawstuh
Louis's. Seems lak he jus' gwine r'ar round twel he hu't somebody!"
Scipio, the Major's body-servant, had grown gray in the Dabney service,
and he was well used to the master's storm periods.
"Doan' you trouble yo'se'f none erbout dat, Mis' Juliet. Mawstuh Majah
tekkin' hit mighty hawd 'cause Mawstuh Louis done daid. But bimeby you
gwine see him climm on his hawss an' ride up yondeh to whah de big
steamboats comes in an' fotch dat li'l gal-child home; an' den:
uck--uh-h! look out, niggahs! dar ain't gwine be nuttin' on de top side
dishyer yearth good ernough for li'l Missy. You watch what I done tol'
you erbout dat, now!"
Scipio's prophecy, or as much of it as related to the bringing of the
orphaned Ardea to Deer Trace Manor, wrought itself out speedily, as a
matter of course, though there was a vow to be broken by the necessary
journey to the North. At the close of the war, Captain Louis, the
Major's only son, had become, like many another hot-hearted young
Confederate, a self-expatriated exile. On the eve of his departure for
France he had married the Virginia maiden who had nursed him alive after
Chancellorsville. Major Caspar had given the bride away,--the war had
spared no kinsman of hers to stand in this breach,--and when the
God-speeds were said, had himself turned back to the weed-grown fields
of Deer Trace Manor, embittered and hostile, swearing never to set foot
outside of his home acres again while the Union should stand.
For more than twenty years he kept this vow almost literally. A few of
the older negroes, a mere handful of the six score slaves of the old
patriarchal days, cast in their lot with their former master, and with
these the Major made shift thriftily, farming a little, stockraising a
little, and, unlike most of the war-broken plantation owners, clinging
tenaciously to every rood of land covered by the original Dabney
title-deeds.
In this cenobitic interval, if you wanted a Dabney colt or a Dabney cow,
you went, or sent, to Deer Trace Manor on your own initiative, and you,
or your deputy, never met the Major: your business was transacted with
lean, lantern-jawed Japheth Pettigrass, the Major's stock-and-farm
foreman. And although the Dabney stock was pedigreed, you kept your wits
about you; else Pettigrass got much the better of you in the trade, like
the shrewd, calculating Alabama Yankee that he was.
Ardea was born in Paris in the twelfth year of the exile; and the
Virginian mother, pining always for the home land, died in the fifteenth
year. Afterward, Captain Louis fought a long-drawn, losing battle,
figuring bravely in his infrequent letters to his father as a rising
miniature painter; figuring otherwise to the students of the Latin
Quarter as "_ce pauvre Monsieur D'Aubigné_;" leading his little girl
back and forth between his lodgings and the studio where he painted
pictures that nobody would buy, and eking out a miserable existence by
giving lessons in English when he was happy enough to find a pupil.
The brave letters imposed on the Major, as they were meant to do; and
Ardea, the loyal, happening on one of them in her first Deer Trace
summer, read it through with childish sobs and never thereafter opened
her lips on the story of those distressful Paris days. Later she
understood her father's motive better: how he would not be a charge on
an old man rich in nothing but ruin; and the memory of the pinched
childhood became a thing sacred.
How the Major, a second Rip Van Winkle, found his way to New York, and
to the pier of the incoming French Line steamer, must always remain a
mystery. But he was there, with the fierce old eyes quenched and
swimming and the passionate Dabney lips trembling strangely under the
great mustaches, when the black-frocked little waif from the Old World
ran down the landing stage and into his arms. Small wonder that they
clung to each other, these two at the further extremes of three
generations; or that the child opened a door in the heart of the fierce
old partizan which was locked and doubly barred against all others.
As may be imagined, the Major got away from Yankeeland with his charge
as soon as a train could be made to serve; and he was grim and
forbidding to all and sundry until the Cumberland Mountains had
displaced the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge on the western horizon.
Indeed, the grimness,--to all save Ardea,--persisted quite to and
through the transformed and transforming city at the eastern foot of
Lebanon. Major Caspar was not in tune with the bravura of modern
progress, and if he had been, his hatred of Northern importations of
whatever nature would have made and kept him hostile.
But when the ancient carriage, with Scipio and Ardea's one small steamer
trunk on the box, had topped the shrugged shoulder of Lebanon, and that
view which we have seen from the summit of Thomas Jefferson's high rock
among the cedars opened out before the eyes of the wondering child, the
Major grew eloquent.
"Look youh fill, my deah child; thah it lies--God's country, and youh's
and mine; the fines', the most inspiring, the most beautiful land the
sun eveh shone on! And whilst you are givin' praise to youh Makeh for
creatin' such a Gyarden of Eden, don't forget to thank him on youh
bended knees for not putting anything oveh yondeh in ouh home lot to
tempt these house-buildin', money-makin', schemin' Yankees that are
swarming again oveh the land like anotheh plague of Egyptian locus'es."
"These--Yankees?" queried Ardea. In his later years the exiled Captain
Louis had remembered only that he was an American, and his child knew no
North nor South.
The Major did not explain. Not that there were any compunctions of
conscience concerning the planting of the seed of sectionalism in this
virgin soil, quite the contrary. He abstained because he made sure that
time, and the Dabney blood, would do it better.
So he talked to the small one of safely prehistoric things, showing her
the high mountain battle-field where John Sevier had broken the power of
the savage Chickamaugas, and, as the carriage rolled down toward the
head of Paradise, the tract of land where the first Dabney had sent his
ax-men to blaze the trees for his lordly boundaries.
It was all new and very strange to a child whose only outlook on life
had been urban and banal. She had never seen a mountain, and nothing
more nearly approaching a forest than the parked groves of the Bois de
Boulogne. Would it be permitted that she should sometimes walk in the
woods of the first Dabney, she asked, with the quaint French twisting
of the phrases that she was never able fully to overcome.
It would certainly be permitted; more, the Major would make her a deed
to as many of the forest acres as she would care to include in her
promenade. By which we see that the second part of Unc' Scipio's
prophecy was finding its fulfilment in the beginning.
How the French-born child fitted into the haphazard household at Deer
Trace Manor, with what struggles she came through the inevitable attack
of homesickness, and how Mammy Juliet and every one else petted and
indulged her, are matters which need not be dwelt on. But we shall
gladly believe that she was too sensible, even at the early and tender
age of ten, to be easily spoiled.
Many foolish things have been said and written about the wax-like
quality of a child's mind; how each new impression effaces the old, and
how character in permanence is not to be looked for until the bones have
stopped growing. Yet who has not known criminals at twelve, and saints
and angels, and wise men and women--in fine, the entire gamut of
humanity--in short frocks or knee-breeches?
Ardea, child of adversity and the Paris ateliers, brought one lasting
memory up out of those early Deer Trace Manor years: she was always
immeasurably older than such infants as Mammy Juliet and Uncle Scipio.
And this also she remembered: that when these and all the others,
including her grandfather and Japheth Pettigrass, were busily leveling
all the barriers of restraint for her, she had built some of her own and
set herself the task of living within them.
I am sure she began to realize, almost at the first, that she must rise
superior to the Dabney weakness, which, as exemplified by the Major, was
ungoverned, and perhaps ungovernable, temper. At all events, she never
forgot a summer day soon after her arrival when she first saw her
grandfather transformed into a frenzied madman.
He was sitting on the wide portico, smoking his long-stemmed pipe and
directing Japheth Pettigrass, who was training the great crimson-rambler
rose that ran well up to the eaves. Ardea, herself, was on the lawn,
playing with her grandfather's latest gift, a huge, solemn-eyed Great
Dane, so she did not see the man who had dismounted at the gate and
walked up the driveway until he was handing his card to her grandfather.
When she did see him, she looked twice at him; not because he was trigly
clad in brown duck and tightly-buttoned service leggings, but because he
wore his beard trimmed to a point, after the manner of the students in
the Latin Quarter, and so was reminiscent of things freshly forsaken.
She had succeeded in making the Great Dane carry her on his back quite
all the way around the circular coleus bed when the explosion took
place. There was a startling thunderclap of fierce words from the
portico, and she slipped from the dog's back and stared wide-eyed. Her
grandfather was on his feet, towering above the visitor as if he were
about to fall on and crush him.
"Bring youh damned Yankee railroad through my fields and pastchuhs, suh?
Foul the pure, God-given ai-ah of this peaceful Gyarden of Eden with
youh dust-flingin', smoke-pot locomotives? Not a rod, suh! not a foot
or an inch oveh the Dabney lands! Do I make it plain to you, suh?"
"But Major Dabney--one moment; this is purely a matter of business;
there is nothing personal about it. Our company is able and willing to
pay liberally for its right of way; and you must remember that the
coming of the railroad will treble and quadruple your land values. I am
only asking you to consider the matter in a business way, and to name
your own price."
Thus the smooth-spoken young locating engineer in brown duck, serving as
plowman for his company. But there be tough old roots in some soils,
roots stout enough to snap the colter of the commercializing plow,--as,
for example, in Paradise Valley, owned, in broken areas, principally by
an unreconciled Major Dabney.
"Not anotheh word, or by Heaven, suh, you'll make me lose my tempah! You
add insult to injury, suh, when you offeh me youh contemptible Yankee
gold. When I desiah to sell my birthright for youh beggahly mess of
pottage, I'll send a black boy in town to infawm you, suh!"
It is conceivable that the locating engineer of the Great Southwestern
Railway Company was younger than he looked; or, at all events, that his
experience hitherto had not brought him in contact with fire-eating
gentlemen of the old school. Else he would hardly have said what he did.
"Of course, it is optional with you, Major Dabney, whether you sell us
our right of way peaceably or compel us to acquire it by condemnation
proceedings in the courts. As for the rest--is it possible that you
don't know the war is over?"
With a roar like that of a maddened lion the Major bowed himself,
caught his man in a mighty wrestler's grip and flung him broadcast into
the coleus bed. The words that went with the fierce attack made Ardea
crouch and shiver and take refuge behind the great dog. Japheth
Pettigrass jumped down from his step-ladder and went to help the
engineer out of the flower bed. The Major had sworn himself to a stand,
but the fine old face was a terrifying mask of passion.
"The old firebrand!" the engineer was muttering under his breath when
Pettigrass reached him; but the foreman cut him short.
"You got mighty little sense, looks like, to me. Stove up any?"
"Nothing to hurt, I guess."
"Well, your hawss is waitin' for ye down yonder at the gate, and I don't
b'lieve the Major is allowin' to ask ye to stay to supper."
The railroad man scowled and recovered his dignity, or some portion of
it.
"You're a hospitable lot," he said, moving off toward the driveway. "You
can tell the old maniac he'll hear from us later."
Pettigrass stooped with his back to the portico and patted the dog.
"Don't you look so shuck up, little one," he whispered reassuringly to
Ardea. "There ain't nothin' goin' to happen, worse than has happened, I
reckon." But Ardea was mute.
When the engineer had mounted and ridden away down the pike, the foreman
straightened himself and faced about. The Major had dropped into his big
arm-chair and was trying to relight his pipe. But his hands shook and
the match went out.
Pettigrass moved nearer and spoke so that the child should not hear. "If
you run me off the place the nex' minute, I'm goin' to tell you you ort
to be tolerably 'shamed of yourse'f, Maje' Dabney. That po' little gal
is scared out of a year's growin', right now."
"I know, Japheth; I know. I'm a damned old heathen! For, insultin' as he
was, the man was for the time bein' my guest, suh--my guest!"
"I'm talkin' about the little one--not that railroader. So far as I
know, he earned what he got. I allowed they'd make some sort of a swap
with you, so I didn't say anything when they was layin' out their lines
thoo' the hawss-lot and across the lower corn-field this mornin'--easy,
now; no more r'arin' and t'arin' with that thar little gal not a-knowin'
which side o' the earth's goin' to cave in next!"
The Major dropped his pipe, laid fast hold of the arms of his chair, and
breathed hard.
"Laid out _theyuh_ lines--across _my_ prope'ty? Japheth, faveh me by
riding down to the furnace and askin' Caleb Gordon if he will do me the
honor to come up heah--this evenin', if he can. I--I--it's twenty yeahs
and mo' since I've troubled the law cou'ts of ouh po', Yankee-ridden
country with any affai-ah of mine; and now--well, I don't know--I don't
know," with a despondent shake of the leonine head.
After Pettigrass had gone on his errand the Major rose and went
unsteadily into the house. Then, and not till then, Ardea got up on her
knees and put her arms around the neck of the Great Dane.
"O, Hector!" she whispered; "me, I am Dabney, too! Once the gamins
killed a poor little cat of mine; and I forgot God--the good God--and
said wicked things; and I could have torn them into little, little
pieces! But we--we shall be very good and patient after this, won't we,
Hector--you and me--no, you and _I_? What is it when you lick my face
that way? Does it mean that you understand?"
VI
BLUE BLOOD AND RED
In a world full of puzzling questions for Thomas Jefferson, one of the
chief clustering points of the persistent "whys" was Major Dabney's
attitude, as a Man of Sin, and as the natural overlord of Paradise
Valley.
That the Major was a Man of Sin there could be no manner of doubt.
During the revival he had been frequently and pointedly prayed for by
that name, and the groans from the Amen corner were conclusively
damning. Just what the distinction was between a Man of Sin and a
sinner--spelled with a small "s"--was something which Thomas Jefferson
could never quite determine; but the desire to find out made him spy on
Major Dabney at odd moments when the spying could be done safely and
with a clear field for retreat in the event of the Major's catching him
at it.
Thus far the spying had been barren of results--of that kind which do
not have to be undone and made over to fit in with other things. Once,
Thomas Jefferson had been picking blackberries behind the wall of his
father's infield when the Major and Squire Bates had met on the pike.
There was some talk of the new railroad; and when the Squire allowed
that it was certain to come through Paradise, the Major had taken the
name of God in vain in a way that suggested the fiery blast roaring
from the furnace lip after the iron was out.
This was one of the results. But on reflection, Thomas Jefferson decided
that this could not be The Sin. Profane swearing--that was what the
Sunday-school lesson-leaf called it--was doubtless a mortal sin in a
believer; was not he, Thomas Jefferson, finding the heavens as brass and
the earth a place of fear and trembling because of that word to Nan
Bryerson? But in other people--well, he had heard his father swear once,
when one of the negroes at the furnace had opened the sand at the end of
the sow and let the stream of molten iron run out into the creek.
The charge of profanity being tried and found wanting in the Major's
case, there remained that of violence. One day, Tike Bryerson--Nan's
father and the man who had tried to kill his Uncle Silas in the revival
meeting--was beating his horses because they would not take the water at
the lower ford. Tike had been stilling more pine-top whisky, and had
been to town with some jugs hidden under the cornstalks in his
wagon-bed. When he did that, he always came back with his eyes red like
a squirrel's, and everybody gave him all the road.
But this time the Major had happened along, and when Tike would not stop
beating the horses for a shouted cursing-out from the bank, the Major
had spurred his Hambletonian into the creek and knocked Tike winding.
More than that, he had made him lead his team out of the ford and go
back to the bridge crossing.
Being himself committed to the theory of turning the other cheek, Thomas
Jefferson could not question the acute sinfulness of all this; yet it
did not sufficiently account for the Major as a Man of Sin. Had not
Peter, stirred, no doubt, by some such generous rage as the Major's,
snatched out his sword and smitten off a man's ear?
In the other field, that of overlordship, the subtleties were still more
elusive. That the negroes, many of whom were the sons and daughters of
the Major's former slaves, should pass the old-time "Mawstuh" on the
pike with uncovered heads and respectful heel-scrapings, was a matter of
course. Thomas Jefferson was white, free, and Southern born. But why his
own father and mother should betray something of the same deference was
not so readily apparent.
On rare occasions the Major, riding to or from the cross-roads
post-office in Hargis's store, would rein in his horse at the Gordon
gate and ask for a drink of water from the Gordon well. At such times
Thomas Jefferson remarked that his mother always hastened to serve the
Major with her own hands; this notwithstanding her own and Uncle Silas's
oft-repeated asseveration touching the Major's unenviable preëminence as
a Man of Sin. Also, he remarked that the Major's manner at such moments
was a thing to dazzle the eye, like the reflection of the summer sun on
the surface of burnished metal. But beneath the polished exterior, the
groping perceptions of the boy would touch a thing repellent; a thing to
stir a slow current of resentment in his blood.
It was Thomas Jefferson's first collision with the law of caste; a law
Draconian in the Old South. Before the war, when Deer Trace Manor had
been a seigniory with its six score black thralls, there had been no
visiting between the great house on the inner knoll and the overgrown
log homestead at the iron furnace. Quarrel there was none, nor any
shadow of enmity; but the Dabneys were lords of the soil, and the
Gordons were craftsmen.
Even in war the distinction was maintained. The Dabneys, father and son,
were officers, having their commissions at the enrolment; while Caleb
Gordon, whose name headed the list of the Paradise volunteers, began and
ended a private in the ranks.
In the years of heart-hardenings which followed, a breach was opened,
narrow at first, and never very deep, but wide enough to serve. Caleb
Gordon had accepted defeat openly and honestly, and for this the
unreconstructed Major had never fully forgiven him. It was an added
proof that there was no redeeming drop of the _sang azure_ in the Gordon
veins--and Major Caspar was as scrupulously polite to Caleb Gordon's
wife as he would have been, and was, to the helpmate of Tike Bryerson,
mountaineer and distiller of illicit whisky.
Thomas Jefferson was vaguely indignant when Pettigrass came to ask his
father to go forthwith to the manor-house. In the mouth of the foreman
the invitation took on something of the flavor of a command. Besides,
since the Major's return from New York, Thomas Jefferson had a grudge
against him of a purely private and personal nature.
None the less, he was eager for news when his father came back, and
though he got it only from overhearing the answer to his mother's
question, it was satisfyingly thrilling.
"It's mighty near as we talked, Martha. The Major lumps the railroad in
with all the other improvements, calls 'em Yankee, and h'ists his
battle-flag. The engineer, that smart young fellow with the peaked
whiskers and the eye-glasses, went to see him this evenin' about the
right of way down the valley, and got himself slung off the porch of the
great house into a posy bed."
"There is going to be trouble, Caleb; now you mark my words. You mustn't
mix up in it."
"I don't allow to, if I can he'p it. The railroad's goin' to be a mighty
good thing for us if I can get Mr. Downing to put in a side-track for
the furnace."
Following this there were other conferences, the Major unbending
sufficiently to come and sit on the Gordon porch in the cool of the
evening. The iron-master, as one still in touch with the moving world,
gave good advice. Failing to buy, the railroad company might possibly
seek to bully a right of way through the valley. But in that case, there
would certainly be redress in the courts for the property owners. In the
meantime, nothing would be gained by making the contest a personal fight
on individuals.
So counseled Caleb Gordon, sure, always, of his own standing-ground in
any conflict. But from the last of the conferences the Major had ridden
home through the fields; and Thomas Jefferson, with an alert eye for
windstraws of conduct, had seen him dismount now and then to pull up and
fling away the locating stakes driven by the railroad engineers.
In such a contention, in an age wholly given over to progress, there
could be, one would say, no possible doubt of the outcome.
Giving the Major a second and a third chance to refuse to grant an
easement, the railroad company pushed its grading and track-laying
around the mountain and up to the stone wall marking the Dabney
boundary, quietly accumulated the necessary material, and on a summer
Sunday morning--Sunday by preference because no restraining writ could
be served for at least twenty-four hours--a construction train, black
with laborers, whisked around the nose of the mountain and dropped
gently down the grade to the temporary end of track.