Sprung from a race which had gone to seed like plants in a
long-abandoned garden, once splendid and vigorous, old Caleb Harper was
a patriarchal figure nearing the sunset of his life.
His forebears had been mountaineers of the Kentucky Cumberlands since
the vanguard of white life had ventured westward from the seaboard. From
pioneers who had led the march of progress that stock had relapsed into
the decay of mountain-hedged isolation and feudal lawlessness, but here
and there among the wastage, like survivors over the weed-choked garden
of neglect, emerged such exceptions as Old Caleb; paradoxes of rudeness
and dignity, of bigotry and nobility.
Caleb's house stood on the rising ground above the river, a substantial
structure grown by occasional additions from the nucleus that his
ancestor Caleb Parish had founded in revolutionary times, and it marked
a contrast with its less provident neighbours. Many cabins scattered
along these slopes were dismal and makeshift abodes which appeared to
proclaim the despair and squalor of their builders and occupants.
Just now a young girl stood in the large unfurnished room that served
the house as an attic--and she held a folded paper in her hand.
She had drawn out of its dusty corner a small and quaintly shaped
horsehide trunk upon which, in spots, the hair still adhered. The
storage-room that could furnish forth its mate must be one whose
proprietors held inviolate relics of long-gone days, for its like has
not been made since the life of America was slenderly strung along the
Atlantic seaboard and the bison ranged about his salt licks east of the
Mississippi.
Into the lock the girl fitted a cumbersome brass key and then for a long
minute she stood there breathing the forenoon air that eddied in
currents of fresh warmth. The June sunlight came, too, in a golden flood
and the soft radiance of it played upon her hair and cheeks.
Outside, almost brushing the eaves with the plumes of its farthest flung
branches, stood a gigantic walnut tree whose fresh leafage filtered a
mottling of sunlight upon the age-tempered walls.
The girl herself, in her red dress, was slim and colourful enough and
dewy-fresh enough to endure the searching illumination of the June
morning.
Dark hair crowned the head that she threw back to gaze upward into the
venerable branches of the tree, and her eyes were as dark as her hair
and as deep as a soft night sky.
Over beetling summits and sunlit valley the girl's glance went lightly
and contentedly, but when it came back to nearer distances it dwelt with
an absorbed tenderness on the gnarled old veteran of storm-tested
generations that stood there before the house: the walnut which the
people of her family had always called the "roof tree" because some
fanciful grandmother had so named it in the long ago.
"I reckon ye're safe now, old roof tree," she murmured, for to her the
tree was human enough to deserve actual address, and as she spoke she
sighed as one sighs who is relieved of an old anxiety.
Then, recalled to the mission that had brought her here, she thought of
the folded paper that she held in her hand.
So she drew the ancient trunk nearer to the window and lifted its
cover.
It was full of things so old that she paused reverently before handling
them.
Once the grandmother who had died when she was still a small child had
allowed her to glimpse some of these ancient treasures but memory was
vague as to their character.
Both father and mother were shadowy and half-mythical beings of hearsay
to her, because just before her birth her father had been murdered from
ambush. The mother had survived him only long enough to bring her baby
into the world and then die broken-hearted because the child was not a
boy whom she might suckle from the hatred in her own breast and rear as
a zealot dedicated to avenging his father.
The chest had always held for this girl intriguing possibilities of
exploration which had never been satisfied. The gentle grandfather had
withheld the key until she should be old enough to treat with respect
those sentimental odds and ends which his women-folk had held sacred,
and when the girl herself had "grown up"--she was eighteen now--some
whimsey of clinging to the illusions and delights of anticipation had
stayed her and held the curb upon her curiosity. Once opened the old
trunk would no longer beckon with its mystery, and in this isolated life
mysteries must not be lightly wasted.
But this morning old Caleb Harper had prosaically settled the question
for her. He had put that paper into her hand before he went over the
ridge to the cornfield with his mule and plow.
"Thet thar paper's right p'intedly valuable, leetle gal," he had told
her. "I wants ye ter put hit away safe somewhars." He had paused there
and then added reflectively, "I reckon ther handiest place would be in
ther old horsehide chist thet our fore-parents fetched over ther
mountings from Virginny."
She had asked no questions about the paper itself because, to her, the
opening of the trunk was more important, but she heard the old man
explaining, unasked:
"I've done paid off what I owes Bas Rowlett an' thet paper's a full
receipt. I knows right well he's my trusty friend, an' hit's my notion
thet he's got his hopes of bein' even more'n thet ter _you_--but still a
debt sets mighty heavy on me, be hit ter friend or foe, an' hit
pleasures me thet hit's sottled."
The girl passed diplomatically over the allusion to herself and the
elder's expression of favour for a particular suitor, but without words
she had made the mental reservation: "Bas Rowlett's brash and uppety
enough withouten us bein' beholden ter him fer no money debt. Like as
not he'll be more humble-like a'tter this when he comes a-sparkin'."
Now she sat on a heavy cross-beam and looked down upon the packed
contents while into her nostrils crept subtly the odour of old herbs and
spicy defences against moth and mould which had been renewed from time
to time through the lagging decades until her own day.
First, there came out a soft package wrapped in a threadbare shawl and
carefully bound with home-twisted twine and this she deposited on her
knees and began to unfasten with trembling fingers of expectancy. When
she had opened up the thing she rose eagerly and shook out a gown that
was as brittle and sere as a leaf in autumn and that rustled frigidly as
the stiffened folds straightened.
"I'll wager now, hit war a _weddin'_ dress," she exclaimed as she held
it excitedly up to the light and appraised the fineness of the ancient
silk with eyes more accustomed to homespun.
Then came something flat that fell rustling to the floor and spread into
a sheaf of paper bound between home-made covers of cloth, but when the
girl opened the improvised book, with the presentiment that here was
the message out of the past that would explain the rest, she knitted her
brows and sat studying it in perplexed engrossment.
The ink had rusted, in the six score years and more since its
inscribing, to a reddish faintness which shrank dimly and without
contrast into the darkened background, yet difficulties only whetted her
discoverer's appetite, so that when, after an hour, she had studied out
the beginning of the document, she was deep in a world of
romance-freighted history. Here was a journal written by a woman in the
brave and tragic days of the nation's birth.
That part which she was now reading seemed to be a sort of preamble to
the rest, and before the girl had progressed far she found a sentence
which, for her, infused life and the warmth of intimacy into the
document.
"It may be that God in His goodenesse will call me to His house which is
in Heaven before I have fully written ye matters which I would sett
downe in this journall," began the record. "Since I can not tell whether
or not I shall survive ye cominge of that new life upon which all my
thoughtes are sett and shoulde such judgement be His Wille, I want that
ye deare childe shall have this recorde of ye days its father and I
spent here in these forest hills so remote from ye sea and ye rivers of
our deare Virginia, and ye gentle refinements we put behind us to become
pioneers."
There was something else there that she could not make out because of
its blurring, and she wondered if the blotted pages had been moistened
by tears as well as ink, but soon she deciphered this unusual statement.
"Much will be founde in this journall, touching ye tree which I planted
in ye first dayes and which we have named ye roofe tree after a fancy of
my owne. I have ye strong faithe that whilst that tree stands and
growes stronge and weathers ye thunder and wind and is revered, ye stem
and branches of our family also will waxe stronge and robust, but that
when it falls, likewise will disaster fall upon our house."
One thing became at once outstandingly certain to the unsophisticated
reader.
This place in the days of its founding had been an abode of love
unshaken by perils, for of the man who had been its head she found such
a portrait as love alone could have painted. He was described as to the
modelling of his features, the light and expression of his eyes; the way
his dark hair fell over his "broade browe"--even the cleft of his chin
was mentioned.
That fondly inspired pen paused in its narrative of incredible
adventures and more than Spartan hardships to assure the future reader
that, "ye peale of his laugh was as clear and tuneful as ye fox horn
with which our Virginia gentry were wont to go afield with horse and
hound." There had possibly been a touch of wistfulness in that mention
of a renounced life of greater affluence and pleasure for hard upon it
followed the observation:
"Here, where our faces are graven with anxieties that besette our waking
and sleeping, it seemeth that most men have forgotten ye very fashion of
laughter. Joy seemes killed out of them, as by a bitter frost, yet _he_
hath ever kept ye clear peale of merriment in his voice and its flash in
his eye and ye smile that showes his white teeth."
Somehow the girl seemed to see that face as though it had a more direct
presentment before her eyes than this faded portraiture of words penned
by a hand long ago dead.
He must have been, she romantically reflected, a handsome figure of a
man. Then naively the writer had passed on to a second description: "If
I have any favour of comeliness it can matter naught to me save as it
giveth pleasure to my deare husbande, yet I shall endeavour to sette
downe truly my own appearance alsoe."
The girl read and re-read the description of this ancestress, then
gasped.
"Why, hit mout be _me_ she was a-writin' erbout," she murmured, "save
only I hain't purty."
In that demure assertion she failed of justice to herself, but her eyes
were sparkling. She knew that hereabout in this rude world of hers her
people were accounted both godly and worthy of respect, but after all it
was a drab and poverty-ridden world with slow and torpid pulses of
being. Here, she found, in indisputable proof, the record of her
"fore-parents". Once they, too, had been ladies and gentlemen familiar
with elegant ways and circumstances as vague to her as fable. Henceforth
when she boasted that hers were "ther best folk in ther world" she would
speak not in empty defiance but in full confidence!
But as she rose at length from her revery she wondered if after all she
had not been actually dreaming, because a sound had come to her ears
that was unfamiliar and that seemed of a piece with her reading. It was
the laugh of a man, and its peal was as clear and as merry as the note
of a fox horn.
The girl was speedily at the window looking out, and there by the
roadside stood her grandfather in conversation with a stranger.
He was a tall young man and though plainly a mountaineer there was a
declaration of something distinct in the character of his clothing and
the easy grace of his bearing. Instead of the jeans overalls and the
coatless shoulders to which she was accustomed, she saw a white shirt
and a dark coat, dust-stained and travel-soiled, yet proclaiming a
certain predilection toward personal neatness.
The traveller had taken off his black felt hat as he talked and his
black hair fell in a long lock over his broad, low forehead. He was
smiling, too, and she caught the flash of white teeth and even--since
the distance was short--the deep cleft of his firm chin.
Framed there at the window the girl caught her hands to her breast and
exclaimed in a stifled whisper, "Land o' Canaan! He's jest walked spang
outen them written pages--he's ther spittin' image of that man my dead
and gone great-great-great-gran'-mammy married."
It was at that instant that the young man looked up and for a moment
their eyes met. The stranger's words halted midway in their utterance
and his lips remained for a moment parted, then he recovered his
conversational balance and carried forward his talk with the gray-beard.
The girl drew back into the shadow, but she stood watching until he had
gone and the bend in the road hid him. Then she placed the receipt that
had brought her to the attic in the old manuscript, marking the place
where her reading had been interrupted, and after locking the trunk ran
lightly down the stairs.
"Gran'pap," she breathlessly demanded, "I seed ye a-talkin' with a
stranger out thar. Did ye find out who _is_ he?"
"He give ther name of Cal Maggard," answered the old man, casually, as
he crumbled leaf tobacco into his pipe. "He lows he's going ter dwell in
ther old Burrell Thornton house over on ther nigh spur of Defeated
Creek."
* * * * *
That night while the patriarch dozed in his hickory withed chair with
his pipe drooping from his wrinkled lips his granddaughter slipped
quietly out of the house and went over to the tree.
Out there magic was making under an early summer moon that clothed the
peaks in silvery softness and painted shadows of cobalt in the hollows.
The river flashed its response and crooned its lullaby, and like
children answering the maternal voice, the frogs gave chorus and the
whippoorwills called plaintively from the woods.
The branches of the great walnut were etched against a sky that would
have been bright with stars were it not that the moon paled them, and
she gazed up with a hand resting lightly on the broad-girthed bole of
the stalwart veteran. Often she had wondered why she loved this
particular tree so much. It had always seemed to her a companion, a
guardian, a personality, when its innumerable fellows in the forest
were--nothing but trees.
Now she knew. She had only failed to understand the language with which
it had spoken to her from childhood, and all the while, when the wind
had made every leaf a whispering tongue, it had been trying to tell her
many ancient stories.
"I knows, now, old roof tree," she murmured. "I've done found out erbout
ye," and her hand patted the close-knit bark.
Then, in the subtle influence of the moonlight and the night that awoke
all the young fires of dreaming, she half closed her eyes and seemed to
see a woman who looked like herself yet who--in the phantasy of that
moment--was arrayed in a gown of silk and small satin slippers, looking
up into the eyes of a man whose hair was dark and whose chin was cleft
and whose smile flashed upon white teeth. Only as the dream took hold
upon her its spirit changed and the other woman seemed to be herself and
the man seemed to be the one whom she had glimpsed to-day.
Then her reveries were broken. In the shallow water of the ford down at
the river splashed a horse's hoofs and she heard a voice singing in the
weird falsetto of mountain minstrelsy an old ballade which, like much
else of the life there, was a heritage from other times.
So the girl brushed an impatient hand over rudely awakened eyes and
turned back to the door, knowing that Bas Rowlett had come sparking.