It was near the middle of the afternoon of an autumnal day, on the
wide, grassy plateau of Central Kentucky.
The Eternal Power seemed to have quitted the universe and left all
nature folded in the calm of the Eternal Peace. Around the pale blue
dome of the heavens a few pearl-colored clouds hung motionless, as
though the wind had been withdrawn to other skies. Not a crimson leaf
floated downward through the soft, silvery light that filled the
atmosphere and created the sense of lonely, unimaginable spaces. This
light overhung the far-rolling landscape of field and meadow and wood,
crowning with faint radiance the remoter low-swelling hill-tops and
deepening into dreamy half-shadows on their eastern slopes. Nearer, it
fell in a white flake on an unstirred sheet of water which lay along
the edge of a mass of sombre-hued woodland, and nearer still it touched
to spring-like brilliancy a level, green meadow on the hither edge of
the water, where a group of Durham cattle stood with reversed flanks
near the gleaming trunks of some leafless sycamores. Still nearer,
it caught the top of the brown foliage of a little bent oaktree and
burned it into a silvery flame. It lit on the back and the wings of a
crow flying heavily in the path of its rays, and made his blackness as
white as the breast of a swan. In the immediate foreground, it sparkled
in minute gleams along the stalks of the coarse, dead weeds that fell
away from the legs and the flanks of a white horse, and slanted across
the face of the rider and through the ends of his gray hair, which
straggled from beneath his soft black hat.
The horse, old and patient and gentle, stood with low-stretched neck
and closed eyes half asleep in the faint glow of the waning heat; and
the rider, the sole human presence in all the field, sat looking across
the silent autumnal landscape, sunk in reverie. Both horse and rider
seemed but harmonious elements in the panorama of still-life, and
completed the picture of a closing scene.
To the man it was a closing scene. From the rank, fallow field through
which he had been riding he was now surveying, for the last time, the
many features of a landscape that had been familiar to him from the
beginning of memory. In the afternoon and the autumn of his age he was
about to rend the last ties that bound him to his former life, and,
like one who had survived his own destiny, turn his face towards a
future that was void of everything he held significant or dear.
The Civil War had only the year before reached its ever-memorable
close. From where he sat there was not a home in sight, as there was
not one beyond the reach of his vision, but had felt its influence.
Some of his neighbors had come home from its camps and prisons, aged
or altered as though by half a lifetime of years. The bones of some
lay whitening on its battle-fields. Families, reassembled around their
hearth-stones, spoke in low tones unceasingly of defeat and victory,
heroism and death. Suspicion and distrust and estrangement prevailed.
Former friends met each other on the turnpikes without speaking;
brothers avoided each other in the streets of the neighboring town.
The rich had grown poor; the poor had become rich. Many of the latter
were preparing to move West. The negroes were drifting blindly hither
and thither, deserting the country and flocking to the towns. Even the
once united church of his neighborhood was jarred by the unstrung and
discordant spirit of the times. At affecting passages in the sermons
men grew pale and set their teeth fiercely; women suddenly lowered
their black veils and rocked to and fro in their pews; for it is always
at the bar of Conscience and before the very altar of God that the
human heart is most wrung by a sense of its losses and the memory of
its wrongs. The war had divided the people of Kentucky as the false
mother would have severed the child.
It had not left the old man unscathed. His younger brother had fallen
early in the conflict, borne to the end of his brief warfare by his
impetuous valor; his aged mother had sunk under the tidings of the
death of her latest-born; his sister was estranged from him by his
political differences with her husband; his old family servants, men
and women, had left him, and grass and weeds had already grown over
the door-steps of the shut, noiseless cabins. Nay, the whole vast
social system of the old régime had fallen, and he was henceforth but a
useless fragment of the ruins.
All at once his mind turned from the cracked and smoky mirror of
the times and dwelt fondly upon the scenes of the past. The silent
fields around him seemed again alive with the negroes, singing as they
followed the ploughs down the corn-rows or swung the cradles through
the bearded wheat. Again, in a frenzy of merriment, the strains of the
old fiddles issued from crevices of cabin-doors to the rhythmic beat of
hands and feet that shook the rafters and the roof. Now he was sitting
on his porch, and one little negro was blacking his shoes, another
leading his saddle-horse to the stiles, a third bringing his hat, and
a fourth handing him a glass of ice-cold sangaree; or now he lay under
the locust-trees in his yard, falling asleep in the drowsy heat of the
summer afternoon, while one waved over him a bough of pungent walnut
leaves, until he lost consciousness and by-and-by awoke to find that
they both had fallen asleep side by side on the grass and that the
abandoned fly-brush lay full across his face.
From where he sat also were seen slopes on which picnics were danced
under the broad shade of maples and elms in June by those whom death
and war had scattered like the transitory leaves that once had
sheltered them. In this direction lay the district schoolhouse where on
Friday evenings there were wont to be speeches and debates; in that,
lay the blacksmith's shop where of old he and his neighbors had met
on horseback of Saturday afternoons to hear the news, get the mails,
discuss elections, and pitch quoits. In the valley beyond stood the
church at which all had assembled on calm Sunday mornings like the
members of one united family. Along with these scenes went many a
chastened reminiscence of bridal and funeral and simpler events that
had made up the annals of his country life.
The reader will have a clearer insight into the character and past
career of Colonel Romulus Fields by remembering that he represented a
fair type of that social order which had existed in rank perfection
over the blue-grass plains of Kentucky during the final decades of the
old régime. Perhaps of all agriculturists in the United States the
inhabitants of that region had spent the most nearly idyllic life, on
account of the beauty of the climate, the richness of the land, the
spacious comfort of their homes, the efficiency of their negroes, and
the characteristic contentedness of their dispositions. Thus nature and
history combined to make them a peculiar class, a cross between the
aristocratic and the bucolic, being as simple as shepherds and as proud
as kings, and not seldom exhibiting among both men and women types of
character which were as remarkable for pure, tender, noble states of
feeling as they were commonplace in powers and cultivation of mind.
It was upon this luxurious social growth that the war naturally fell
as a killing frost, and upon no single specimen with more blighting
power than upon Colonel Fields. For destiny had quarried and chiselled
him, to serve as an ornament in the barbaric temple of human bondage.
There _were_ ornaments in that temple, and he was one. A slave-holder
with Southern sympathies, a man educated not beyond the ideas of his
generation, convinced that slavery was an evil, yet seeing no present
way of removing it, he had of all things been a model master. As such
he had gone on record in Kentucky, and no doubt in a Higher Court;
and as such his efforts had been put forth to secure the passage
of many of those milder laws for which his State was distinguished.
Often, in those dark days, his face, anxious and sad, was to be seen
amid the throng that surrounded the blocks on which slaves were sold
at auction; and more than one poor wretch he had bought to save him
from separation from his family or from being sold into the Southern
plantations--afterwards riding far and near to find him a home on one
of the neighboring farms.
But all those days were over. He had but to place the whole picture of
the present beside the whole picture of the past to realize what the
contrast meant for him.
At length he gathered the bridle reins from the neck of his old horse
and turned his head homeward. As he rode slowly on, every spot gave
up its memories. He dismounted when he came to the cattle and walked
among them, stroking their soft flanks and feeling in the palm of his
hand the rasp of their salt-loving tongues; on his sideboard at home
was many a silver cup which told of premiums on cattle at the great
fairs. It was in this very pond that as a boy he had learned to swim on
a cherry rail. When he entered the woods, the sight of the walnut-trees
and the hickory-nut trees, loaded on the topmost branches, gave him a
sudden pang.
Beyond the woods he came upon the garden, which he had kept as his
mother had left it--an old-fashioned garden with an arbor in the
centre, covered with Isabella grape-vines on one side and Catawba on
the other; with walks branching thence in four directions, and along
them beds of jump-up-johnnies, sweet-williams, daffodils, sweet-peas,
larkspur, and thyme, flags and the sensitive-plant, celestial and
maiden's-blush roses. He stopped and looked over the fence at the very
spot where he had found his mother on the day when the news of the
battle came.
She had been kneeling, trowel in hand, driving away vigorously at the
loamy earth, and, as she saw him coming, had risen and turned towards
him her face with the ancient pink bloom on her clear cheeks and the
light of a pure, strong soul in her gentle eyes. Overcome by his
emotions, he had blindly faltered out the words, "Mother, John was
among the killed!" For a moment she had looked at him as though stunned
by a blow. Then a violent flush had overspread her features, and then
an ashen pallor; after which, with a sudden proud dilating of her
form as though with joy, she had sunk down like the tenderest of her
lily-stalks, cut from its root.
Beyond the garden he came to the empty cabin and the great wood-pile.
At this hour it used to be a scene of hilarious activity--the little
negroes sitting perched in chattering groups on the topmost logs or
playing leap-frog in the dust, while some picked up baskets of chips or
dragged a back-log into the cabins.
At last he drew near the wooden stiles and saw the large house of which
he was the solitary occupant. What darkened rooms and noiseless halls!
What beds, all ready, that nobody now came to sleep in, and cushioned
old chairs that nobody rocked! The house and the contents of its attic,
presses, and drawers could have told much of the history of Kentucky
from almost its beginning; for its foundations had been laid by his
father near the beginning of the century, and through its doors had
passed a long train of forms, from the veterans of the Revolution
to the soldiers of the Civil War. Old coats hung up in closets; old
dresses folded away in drawers; saddle-bags and buckskin-leggins;
hunting-jackets, powder-horns, and militiamen hats; looms and
knitting-needles; snuffboxes and reticules--what a treasure-house of
the past it was! And now the only thing that had the springs of life
within its bosom was the great, sweet-voiced clock, whose faithful face
had kept unchanged amid all the swift pageantry of changes.
He dismounted at the stiles and handed the reins to a gray-haired
negro, who had hobbled up to receive them with a smile and a gesture of
the deepest respect.
"Peter," he said, very simply, "I am going to sell the place and move
to town. I can't live here any longer."
With these words he passed through the yard-gate, walked slowly up the
broad pavement, and entered the house.