"What do you know of the Varicks?" I asked, smiling.
"More than do you," he said, "for all that they are your kin. Look at
me, sir! Like myself, you wear deer-skin from throat to ankle, and your
nose is ever sniffing to windward. But this is a strange wind to you.
You see, you smell, but your eyes ask, 'What is it?' You are a woodsman,
but a stranger among your own kin. You have never seen a living Varick;
you have never even seen a partridge."
"Your wisdom is at fault there," I said, maliciously.
"Have you seen a Varick?"
"No; but the partridge--"
"Pooh! a little creature, like a gray meadow-lark remoulded! You call it
partridge, I call it quail. But I speak of the crested thunder--drumming
cock that struts all ruffed like a Spanish grandee of ancient times.
Wait, sir!" and he pointed to a string of birds' footprints in the dust
just ahead. "Tell me what manner of creature left its mark there?"
I leaned from my saddle, scanning the sign carefully, but the bird that
made it was a strange bird to me. Still bending from my saddle, I heard
his mocking laugh, but did not look up.
"You wear a lynx-skin for a saddle-cloth," he said, "yet that lynx never
squalled within a thousand miles of these hills."
"Do you mean to say there are no lynxes here?" I asked.
"Plenty, sir, but their ears bear no black-and-white marks. Pardon, I do
not mean to vex you; I read as I run, sir; it is my habit."
"So you have traced me on a back trail for a thousand miles--from
habit," I said, not exactly pleased.
"A thousand miles--by your leave."
"Or without it."
"Or without it--a thousand miles, sir, on a back trail, through forests
that blossom like gigantic gardens in May with flowers sweeter than our
white water-lilies abloom on trees that bear glossy leaves the year
round; through thickets that spread great, green, many-fingered hands at
you, all adrip with golden jasmine; where pine wood is fat as bacon;
where the two oaks shed their leaves, yet are ever in foliage; where the
thick, blunt snakes lie in the mud and give no warning when they deal
death. So far, sir, I trail you, back to the soil where your baby
fingers first dug--soil as white as the snow which you are yet to see
for the first time in your life of twenty-three years. A land where
there are no hills; a land where the vultures sail all day without
flapping their tip-curled wings; where slimy dragon things watch from
the water's edge; where Greek slaves sweat at indigo-vats that draw
vultures like carrion; where black men, toiling, sing all day on the
sea-islands, plucking cotton-blossoms; where monstrous horrors, hornless
and legless, wallow out to the sedge and graze like cattle--"
"Man! You picture a hell!" I said, angrily, "while I come from
paradise!"
"The outer edges of paradise border on hell," he said. "Wait! Sniff that
odor floating."
"It is jasmine!" I muttered, and my throat tightened with a homesick
spasm.
"It is the last of the arbutus," he said, dropping his voice to a gentle
monotone. "This is New York province, county of Tryon, sir, and yonder
bird trilling is not that gray minstrel of the Spanish orange-tree,
mocking the jays and the crimson fire-birds which sing 'Peet! peet!'
among the china-berries. Do you know the wild partridge-pea of the pine
barrens, that scatters its seeds with a faint report when the pods are
touched? There is in this land a red bud which has burst thundering into
crimson bloom, scattering seeds o' death to the eight winds. And every
seed breeds a battle, and every root drinks blood!"
He straightened in his stirrups, blue eyes ablaze, face burning under
its heavy mask of tan and dust.
"If I know a man when I see him, I know you," he said. "God save our
country, friend, upon this sweet May day."
"Amen, sir," I replied, tingling. "And God save the King the whole year
round!"
"Yes," he repeated, with a disagreeable laugh, "God save the King; he is
past all human aid now, and headed straight to hell. Friend, let us part
ere we quarrel. You will be with me or against me this day week. I knew
it was a man I addressed, and no tavern-post."
"Yet this brawl with Boston is no affair of mine," I said, troubled.
"Who touches the ancient liberties of Englishmen touches my country,
that is all I know."
"Which country, sir?"
"Greater Britain."
"And when Greater Britain divides?"
"It must not!"
"It has."
I unbound the scarlet handkerchief which I wore for a cap, and held it
between my fingers to dry its sweat in the breeze. Watching it
flutter, I said:
"Friend, in my country we never cross the branch till we come to it, nor
leave the hammock till the river-sands are beneath our feet. No
hunting-shirt is sewed till the bullet has done its errand, nor do men
fish for gray mullet with a hook and line. There is always time to pray
for wisdom."
"Friend," replied Mount, "I wear red quills on my moccasins, you wear
bits of sea-shell. That is all the difference between us. Good-bye.
Varick Manor is the first house four miles ahead."
He wheeled his horse, then, as at a second thought, checked him and
looked back at me.
"You will see queer folk yonder at the patroon's," he said. "You are
accustomed to the manners of your peers; you were bred in that land
where hospitality, courtesy, and deference are shown to equals; where
dignity and graciousness are expected from the elders; where duty and
humility are inbred in the young. So is it with us--except where you are
going. The great patroon families, with their vast estates, their
patents, their feudal systems, have stood supreme here for years. Theirs
is the power of life and death over their retainers; they reign absolute
in their manors, they account only to God for their trusts. And they are
great folk, sir, even yet--these Livingstons, these Van Rensselaers,
these Phillipses, lords of their manors still; Dutch of descent,
polished, courtly, proud, bearing the title of patroon as a noble bears
his coronet."
He raised his hand, smiling. "It is not so with the Varicks. They are
patroons, too, yet kin to the Johnsons, of Johnson Hall and Guy Park,
and kin to the Ormond-Butlers. But they are different from either
Johnson or Butler--vastly different from the Schuylers or the
Livingstons--"
He shrugged his broad shoulders and dropped his hand: "The Varicks are
all mad, sir. Good-bye."
He struck his horse with his soft leather heels; the animal bounded out
into the western road, and his rider swung around once more towards me
with a gesture partly friendly, partly, perhaps, in menace. "Tell Sir
Lupus to go to the devil!" he cried, gayly, and cantered away through
the golden dust.
I sat my horse to watch him; presently, far away on the hill's crest,
the sun caught his rifle and sparkled for a space, then the point of
white fire went out, and there was nothing on the hill-top save the
dust drifting.
Lonelier than I had yet been since that day, three months gone, when I
had set out from our plantation on the shallow Halifax, which the
hammock scarcely separates from the ocean, I gathered bridle with
listless fingers and spoke to my mare. "Isene, we must be moving
eastward--always moving, sweetheart. Come, lass, there's grain somewhere
in this Northern land where you have carried me." And to myself,
muttering aloud as I rode: "A fine name he has given to my cousins the
Varicks, this giant forest-runner, with his boy's face and limbs of
iron! And he was none too cordial concerning the Butlers,
either--cousins, too, but in what degree they must tell me, for I
don't know--"
The road entering the forest, I ceased my prattle by instinct, and again
for the thousandth time I sniffed at odors new to me, and scanned leafy
depths for those familiar trees which stand warden in our Southern
forests. There were pines, but they were not our pines, these feathery,
dark-stemmed trees; there were oaks, but neither our golden water oaks
nor our great, green-and-silver live-oaks. Little, pale flowers bloomed
everywhere, shadows only of our bright blossoms of the South; and the
rare birds I saw were gray and small, and chary of song, as though the
stillness that slept in this Northern forest was a danger not to be
awakened. Loneliness fell on me; my shoulders bent and my head hung
heavily. Isene, my mare, paced the soft forest-road without a sound, so
quietly that the squatting rabbit leaped from between her forelegs, and
the slim, striped, squirrel-like creatures crouched paralyzed as we
passed ere they burst into their shrill chatter of fright or anger, I
know not which.
Had I a night to spend in this wilderness I should not know where to
find a palmetto-fan for a torch, where to seek light-wood for splinter.
It was all new to me; signs read riddles; tracks were sealed books; the
east winds brought rain, where at home they bring heaven's own balm to
us of the Spanish grants on the seaboard; the northwest winds that we
dread turn these Northern skies to sapphire, and set bees a-humming on
every bud.
There was no salt in the air, no citrus scent in the breeze, no heavy
incense of the great magnolia bloom perfuming the wilderness like a
cathedral aisle where a young bride passes, clouded in lace.
But in the heat a heavy, sweetish odor hung; balsam it is called, and
mingled, too, with a faint scent like our bay, which comes from a woody
bush called sweet-fern. That, and the strong smell of the bluish,
short-needled pine, was ever clogging my nostrils and confusing me. Once
I thought to scent a 'possum, but the musky taint came from a rotting
log; and a stale fox might have crossed to windward and I not noticed,
so blunted had grown my nose in this unfamiliar Northern world.
Musing, restless, dimly confused, and doubly watchful, I rode through
the timber-belt, and out at last into a dusty, sunny road. And
straightway I sighted a house.
The house was of stone, and large and square and gray, with only a
pillared porch instead of the long double galleries we build; and it had
a row of windows in the roof, called dormers, and was surrounded by a
stockade of enormous timbers, in the four corners of which were set
little forts pierced for rifle fire.
Noble trees stood within the fortified lines; outside, green meadows
ringed the place; and the grass was thick and soft, and vivid as a green
jewel in color--such grass as we never see save for a spot here and
there in swampy places where the sun falls in early spring.
The house was yet a hundred rods away to the eastward. I rode on slowly,
noticing the neglected fences on either hand, and thought that my cousin
Varick might have found an hour to mend them, for his pride's sake.
Isene, my mare, had already scented the distant stables, and was
pricking forward her beautiful ears as I unslung my broad hat of plaited
palmetto and placed it on my head, the better to salute my hosts when I
should ride to their threshold in the Spanish fashion we followed
at home.
So, cantering on, I crossed a log bridge which spanned a ravine, below
which I saw a grist-mill; and so came to the stockade. The gate was open
and unguarded, and I guided my mare through without a challenge from the
small corner forts, and rode straight to the porch, where an ancient
negro serving-man stood, dressed in a tawdry livery too large for him.
As I drew bridle he gave me a dull, almost sullen glance, and it was not
until I spoke sharply to him that he shambled forward and descended the
two steps to hold my stirrup.
"Is Sir Lupus at home?" I asked, looking curiously at this mute,
dull-eyed black, so different from our grinning lads at home.
"Yaas, suh, he done come home, suh."
"Then announce Mr. George Ormond," I said.
He stared, but did not offer to move.
"Did you hear me?" I asked, astonished.
"Yaas, suh, I done hear yoh, suh."