SEVERAL days had slipped by.
At John's request they had moved his bed across the doorway of his cabin;
and stretched there, he could see the sun spring every morning out the
dimpled emerald ocean of the wilderness; and the moon follow at night,
silvering the soft ripples of the multitudinous leaves lapping the shores of
silence: days when the inner noises of life sounded like storms; nights when
everything within him lay as still as memory.
His wounds had behaved well from the out-set. When he had put forth all his
frenzied despairing strength to throttle the cougar, it had let go its hold
only to sink its fangs more deeply into his flesh, thus increasing the
laceration; and there was also much laceration of the hand. But the rich
blood flowing in him was the purest; and among a people who for a quarter of
a century had been used to the treatment of wounds, there prevailed a rough
but genuine skill that stood him in good stead. To these hardy fighting
folk, as to him, it was a scratch and he would have liked to go on with his
teaching. Warned of the danger of inflammation, however, he took to his bed;
and according to our own nervous standards which seem to have intensified
pain for us beyond the comprehension of our forefathers, he was sick and a
great sufferer.
Those long cool, sweet, brilliant days! Those long still, lonely, silvery
nights! His cabin stood near the crest of the hill that ran along the
southern edge of the settlement; and propped on his bed, he could look down
into the wide valley--into the town. The frame of his door became the frame
of many a living picture. Under a big shady tree at the creek-side, he could
see some of his children playing or fishing: their shouts and laughter were
borne to his ear; he could recognize their shrill voices--those always
masterful voices of boys at their games. Sometimes these little figures were
framed timidly just outside the door--the girls with small wilted posies,
the boys with inquiries. But there was no disguising the dread they all felt
that he might soon be well: he had felt himself once; he did not blame them.
Wee Jennie even came up with her slate one day and asked him to set her a
sum in multiplication; he did so; but he knew that she would rub it out as
soon as she could get out of sight, and he laughed quietly to himself at
this tiny casuist, who was trying so hard to deceive them both.
Two or three times, now out in the sunlight, now under the shadow of the
trees, he saw an old white horse go slowly along the distant road; and a
pink skirt and a huge white bonnet--two or three times; but he watched for
it a thousand times till his eyes grew weary.
One day Erskine brought the skin of the panther which he was preparing for
him, to take the place of the old one under his table. He brought his rifle
along also,--his "Betsy," as he always called it; which, however, he
declared was bewitched just now; and for a while John watched him curiously
as he nailed a target on a tree in front of John's door, drew on it the face
of the person whom he charged with having bewitched his gun, and then,
standing back, shot it with a silver bullet; after which, the spell being
now undone, he dug the bullet out of the tree again and went off to hunt
with confidence in his luck.
And then the making of history was going on under his eyes down there in the
town, and many a thoughtful hour he studied that. The mere procession of
figures across his field of vision symbolized the march of destiny, the
onward sweep of the race, the winning of the continent. Now the barbaric
paint and plumes of some proud Indian, peaceably come to trade in pelts but
really to note the changes that had taken place in his great hunting ground,
loved and ranged of old beyond all others: this figure was the Past--the
old, old Past. Next, the picturesque, rugged outlines of some backwoods
rifleman, who with his fellows had dislodged and pushed the Indian westward:
this figure was the Present--the short-lived Present. Lastly, dislodging
this figure in turn and already pushing him westward as he had driven the
Indian, a third type of historic man, the fixed settler, the land-loving,
house-building, wife-bringing, child-getting, stock-breeding yeoman of the
new field and pasture: this was the figure of the endless Future. The
retreating wave of Indian life, the thin restless wave of frontier life, the
on-coming, all-burying wave of civilized life--he seemed to feel close to
him the mighty movements of the three. His own affair, the attack of the
panther, the last encounter between the cabin and the jungle looked to him
as typical of the conquest; and that he should have come out of the struggle
alive, and have owed his life to the young Indian fighter and hunter who had
sprung between him and the incarnate terror of the wilderness, affected his
imagination as an epitome of the whole winning of the West.
One morning while the earth was still fresh with dew, the great Boone came
to inquire for him, and before he left, drew from the pocket of his hunting
shirt a well-worn little volume.
"It has been my friend many a night," he said. "I have read it by many a
camp-fire. I had it in my pocket when I stood on the top of Indian Old
Fields and saw the blue grass lands for the first time. And when we
encamped on the creek there, I named it Lulbegrud in honour of my book. You
can read it while you have nothing else to do;" and he astounded John by
leaving in his hand Swift's story of adventures in new worlds.
He had many other visitors: the Governor, Mr. Bradford, General Wilkinson,
the leaders in the French movement, all of whom were solicitous for his
welfare as a man, but also as their chosen emissary to the Jacobin Club of
Philadelphia. In truth it seemed to him that everyone in the town came
sooner or later, to take a turn at his bedside or wish him well.
Except four persons: Amy did not come; nor Joseph, with whom he had
quarrelled and with whom he meant to settle his difference as soon as he
could get about; nor O'Bannon, whose practical joke had indirectly led to
the whole trouble; nor Peter, who toiled on at his forge with his wounded
vanity.
Betrothals were not kept secret in those days and engagements were short.
But as he was sick and suffering, some of those who visited him forbore to
mention her name, much less to speak of the preparations now going forward
for her marriage with Joseph. Others, indeed, did begin to talk of her and
to pry; but he changed the subject quickly.
And so he lay there with the old battle going on in his thoughts, never
knowing that she had promised to become the wife of another: fighting it all
over in his foolish, iron-minded way: some days hardening and saying he
would never look her in the face again; other days softening and resolving
to seek her out as soon as he grew well enough and learn whether the fault
of all this quarrel lay with him or wherein lay the truth: yet in all his
moods sore beset with doubts of her sincerity and at all times passing sore
over his defeat--defeat that always went so hard with him.
Meantime one person was pondering his case with a solicitude that he wist
not of: the Reverend James Moore, the flute-playing Episcopal parson of the
town, within whose flock this marriage was to take place and who may have
regarded Amy as one of his most frisky wayward fleeces. Perhaps indeed as
not wearing a white spiritual fleece at all but as dyed a sort of
merino-brown in the matter of righteousness.
He had long been fond of John--they both being pure-minded men, religious,
bookish, and bachelors; but their friendship caused one to think of the pine
and the palm: for the parson, with his cold bleak face, palish straight hair
put back behind white ears, and frozen smile, appeared always to be
inhabiting the arctic regions of life while John, though rooted in a
tropical soil of many passions, strove always to bear himself in character
like a palm, up-right, clean-cut; having no low or drooping branches; and
putting forth all the foliage and blossoms of the mind at the very summit of
his powers.
The parson and the school-master had often walked out to the Falconers'
together in the days when John imagined his suit to be faring prosperously;
and from Amy's conduct, and his too slight knowledge of the sex, this arctic
explorer had long since adjusted his frosted faculties to the notion that
she expected to become John's wife. He was sorry; it sent an extra chill
through the icebergs of his imagination; but perhaps he gathered comforting
warmth from the hope that some of John's whiteness would fall upon her and
that thus from being a blackish lambkin she would at least eventually turn
into a light-gray ewe.
When the tidings reached his far-inward ear that she was to marry Joseph
instead of his friend, a general thaw set in over the entire landscape of
his nature: it was like spring along the southern fringes of Greenland.
The error must not be inculcated here that the parson had no passions: he
had three-ruling ones: a passion for music, a passion for metaphysics, and a
passion for satirizing the other sex.
Dropping in one afternoon and glancing with delicate indirection at John's
short shelf of books, he inquired whether he had finished with his Paley.
John said he had and the parson took it down to bear away with him. Laying
it across his stony knees as he sat down and piling his white hands on it,
"Do you believe Paley?" he asked, turning upon John a pair of the most
beautiful eyes, which looked a little like moss agates.
"I believe St. Paul," replied John, turning his own eyes fondly on his open
Testament.
"Do you believe Paley?" insisted the parson, who would always have his
questions answered directly.
"There's a good deal of Paley: what do you mean?" said John, laughing
evasively.
"I mean his ground idea-the corner stone of his doctrine -his pou sto. I
mean do you believe that we can infer the existence and character of God
from any evidences of design that we see in the universe "
"I'm not so sure about that," said John. "What we call the evidences of
design in the universe may be merely certain laws of our own minds, certain
inward necessities we are under to think of everything as having an order
and a plan and a cause. And these inner necessities may themselves rest on
nothing, may be wrong, may be deceiving us."
"Oh, I don't mean that!" said the parson. "We've got to believe our own
minds. We've got to do that even to disbelieve them. If the mind says of
itself it is a liar, how does it know this to be true if it is a liar
itself? No; we have to believe our own minds whether they are right or
wrong. But what I mean is: can we, according to Paley, infer the existence
and character of God from anything we see?"
"It sounds reasonable," said John.
"Does it! Then suppose you apply this method of reasoning to a woman: can
you infer her existence from anything you see? Can you trace the evidences
of design there? Can you derive the slightest notion of her character from
her works?"
As the parson said this, he turned upon the sick man a look of such logical
triumph that John, who for days had been wearily trying to infer Amy's
character from what she had done, was seized with a fit of laughter--the
parson himself remaining perfectly grave.
Another day he examined John's wound tenderly, and then sat down by him with
his beautiful moss-agate eyes emitting dangerous little sparkles.
"It's a bad bite," he said, "the bite of a cat--felis concolor. They are a
bad family--these cats--the scratchers." He was holding John's wounded hand.
"So you've had your fight with a felis. A single encounter ought to be
enough! If some one hadn't happened to step in and save you!--What do you
suppose is the root of the idea universal in the consciousness of our race
that if a man had not been a man he'd have been a lion; and that if a woman
hadn't been a woman she'd have been a tigress? "
"I don't believe there's any such idea universal in the consciousness of the
race," replied John, laughing.
"It's universal in my consciousness," said the parson doggedly, "and my
consciousness is as valid as any other man's. But I'll ask you an easier
question: who of all men, do you suppose, knew most about women?"
"Women or Woman?" inquired John.
"Women," said the parson. "We'll drop the subject of Woman: she's beyond us!
"I don't know," observed John. "St. Paul knew a good deal, and said some
necessary things."
"St. Paul!" exclaimed the parson condescendingly. "He knew a few noble
Jewesses--superficially--with a scattering acquaintance among the pagan
sisters around the shores of the Mediterranean. As for what he wrote on
that subject--it may have been inspired by Heaven: it never could have been
inspired by the sex."
"Shakspeare, I suppose," said John.
"The man in the Arabian Nights," cried the parson, who may have been put in
mind of this character by his own attempts to furnish daily entertainment.
"He knew a thousand of them--intimately. And cut off the heads of nine
hundred and ninety-nine! The only reason he did not cut off the head of the
other was that he had learned enough: he could not endure to know any more.
All the evidence had come in: the case was closed."
"I suppose there are men in the world," he continued, "who would find it
hard to stand a single disappointment about a woman. But think of a thousand
disappointments! A thousand attempts to find a good wife--just one woman who
could furnish a man a little rational companionship at night. Bluebeard also
must have been a well-informed person. And Henry the Eighth--there was a man
who had evidently picked up considerable knowledge and who made considerable
use of it. But to go back a moment to the idea of the felis family. Suppose
we do this: we'll begin to enumerate the qualities of the common house cat.
I'll think of the cat; you think of some woman; and we'll see what we come
to."
"I'll not do it," said John. "She's too noble."
"Just for fun!"
"There's no fun in comparing a woman to a cat."
"There is if she doesn't know it. Come, begin!" And the parson laid one long
forefinger on one long little finger and waited for the first specification.
"Fineness," said John, thinking of a certain woman.
"Fondness for a nap," said the parson, thinking of a certain cat.
"Grace," said John.
"Inability to express thanks," said the parson.
"A beautiful form," said John."A desire to be stroked," said the parson.
"Sympathy," said John.
"Oh, no!" said the parson; "no cat has any sympathy. A dog has: a man is
more of a dog."
"Noble-mindedness," said John.
"That will not do either," said the parson. "Cats are not noble-minded; it's
preposterous!"
"Perfect case of manner," said John.
"Perfect indifference of manner," said the parson."
"No vanity," said John.
"No sense of humour," said the parson.
"Plenty of wit," said John.
"You keep on thinking too much about some woman," remonstrated the parson,
slightly exasperated.
"Fastidiousness," said John.
"Soft hands and beautiful nails," said the parson, nodding encouragingly.
"A gentle footstep," said John with a softened look coming into his eyes. "A
quiet presence."
"Beautiful taste in music," said John.
"Oh! dreadful!" said the parson. "What on earth are you thinking about?"
"The love of rugs and cushions," said John, groping desperately.
"The love of a lap," said the parson fluently.
"The love of playing with its victim," said John, thinking of another woman.
"Capital!" cried the parson. "That's the truest thing we've said. We'll not
spoil it by another word;" but he searched John's face covertly to see
whether this talk had beguiled him.
All this satire meant nothing sour, or bitter, or ignoble with the parson.
It was merely the low, far-off play of the northern lights of his mind,
irradiating the long polar night of his bachelorhood. But even on the polar
night the sun rises--a little way; and the time came when he married--as one
might expect to find the flame of a volcano hidden away in a mountain of
Iceland spar.
Toward the end of his illness, John lay one night inside his door, looking
soberly, sorrowfully out into the moonlight. A chair sat outside, and the
parson walked quietly up the green hill and took it. Then he laid his hat on
the grass; and passed his delicate hands slowly backward over his long fine
straight hair, on which the moonbeams at once fell with a luster as upon
still water or the finest satin.
They talked awhile of the best things in life, as they commonly did. At
length the parson said in his unworldly way:
"I have one thing against Aristotle: he said the effect of the flute was bad
and exciting. He was no true Greek. John, have you ever thought how much of
life can be expressed in terms of music? To me every civilization has given
out its distinct musical quality; the ages have their peculiar tones; each
century its key, its scale. For generations in Greece you can hear nothing
but the pipes; during other generations nothing but the lyre. Think of the
long, long time among the Romans when your ear is reached by the trumpet
alone.
"Then again whole events in history come down to me with the effect of an
orchestra, playing in the distance; single lives sometimes like a great
solo. As for the people I know or have known, some have to me the sound of
brass, some the sound of wood, some the sound of strings. Only--so few, so
very, very few yield the perfect music of their kind. The brass is a little
too loud; the wood a little too muffled; the strings--some of the strings
are invariably broken. I know a big man who is nothing but a big drum; and I
know another whose whole existence has been a jig on a fiddle; and I know a
shrill little fellow who is a fife; and I know a brassy girl who is a pair
of cymbals; and once--once," repeated the parson whimsically, "I knew an old
maid who was a real living spinet. I even know another old maid now who is
nothing but an old music book--long ago sung through, learned by heart, and
laid aside: in a faded, wrinkled binding--yellowed paper stained by
tears--and haunted by an odour of rose-petals, crushed between the leaves of
memory: a genuine very thin and stiff collection of the rarest original
songs--not songs without words, but songs without sounds--the ballads of an
undiscovered heart, the hymns of an unanswered spirit."
After a pause during which neither of the men spoke, the parson went on:
"All Ireland--it is a harp! We know what Scotland is. John," he exclaimed,
suddenly turning toward the dark figure lying just inside the shadow, "you
are a discord of the bagpipe and the harp: there's the trouble with you.
Sometimes I can hear the harp alone in you, and then I like you; but when
the bagpipe begins, you are worse than a big bumblebee with a bad cold."
"I know it," said John sorrowfully. "My only hope is that the harp will
outlast the bee."
"At least that was a chord finely struck," said the parson warmly. After
another silence he went on.
"Martin Luther--he was a cathedral organ. And so it goes. And so the whole
past sounds to me: it is the music of the world: it is the vast choir of the
ever-living dead." He gazed dreamily up at the heavens: "Plato! he is the
music of the stars."
After a little while, bending over and looking at the earth and speaking in
a tone of unconscious humility, he added:
"The most that we can do is to begin a strain that will swell the general
volume and last on after we have perished. As for me, when I am gone, I
should like the memory of my life to give out the sound of a flute."
He slipped his hand softly into the breastpocket of his coat and more softly
drew something out.
"Would you like a little music?" he asked shyly, his cold beautiful face all
at once taking on an expression of angelic sweetness.
John quickly reached out and caught his hand in a long, crushing grip: he
knew this was the last proof the parson could ever have given him that he
loved him. And then as he lay back on his pillow, he turned his face back
into the dark cabin.
Out upon the stillness of the night floated the parson's passion--
silver-clear, but in an undertone of such peace, of such immortal
gentleness. It was as though the very beams of the far-off serenest moon,
falling upon his flute and dropping down into its interior through its
little round openings, were by his touch shorn of all their lustre, their
softness, their celestial energy, and made to reissue as music. It was as
though his flute had been stuffed with frozen Alpine blossoms and these had
been melted away by the passionate breath of his soul into the coldest
invisible flowers of sound.
At last, as though all these blossoms in his flute had been used up--blown
out upon the warm, moon-lit air as the snow-white fragrances of the ear--the
parson buried his face softly upon his elbow which rested on the back of his
chair.
And neither man spoke again.
XIII
WHEN Mrs. Falconer had drawn near John's hut on the morning of his
misfortune, it was past noon despite all her anxious, sorrowful haste to
reach him. His wounds had been dressed. The crowd of people that had
gathered about his cabin were gone back to their occupations or their
homes--except a group that sat on the roots of a green tree several yards
from his door. Some of these were old wilderness folk living near by who had
offered to nurse him and otherwise to care for his comforts and needs. The
affair furnished them that renewed interest in themselves which is so liable
to revisit us when we have escaped a fellow-creature's suffering but can
relate good things about ourselves in like risks and dangers; and they were
drawing out their reminiscences now with unconscious gratitude for so
excellent an opportunity befalling them in these peaceful unadventurous
days. Several of John's boys lay in the grass and hung upon these
narratives. Now and then they cast awe-stricken glances at his door which
had been pushed to, that he might be quiet; or, if his pain would let him,
drop into a little sleep. They made it their especial care, when any
new-comer hurried past, to arrest him with the command that he must not go
in; and they would thus have stopped Mrs. Falconer but she put them gently
aside without heed or hearing.
When she softly pushed the door open, John was not asleep. He lay in a
corner on his low hard bed of skins against the wall of logs-- his eyes wide
open, the hard white glare of the small shutter-less window falling on his
face. He turned to her the look of a dumb animal that can say nothing of why
it has been wounded or of how it is suffering; stretched out his hand
gratefully; and drew her toward him. She sat down on the edge of the bed,
folded her quivering fingers across his temples, smoothed back his heavy,
coarse, curling hair, and bending low over his eyes, rained down into them
the whole unuttered, tearless passion of her distress, her sympathy.
Major Falconer came for her within the hour and she left with him almost as
soon as he arrived.
When she was gone, John lay thinking of her.
"What a nurse she is!" he said, remembering how she had concerned herself
solely his about life, his safety, his wounds. Once she had turned quickly:
"Now you can't go away!" she had said with a smile that touched him deeply.
"I wish you didn't have to go!" he had replied mourningfully, feeling his
sudden dependence on her.
This was the first time she had ever been in room--with its poverty, its
bareness. She must have cast about it a look of delicate inquiry--as a woman
is apt to do in a singleman's abode; for when she came again, in addition to
pieces of soft old linen for bandages brought fresh cool fragrant
sheets--the work of her own looms; a better pillow with a pillow-case on it
that was delicious to his cheek; for he had his weakness about clean, white
linen. She put a curtain over the pitiless window. He saw a wild rose in a
glass beside his Testament. He discovered moccasin slippers beside his bed.
"And here," she had said just before leaving, with her hand on a pile of
things and with an embarrassed laugh--keeping her face turned away--"here
are some towels."
Under the towels he found two night shirts--new ones.
When she was gone, he lay thinking of her again.
He had gratefully slipped on one of the shirts. He was feeling the new sense
of luxury that is imparted by a bed enriched with snow-white, sweet-smelling
pillows and sheets. The curtain over his window strained into his room a
light shadowy, restful. The flower on his table,--the transforming touch in
his room--her noble brooding tenderness--everything went into his gratitude,
his remembrance of her. But all this--he argued with a sudden taste for fine
discrimination--had not been done out of mere anxiety for his life: it was
not the barren solicitude of a nurse but the deliberate, luxurious regard of
a mother for his comfort: no doubt it represented the ungovernable overflow
of the maternal, long pent-up in her ungratified. And by this route he came
at last to a thought of her that novel for him--the pitying recollection of
her childlessness.
"What a mother she would have been!" he said rebelliously. "The mother of
sons who would have become great through her--and greater through the memory
of her after she was gone."
When she came again, seeing him out of danger and seeing him comfortable,
she seated herself beside his table and opened her work."It isn't good for
you to talk much," she soon said reprovingly, "and I have to work--and to
think."
And so he lay watching her--watching her beautiful fingers which never
seemed to rest in life--watching her quiet brow with its ripple of lustrous
hair forever suggesting to him how her lovely neck and shoulders would be
buried by it if its long light waves were but loosened. To have a woman
sitting by his table with her sewing--it turned his room into something
vaguely dreamed of heretofore: a home. She finished a sock for Major
Falconer and began on one of his shirts. He counted the stitches as they
went into a sleeve. They made him angry. And her face!--over it had come a
look of settled weariness; for perhaps if there is ever a time when a woman
forgets and the inward sorrow steals outward to the surface as an unwatched
shadow along a wall, it is when she sews.
"What a wife she is!" he reflected enviously after she was gone; and he
tried not to think of certain matters in her life. "What a wife! How
unfaltering in duty!"
The next time she came, it was early. She seemed to him to have bathed in
the freshness, the beauty, the delight of the morning. He had never seen her
so radiant, so young. She was like a woman who holds in her hand the
unopened casket of life--its jewels still ungazed on, still unworn. There
was some secret excitement in her as though the moment had at last come for
her to open it. She had but a few moments to spare.
"I have brought you a book," she said, smiling and laying her cheek against
a rose newly placed by his Testament. For a moment she scrutinized him with
intense penetration. Then she added:
"Will you read it wisely?"
"I will if I am wise," he replied laughing. "Thank you," and he held out his
hand for the book eagerly.
She clasped it more tightly with the gayest laugh of irresolution. Her
colour deepened. A moment later, however, she recovered the simple and noble
seriousness to which she had grown used as the one habit of her life with
him.
"You should have read it long ago," she said. "But it is not too late for
you. Perhaps now is your best time. It is a good book for a man, wounded as
you have been; and by the time you are well, you will need it more than you
have ever done. Hereafter you will always need it more."
She spoke with partly hidden significance, as one who knows life may speak
to one who does not.
He eyed the book despairingly.
"It is my old Bible of manhood," she continued with rich soberness, " part
worthless, part divine. Not Greek manhood--nor Roman manhood: they were too
pagan. Not Semitic manhood: that--in its ideal at least--was not pagan
enough. But something better than any of these--something that is
everything."
The subject struck inward to the very heart's root of his private life. He
listened as with breath arrested.
"We know what the Greeks were before everything else," she said resolutely:
" hey were physical men: we think less of them spiritually in any sense of
the idea that is valued by us and of course we do not think of them at all
as gentlemen: that involves of course the highest courtesy to women. The
Jews were of all things spiritual in the type of their striving. Their
ancient system, and the system of the New Testament itself as it was soon
taught and passed down to us, struck a deadly blow at the development of the
body for its own sake--at physical beauty: and the highest development of
the body is what the race can never do without. It struck another blow at
the development of taste--at the luxury and grace of the intellect: which
also the race can never do without. But in this old book you will find the
starting-point of a new conception of ideal human life. It grew partly out
of the pagan; it grew partly out of the Christian; it added from its own age
something of its own. Nearly every nation of Europe has lived on it ever
since--as its ideal. The whole world is being nourished by that ideal more
and more. It is the only conception of itself that the race can never fall
away from without harm, because it is the ideal of its own perfection. You
know what I mean?" she asked a little imperiously as though she were talking
to a green boy.
"What do you mean?" he asked wonderingly. She had never spoken to him in
this way. Her mood, the passionate, beautiful, embarrassed stress behind all
this, was a bewildering revelation.
"I mean," she said, "that first of all things in this world a man must be a
man--with all the grace and vigour and, if possible, all the beauty of the
body. Then he must be a gentleman--with all the grace, the vigour, the good
taste of the mind. And then with both of these--no matter what his creed,
his dogmas, his superstitions, his religion--with both of these he must try
to live a beautiful life of the spirit."
He looked at her eagerly, gratefully.
"You will find him all these," she resumed, dropping her eyes before his
gratitude which was much too personal. "You wil1 find all these in this
book: here are men who were men; here are men who were gentlemen; and here
are gentlemen who served the unfallen life of the spirit."
She kept her eyes on the book. Her voice had become very grave and reverent.
She had grown more embarrassed, but at last she went on as though resolved
to finish:
"So it ought to help you! It will help you. It will help you to be what you
are trying to be. There are things here that you have sought and have never
found. There are characters here whom you have wished to meet without ever
having known that they existed. If you will always live by what is best in
this book, love the best that it loves, hate what it hates, scorn what it
scorns, follow its ideals to the end of the world, to the end of your
life --"
"Oh, but give it to me!" he cried, lifting himself impulsively on one elbow
and holding out his hand for it.
She came silently over to the bedside and placed it on his hand. He studied
the title wonderingly, wonderingly turned some of the leaves, and at last,
smiling with wonder still, looked up at her. And then he forgot the
book--forgot everything but her.
Once upon a time he had been walking along a woodland path with his eyes
fixed on the ground in front of him as was his studious wont. In the path
itself there had not been one thing to catch his notice: only brown
dust--little stones--a twig--some blades of withered grass.
Then all at once out of this dull, dead motley of harmonious nothingness, a
single gorgeous spot had revealed itself, swelled out, and disappeared: a
butterfly had opened its wings, laid bare their inside splendours, and
closed them again--presenting to the eye only the adaptive, protective,
exterior of those marvellous swinging doors of its life. He had wondered
then that Nature could so paint the two sides of this thinnest of all
canvases: the outside merely daubed over that it might resemble the dead and
common and worthless things amid which the creature had to live--a
masterwork of concealment; the inside designed and drawn and coloured with
lavish fullness of plan, grace of curve, marvel of hue--all for the purpose
of the exquisite self revelation which should come when the one great
invitation of existence was sought or was given.
As the young school-master now looked up--too quickly--at the woman who
stood over him, her eyes were like a butterfly's gorgeous wings that for an
instant had opened upon him and already were closing--closing upon the
hidden splendours of her nature--closing upon the power to receive upon
walls of beauty all the sunlight of the world.
"What a woman!" he said to himself, strangely troubled a moment later when
she was gone. He had not looked at the book again. It lay forgotten by his
pillow.
"What a woman!" he repeated, with a sigh that was like a groan.
Her bringing of the book--her unusual conversation--her excitement--her
seriousness--the impression she made upon him that a new problem was
beginning to work itself out in her life--most of all that one startling
revelation of herself at the instant of turning away: all these occupied his
thoughts that day.
She did not return the next or the next or the next. And, it was during
these long vacant hours that he began to weave curiously together all that
he had ever heard of her and of her past; until, in the end, he accomplished
something like a true restoration of her life--in the colour of his own
emotions. Then he fell to wandering up and down this long vista of scenes as
he might have sought unwearied secret gallery of pictures through which he
alone had the privilege of walking.
At the far end of the vista he could behold her in her childhood as the
daughter of a cavalier land-holder in the valley of the James: an heiress of
a vast estate with its winding creeks and sunny bays, its tobacco
plantations worked by troops of slaves, its deer parks and open country for
the riding to hounds. There was the manor-house in the style of the grand
places of the English gentry from whom her father was descended; sloping
from the veranda to the river landing a wide lawn covered with the silvery
grass of the English parks, its walks bordered with hedges of box, its
summer-house festooned with vines, its terraces gay with the old familiar
shrubs and flowers loyally brought over from the mother land. He could see
her as, some bright summer morning, followed by a tame fawn, she bounded
down the lawn to the private landing where a slow frigate had stopped to
break bulk on its way to Williamsburg-perhaps to put out with other
furniture a little mahogany chair brought especially for herself over the
rocking sea from London or where some round-sterned packet from New England
or New Amsterdam was unloading its cargo of grain or hides or rum in
exchange for her father's tobacco. Perhaps to greet her father himself
returning from a long absence amid old scenes that still could draw him back
to England; or standing lonely on the pier, to watch in tears him and her
brothers--a vanishing group--as they waved her a last good-bye and drifted
slowly out to the blue ocean on their way "home" to school at Eton.
He liked to dwell on the picture of her as a little school-girl herself:
sent fastidiously on her way, with long gloves covering her arms, a white
linen mask tied over her face to screen her complexion from tan, a sunbonnet
sewed tightly on her head to keep it secure from the capricious winds of
heaven and the more variable gusts of her own wilfulness; or on another
picture of her--as a lonely little lass--begging to be taken to court, where
she could marvel at her father, an awful judge in his wig and his robe of
scarlet and black velvet; or on a third picture of her--as when she was
marshalled into church behind a liveried servant bearing the family
prayer-book, sat in the raised pew upholstered in purple velvet, with its
canopy overhead and the gilt letters of the family name in front; and a
little farther away on the wall of the church the Lord's Prayer and the
Commandments put there by her father at the cost of two thousand pounds of
his best tobacco; finally to be preached to by a minister with whom her
father sometimes spilt wine on the table-cloth, and who had once fought a
successful duel behind his own sanctuary of peace and good will to all men.
Here succeeded other scenes; for as his interest deepened, he never grew
tired of this restorative image-building by which she could be brought
always more vividly before his imagination.
Her childhood gone, then, he followed her as she glided along the shining
creeks from plantation to plantation in a canoe manned by singing black
oarsmen: or rode abroad followed by her greyhound, her face concealed by a
black velvet riding mask kept in place by a silver mouth-piece held between
her teeth; or when autumn waned, went rolling slowly along towards
Williamsburg or Annapolis in the great family coach of mahogany, with its
yellow facings, Venetian windows, projection lamps, and high seat for
footmen and coachman --there to take a house for the winter season--there to
give and to be given balls, where she trod the minuet, stiff in blue
brocade, her white shoulders rising out of a bodice hung with gems, her
beautiful head bearing aloft its tower of long white feathers.
Yet with most of her life passed at the great lonely country-house by the
bright river: qazing wistfully out of the deep-mullioned windows of diamond
panes; flitting up and down the wide staircase of carven oak; buried in its
library, with its wainscoted walls crossed with swords and hung with
portraits of soldierly faces: all of which pleased him best, he being a
home-lover. So that when facts were lacking, sometimes he would kindle true
fancies of her young life in this place: as when she reclined on mats and
cushions in the breeze-swept balls, fanned by a slave and reading the Tatler
or the Spectator; or if it were the chill twilights of October, perhaps came
in from a walk in the cool woods with a red leaf at her white throat, and
seated herself at the spinet, while a low blaze from the deep chimney seat
flickered over her face, and the low music flickered with the shadows; or
when the white tempests of winter raved outside, gave her nights to the
reading of "Tom Jones," by the light of myrtleberry candles on a
slender-legged mahogany table.
But he had heard a great deal of her visits at the other great country
places of the day. Often at Greenway Court, where her father went to ride to
hounds with Lord Fairfax and Washington; at Carter's Grove; at the homes of
the Berkeleys, the Masons, the Spottswoods; once, indeed, at Castlewood
itself, where the stately Madam Esmond Warrington had placed her by her own
side at dinner and had kissed her check at leaving; but oftenest at Brandon
Mansion where one of her heroines had lived--Evelyn Byrd; so that, Sir
Godfrey Knell having painted that sad young lady, who now lies with a heavy
stone on her heavier heart in the dim old burying-ground at Westover, she
would have it that hers must be painted in the same identical fashion, with
herself sitting on a green bank, a cluster of roses in her hand, a
shepherd's crook across her knees.
And then, just as she was fairly opening into the earliest flower of
womanhood, the sudden, awful end of all this half-barbaric,
half-aristocratic life--the revolt of the colonies, the outbreak of the
Revolution, the blaze of way that swept the land like a forest fire, and
that enveloped in its furies even the great house on the James. One of her
brothers turned Whig, and already gone impetuously away in his uniform of
buff and blue, to follow the fortunes of Washington; the other siding with
the "home" across the sea, and he too already ridden impetuously away in
scarlet. Her proud father, his heart long torn between these two and
between his two countries, pacing the great hall, his face flushed with
wine, his eyes turning confusedly, pitifully, on the soldierly portraits of
his ancestors; until at last he too was gone, to keep his sword and his
conscience loyal to his king.
And then more dreadful years and still sadder times; as when one dark
morning toward daybreak, by the edge of a darker forest draped with snow
where the frozen dead lay thick, they found an officer's hat half filled
with snow, and near by, her father fallen face downward; and turning him
over, saw a bullet-hole over his breast, and the crimson of his blood on the
scarlet of his waistcoat; so departed, with manfulness out of this world and
leaving behind him some finer things than his debts and mortgages over dice
and cards and dogs and wine and lotteries. Then not long after that, the
manor-house on the James turned into the unkindest of battlefields; one
brother defending at the head of troops within, the other attacking at the
head of troops without; the snowy bedrooms becoming the red-stained wards of
a hospital; the staircase hacked by swords; the poor little spinet and the
slender-legged little mahogany tables overturned and smashed, the portraits
slashed, the library scattered. Then one night, seen from a distance, a vast
flame licking the low clouds; and afterwards a black ruin where the great
house had stood, and so the end of it all forever.
During these years, she, herself, had been like a lily in a lake, never
uprooted, but buried out of sight beneath the storm that tosses the waves
back and forth.
Then white and heavenly Peace again, and the liberty of the Anglo-Saxon race
in the New World. But with wounds harder to heal than those of the flesh;
with memories that were as sword-points broken off in the body; with glory
to brighten more and more, as time went on, but with starvation close at
hand. Virginia willing to pay her heroes but having naught wherewith to pay,
until the news comes from afar, that while all this has been going on in the
East, in the West the rude border-folk, the backwoodsmen of the Blue Ridge
and the Alleghanies, without generals, without commands, without help or
pay, or reward of any kind, but fighting of their own free will and dyeing
every step of their advance with their blood, had entered and conquered the
great neutral game-park of the Northern and the Southern Indians, and were
holding it against all plots: in the teeth of all comers and against the
frantic Indians themselves; against England, France, Spain,--a new land as
good as the best of old England--Kentucky! Into which already thousands upon
thousands were hurrying in search of homes --a new movement of the race--its
first spreading-out over the mighty continent upon its mightier destiny.
So had come about her hasty marriage with her young officer, whom Virginia
rewarded for his service with land; so had followed the breaking of all
ties, to journey by his side into the wilderness, there to undergo hardship,
perhaps death itself after captivity and torture such that no man who has
ever loved a woman can even look another man in the face and name.
Thus ever on and on unwittingly he wove the fibres of her life about him as
his shirt of destiny: following the threads nearer, always nearer, toward
the present, until he reached the day on which he had first met her on his
in the wilderness. From that time, he no longer relied upon hearsay, but
drew from his own knowledge of her to fill out and so far to end all these
fond tapestries of his memory and imagination.
But as one who has traversed a long gallery of pictures, and, turning to
look back upon all that he has passed, sees a straight track narrowing away
into the dimming distance, and only the last few life scenes standing out
lustrous and clear, so the school-master, gazing down this long vista,
beheld at the far end of it a little girl, whom he did not know, playing on
the silvery ancestral lawns of the James; at the near end, watching by his
bedside on this rude border of the West, a woman who had become
indispensable to his friendship.
More days passed, and still she did not return. His eagerness for her rose
and followed, and sorrowfully set with every sun.
Meantime he read the book, beginning it with an effort through finding it
hard to withdraw his mind from his present. But soon he was clutching it
with a forgotten hand and lay on his bed for hours joined fast to it with
unreleasing eyes; draining its last words into his heart, with a thirst
newly begotten and growing always the more quenchless as it was always being
quenched. So that having finished it, he read it again, now seeing the high
end of it all from the low beginning. And then a third time, more
clingingly, more yearningly yet, thrice lighting the fire in his blood with
the same straw. Like a vital fire it was left in him at last, a red and
white of flame; the two flames forever hostile, and seeking each to burn the
other out. And while it stayed in him thus as a fire, it had also filled all
tissues of his being as water fills a sponge--not dead water a dead
sponge--but as a living sap runs through the living sponges of a young oak
on the edge of its summer. So that never should he be able to forget it;
never henceforth be the same in knowledge or heart or conscience; and
nevermore was the lone spiritual battle of his life, if haply waged at all,
to be fought out by him with the earlier, simpler weapons of his innocence
and his youth, but with all the might of a tempted man's high faith in the
beauty and the right and the divine supremacy of goodness.
One morning his wounds had begun to require attention. No one had yet come
to him: it was hardly the customary hour: and moreover, by rising in bed he
could see that something unusual had drawn the people into the streets. The
news of a massacre on the western frontier, perhaps; the arrival of the
post-rider with angry despatches from the East; or the torch of revolution
thrown far northward from New Orleans. His face had flushed with feverish
waiting and he lay with his eyes turned restlessly toward the door.
It was Mrs. Falconer who stepped forward to it with hesitation. But as soon
as she caught sight of him, she hurried to the bed.
"What is the trouble? Have you been worse?"
"Oh, nothing! It is nothing."
"Why do you say that--to me?"
"My shoulder. But it is hardly time for them to come yet."
She hesitated and her face showed how serious her struggle was.
"Let me," she said firmly.
He looked up quickly, confusedly, at her with a refusal on his lips; but she
had already turned away to get the needful things in readiness, and he
suffered her, if for no other reason than to avoid letting her see the
painful rush of blood to his face. As she moved about the room, she spoke
only to ask unavoidable questions; he, only to answer them; and neither
looked at the other.
Then he sat up in the bed and bared his neck and shoulder, one arm and half
his chest; and with his face crimson, turned his eyes away. She had been
among the women in the fort during that summer thirteen years before, when
the battle of the Blue Licks had been fought; and speaking in the quietest,
most natural of voices, she now began to describe how the wounded had
straggled in from the battle-field; one rifleman reeling on his horse and
held in his seat by the arm of a comrade, his bleeding, bandaged head on
that comrade's shoulder; another borne on a litter swung between two horses;
others --footmen--holding out just long enough to come into sight of the
fort, there to sink down; one, a mere youth, fallen a mile back in the hot
dusty buffalo trace with an unspoken message to some one in his brave,
beautiful, darkening eyes. But before this, she told him how the women had
watched all that night and the day previous inside the poor little
earth-mound of a defence against artillery, built by order of Jefferson and
costing $37.5O; the women taking as always the places of the men who were
gone away to the war; becoming as always the defenders of the land, of the
children, of those left behind sick or too old to fight. How from the black
edge of dawn they had strained their eyes in the direction of the battle
until at last a woman's cry of agony had rent the air as the first of the
wounded had ridden slowly into sight. How they had rushed forth through the
wooden gates and heard the tidings of it all and then had followed the
scenes and the things that could never be told for pity and grief and love
and sadness.
After a little pause she began to speak of Major Falconer as the
school-master had never known her to speak; tremulously of his part in that
battle, a Revolutionary officer serving as a common backwoods soldier;
eloquently of his perfect courage then and always, of his perfect manliness;
and she ended by saying that the worst thing that could ever befall a woman
was to marry an unmanly man.
"If any one single thing in life could ever have killed me," she said, "it
would have been that."
With her last words she finished the dressing of his wounds. Spots of the
deepest rose were on her cheeks; her eyes were lighted with proud fire.
Confusedly he thanked her and, lying back on his pillow, closed his eyes and
turned his face away.
When she had quickly gone he sat up in the bed again. He drew the book
guiltily from under his pillow, looked long and sorrowfully at it, and then
with a low cry of shame--the first that had ever burst from his lips--he
hurled it across the room and threw himself violently down again, with his
forehead against the logs, his eyes hidden, his face burning.