XXII

IT was early autumn when the first letters from him were received over the

mountains. All these had relation to Mount Vernon and his business there.

To the Transylvania Library Committee he wrote that the President had mad a

liberal subscription for the buying of books and that the Vice-President and

other public men would be likely to contribute.

His sonorous, pompous letter to a member of the Democratic Society was much

longer and in part as follows:

"When I made know to the President who I was and where I came from, he

regarded me with a look at once so stern and so benign, that I felt like one

of my school-boys overtaken in some small rascality and was almost of a mind

to march straight to a corner of the room and stand with my face to the

wall. If he had seized me by the coat collar and trounced me well, I should

somehow have felt that he had the right. From the conversations that

followed I am led to believe that he knows the name of every prominent

member of the Democratic Society of Lexington, and that he understands

Kentucky affairs with regard to national and international complications as

no other living man. While questioning me on the subject, he had the manner

of one who, from conscientiousness, would further verify facts which he had

already tested. But what impressed me even more than his knowledge was his

justice; in illustration of which I shall never forget his saying, that the

part which Kentucky had taken, or had wished to take, in the Spanish and

French conspiracies had caused him greater solicitude than any other single

event since the foundation of the National Government; but that nowhere else

in America had the struggle for immediate self-government been so necessary

and so difficult, and that nowhere else were the mistakes of patriotic and

able men more natural or more to be judged with mildness.

"I think I can quote his very words when he spoke of the foolish jealousies

and heartburnings, due to misrepresentations, that have influenced Kentucky

against the East as a section and against the Government as favouring it:

'The West derives from the East supplies requisite to its growth and

comfort; and what is perhaps of still greater consequence, it must of

necessity owe the secure enjoyment of indispensable outlets for its own

production to the weight, influence, and future maritime strength of the

Atlantic side of the Union, directed by an indissoluble community of

interest, as One Nation.'

"Memorable to me likewise was the language in which he proceeded to show

that this was true:

"'The inhabitants of our Western country have lately had a useful lesson on

this head. They have seen in the negotiations by the Executive, and in the

unanimous ratification by the Senate of the treaty with Spain, and in the

universal satisfaction of that event throughout the United States, a

decisive proof how unfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a

policy in the General Government and in the Atlantic States unfriendly to

their interests in regard to the Mississippi. . . . Will they not henceforth

be deaf to those advisers, if such there are, who would sever them from

their Brethren and connect them with Aliens?'

"I am frank to declare that, having enjoyed the high privilege of these

interviews with the President and been brought to judge rightly what through

ignorance I had judged amiss, I feel myself in honour bound to renounce my

past political convictions and to resign my membership in the Lexington

Democratic Society. Nor shall I join the Democratic Society of Philadelphia,

as had been my ardent purpose; and it will not be possible for me on

reaching that city to act as the emissary of the Kentucky Clubs. But I shall

lay before the Society the despatches of which I am the bearer. And will you

lay before yours the papers herewith enclosed, containing my formal

resignation with the grounds thereof carefully stated?"

To Mrs. Falconer he wrote bouyantly:

"I have crossed the Kentucky Alps, seen the American Caesar, carried away

some of his gold. I came, I saw, I overcame. How do you think I met the

President? I was riding toward Mount Vernon one quiet sunny afternoon and

unexpectedly came upon an old gentleman who was putting up some bars that

opened into a wheat-filed by the roadside. He had on long boots, corduroy

smalls, a speckled red jacket, blue coat with yellow buttons, and a

broad-brimmed hat. He held a hickory switch in his hand. An umbrella and a

long staff were attached to his saddle-bow. His limbs were so long, large,

and sinewy; his countenance so lofty, masculine, and contemplative; and

although he was of a presence so statue-like and venerable that my heart

with a great throb cried out, It is Washington!"

"My dear friend," he wrote at the close, "it is of no little worth to me

that I should have come to Mount Vernon at this turning-point of my life. I

find myself uplifted to a plane of thought and feeling higher than has ever

been trod by me. When I began to draw near this place, I seemed to be

mounting higher, like a man ascending a mountain; and ever since my arrival

there has been this same sense of rising into a still loftier atmosphere, of

surveying a vaster horizon, of beholding the juster relations of surrounding

objects.

"All this feeling has its origin in my contemplation of the character of the

President. You know that when a heavy sleet falls upon the Kentucky forest,

the great trees crack and split, or groan and stagger, with branches snapped

off or trailing. In adversity it is often so with men. But he is a vast

mountain-peak, always calm, always lofty, always resting upon a base that

nothing can shake; never higher, never lower, never changing; from every

quarter of the earth storms have rushed in and beaten upon him; but they

have passed; he is as he was. The heavens have emptied their sleets and

snows on his head,--these have made him look only purer, only the more

sublime.

"From the spectacle of this great man thus bearing the great burdens of his

great life, a new standard of what is possible to human nature has been

raised within me. I have seen with my own eyes a man whom the adverse forces

of the world have not been able to wreck--a lover of perfection, who has so

wrought it out in his character that to know him is to be awed into

reverence of his virtues. I shall go away from him with nobler hopes of what

a man may do and be.

"It is to you soley that I owe the honour of having enjoyed the personal

consideration of the President. His reception of me had been in the highest

degree ceremonious and distant; but upon my mentioning the names of father

and brother, his manner grew warm: I had touched that trait of affectionate

faithfulness with which he has always held on to every tie of kin and

friendship. That your father should have fought against him and your brother

under him made no difference in his memory. He had many questions to ask

regarding you--your happiness, your family--to some of which I could return

the answers that gave him pleasure or left him thoughtful. Upon my setting

out from Mount Vernon, his last words made me the bearer of his message to

you, the child of an old comrade and the sister or a gallant young soldier."

Beyond this there was nothing personal in his letter and nothing as to his

return.

When she next heard, he was in Philadelphia, giving his attention to the

choosing and shipment of the books. One piece of news, imparted in perfect

calmness by him, occasioned her acute disappointment. His expectation of

coming into possession of some ten thousand dollars had not quite been

realized. An appeal had been taken and the case was yet pending. He was

pleased neither with the good faith nor with the good sense of the counsel

engaged; and he would remain on the spot himself during the trial. He added

that he was lodging with a pleasant family. Then followed the long winter

during which all communication between the frontier and the seaboard was

interrupted. When spring returned at last and the earliest travel was

resumed, other letters came, announcing that the case had gone against him,

and that he had nothing.

She sold at once all the new linen that had been woven, got together all the

money she otherwise could and despatched it with Major Falconer's consent,

begging him to make use of it for the sake of their friendship--not to be

foolish and proud: there were lawyers' fees it could help to pay, or other

plain practical needs it might cover. But when the post-rider returned, he

brought it all back with a letter of gratitude: only, he couldn't accept it.

And the messenger had been warned not to let it be known that he was in

prison for debt on account of these same suit expenses; for having from the

first formed a low opinion of his counsel's honour and ability and having

later expressed this opinion at the door of the court-room with a good deal

of fire and a good deal of contempt, and being furthermore unable and

unwilling to pay the exorbitant fee, he had been promptly clapped into jail

by the incensed attorney, as well for his poverty and for his temper and his

pride.

In jail he spent that spring and summer and autumn. Then an important turn

was given to his history. It seems that among the commissions with which he

was charged on leaving Lexington was one from Edward West, the watchmaker

and inventor, who some time before, and long before Fulton, had made trial

of steam navigation with a small boat on the Town Fork of the Elkhorn, and

who desired to have his invention brought before the American Philosophical

Society of Philadelphia. He had therefore placed a full description of his

steamboat in John's hands with the request that he would enforce this with

the testimony of an eye-witness as to its having moved through water. At

this time, through Franklin's influence, the Society was keenly interested

in the work of inventors, having received also some years previous from

Hyacinthe de Magellan two hundred guineas to be used for rewarding the

authors of improvements and discoveries. Accordingly it took up the subject

of West's invention but desired to hear more regarding the success of the

experiment; and so requested John to appear before it at one of its

meetings. But upon looking for this obscure John and finding him in jail,

the committee were under the necessity of appearing before him. Whereupon,

grown interested in him and made acquainted with the ground of his

unreasonable imprisonment, some of the members effected his release--by

recourse to the attorney with certain well-direct threats that he could

easily be put into jail for his own debts. Not only this; but soon

afterwards the young Westerner was taken into the law-office of one of these

gentlemen, binding himself for a term of years.

It was not until spring that he wrote he humorously of his days in jail; but

when it came to telling her of the other matter, the words refused to form

themselves before his will or his hand to shape them on the paper. He would

do this in the next letter, he said to himself mournfully.

But early that winter Major Falconer had died, and his next letter was but a

short hurried reply to one from her, bringing him this intelligence. And

before he wrote again, certain grave events had happened that led him still

further to defer acquainting her with his new situation, new duties, new

plans.

That same spring, then, during which he was entering upon his career in

Philadelphia, she too began really to live. And beginning to live, she began

to build--inwardly and outwardly; for what is all life but ceaseless inner

and outer building?

As the first act, she sold one of the major's military grants, reserving the

ample, noble, parklike one on which she had passed existence up to this; and

near the cabin she laid the foundations of her house. Not the great

ancestral manor-house on the James and yet a seaboard aristocratic Virginia

country-place: two story brick with two-story front veranda of Corinthian

columns; wide hall, wide stairway; oak wood interior, hand-carved, massive;

sliding doors between the large library and large dining-room; great

bedrooms, great fireplaces, great brass fenders and fire-dogs, brass locks

and keys: full of elegance, spaciousness, comfort, rest.

In every letter she sent him that spring and summer and early autumn, always

she had something to tell him about this house, about the room in it built

for him, about the negros she had bought, the land she was clearing, the

changes and improvements everywhere: as to many things she wanted his

advice. That year also she sent back to Virginia for flower-seed and shrub

and plants--the same old familiar ones that had grown on her father's lawn,

in the garden, about the walls, along the water--some of which had been

bought over from England: the flags, the lilies, honeysuckles, calacanthus,

snowdrops, roses--all of them. Speaking of this, she wrote him that of

course that most of these would have to be set out that autumn, and little

could be done for grounds till the following season; but the house!--it was

to be finished before winter set in. In the last of these letters, she ended

by saying: "I think I know now the very day you will be coming back. I can

hear your horse's feet rustling in the leaves of--I said--October; but I

will say November this time."

His replies were unsatisfying. There had been the short, hurried, earnest

letter, speaking of Major Falconer's death: that was all right. But since

then a vague blinding mist had seemed to lie between her eyes and every

page. Something was kept hidden--some new trouble. "I shall understand

everything when he comes!" she would say to herself each time. "I can wait."

Her buoyancy was irrepressible.

Late that autumn the house was finished--one of those early country-places

yet to be seen here and there on the landscape of Kentucky, marking the

building era of the aristocratic Virginians and renewing in the wilderness

the architecture of the James.

She had taken such delight in furnishing her room: in the great bedstead

with its mighty posts, its high tester, its dainty, hiding curtains; such

delight in choosing, in bleaching, in weaving the linen for it! And the

pillowcases--how expectant they were on the two pillows now set side by side

at the head of the bed, with the delicate embroidery in the centre of each!

At first she had thought of working her initials within an oval-shaped vine;

but one day, her needle suddenly arrested in the air, she had simply worked

a rose.

Late one afternoon, when the blue of Indian summer lay on the walls of the

forest like a still sweet veil, she came home from a walk in the woods. Her

feet had been rustling among the brown leaves and each time she had laughed.

At her round white throat she had pinned a scarlet leaf, from an old habit

of her girlhood. But was not Kentucky turning into Virginia? Was not

womanhood becoming girlhood again? She was still so young--only

thirty-eight. She had the right to be bringing in from the woods a bunch of

the purple violets of November.

She sat down in her shadowy room before the deep fireplace; where there was

such comfort now, such loneliness. In early years at such hours she had like

to play. She resolved to get her a spinet. Yes; and she would have

myrtle-berry candles instead of tallow, and a slender-legged mahogany table

beside which to read again in the Spectator and "Tom Jones." As nearly as

she could she would bring back everything that she had been used to in her

childhood--was not all life still before her? If he were coming, it must be

soon, and she would know what had been keeping him--what it was that had

happened. She had walked to meet him so many times already. And the

heartless little gusts of wind, starting up among the leaves in the woods,

how often they had fooled her ear and left her white and trembling!

The negro boy who had been sent to town on other business and to fetch the

mail, soon afterwards knocked and entered. There was a letter from him--a

short one and a paper. She read the letter and could not believe her own

eyes, could not believe her own mind. Then she opened the paper and read the

announcement of it printed there": he was married.

That night in her bedroom--with the great clock measuring out life in the

corner--the red logs turning slowly to ashes--the crickets under the bricks

of the hearth singing of summer gone--that night, sitting by the

candle-stand, where his letter lay opened, in a nightgown white as white

samite, she loosened the folds of her heavy lustrous hair--wave upon

wave--until the edges that rippled over her forehead rippled down over her

knees. With the loosening of her hair somehow had come the loosening of her

tears. And with the loosening of her tears came the loosening of her hold

upon what she, until this night, had never acknowledged to herself--her love

for him, the belief that he had loved her.

The next morning the parson, standing a white, cold shepherd before his

chilly wilderness flock, preached a sermon from the text: "I shall go softly

all my years." While the heads of the rest were bowed during the last

moments of prayer, she rose and slipped out.

"Yes," she said to herself, gathering her veil closely about her face as she

alighted at the door of her house and the withered leaves of November were

whirled fiercely about her feet, "I shall go softly all my years."