"You know we can't trust our negroes. They disobeyed you. They lied
to you; they never buried it. They threw it on the ash-pile. The pigs
tore it to pieces; I saw them; they were rooting at it and tearing it
to pieces."
She had clasped her hands, and turned towards me in acute distress.
After a while, with her face aside, she said, slowly,
"And you have believed that I knew of this--that I permitted it?"
"I have believed nothing. I have waited to understand."
A few minutes later she said, as if to herself,
"Many a person would have been only too glad to believe it, and to
blame me." Then folding her hands over one of mine, she said, with
tears in her eyes:
"Promise me--promise me, Adam, until we are married, and--yes, _after_
we are married--as long as I live, that you will never believe anything
of me until you _know_ that it is true!"
"I do promise, dear, dear, dearest one-!" I cried, trying to draw her
to me, but she would not permit it. "And you?"
"I shall never misunderstand," she replied, as with a flash of white
inward light. "I know that you can never do anything that will make me
think the less of you."
Since the sad, sad day on which I caused the death of the Cardinal, I
have paid little heed to the birds. The subject has been a sore one.
Besides, my whole life is gradually changing under the influence of
Georgiana, who draws me farther and farther away from nature, and
nearer and nearer to my own kind.
When, two years ago, she moved into this part of the State, I dwelt on
the outskirts of the town and of humanity. On the side of them lay the
sour land of my prose; the country, nature, rolled away on the other as
the sweet deep ocean of my poetry. I called my neighbors my
manifestations of prose; my doings with the townspeople, prose
passages. The manifestations and passages scarce made a scrimp volume.
There was Jacob, who lived on his symptoms and died without any; there
was and there is Mrs. Walters--may she last to the age of the eagle.
In town, a couple of prose items of cheap quality: an old preacher who
was willing to save my soul while my strawberries were ripe, and an old
doctor who cared to save my body so long as he could eat my pears--with
others interested severally in my asparagus, my rhubarb, my lilies, and
sweet-peas. Always not forgetting a few inestimably wholesome, cheery,
noble souls, who sought me out on the edge of human life rather than
succeeded in drawing me over the edge towards the centre.
But this Georgiana has been doing--long without my knowing it. I have
become less a woodsman, more a civilian. Unless she relents, it may
end in my ceasing to be a lover of birds, and running for the
Legislature. Seeing me so much on the streets, one of my
fellow-townsmen declared the other day that if I would consent to come
out of the canebrakes for good they would make me postmaster.
It has fallen awkwardly for me that this enforced transformation in my
tastes and habits should coincide with the season of my love-making;
and it is well that Georgiana does not demand in me the capering or
strutting manners of those young men of my day who likewise are
exerting themselves to marry. I am more like a badger than like one of
them; and indeed I find the image of my fate and my condition in a
badger-like creature close at hand.
For the carpenter who is at work upon bridal repairs in my house has
the fancy not uncommon among a class hereabouts to keep a tamed
raccoon. He brings it with him daily, and fastens it by its chain to a
tree in my front yard: a rough, burly, knowing fellow, loving wild
nature, but forced to acquire the tediousness of civilization; meantime
leading a desperately hampered life; wondering at his own teeth and
claws, and sorely put to it to invent a decent occupation. So am I;
and as the raccoon paces everywhere after the carpenter, so do I in
spirit pace everywhere after Georgiana; only his chain seems longer and
more easily to be broken. The restless beast enlivens his captivity by
the keenest scrutiny of every object within his range; I too have
busied myself with the few people that have come this way.
First, early in the month, Georgiana's brother--down from West Point,
very stately, and with his brow stern, as if for gory war. When I
called promptly to pay my respects, as his brother-in-law to be, he was
sitting on the front porch surrounded by a subdued family, Georgiana
alone remaining unawed. He looked me over indifferently, as though I
were a species of ancient earthworks not worth any more special
reconnoissance, and continued his most superior remarks to his mother
on the approaching visit of three generals.
Upon leaving I invited him to join me on the morrow in a squirrel hunt
with smooth-bores, whereupon he manifested surprise that I was
acquainted with the use of fire-arms. Whereupon I remarked that I
would sometimes hit big game if it were so close that I could not miss
it, and further urged him to have breakfast with me at a very early
hour in order that we might reach the woods while the squirrels were at
theirs.
Going home, I knocked at the cabin where Jack and Dilsy lay snoring
side by side with the velocity of rival saw-mills, and begged Dilsy to
give me a bite about daybreak--coffee and corn-batter cakes--saying
that I could get breakfast when I returned. I shared this scant bite
with my young soldier--to Dilsy's abject mortification, I not having
told her of his coming. Then we set off at a brisk pace towards a
great forest south of the town some five miles away, where the
squirrels had appeared and were doing great damage, being the last of a
countless plague of them that overran northern and central Kentucky a
year ago.
On the way I dragged him through several canebrakes, a thicket of
blackberry; kept him out all day; said not a word about dinner; avoided
every spot where he could have gotten a swallow of water; not once sat
down to rest; towards the middle of the afternoon told him I desired to
take enough squirrels home to make Jack a squirrel-skin overcoat, and
asked him to carry while I killed; loaded him with squirrels, neck,
shoulders, breast, back, and loins, till as he moved he tottered and
swayed like a squirrel pyramid; about sundown challenged him to what he
had not yet had, some crack shooting, which in that light requires
young eyesight, and barked the squirrel for him four times; later still
snuffed the candle for him, having brought one along for the purpose;
and then, with my step fresh, led him swiftly home.
He has the blood of Georgiana in him, and stood it like a man. But he
was nearly dead. He has saluted me since as though I were a murderous
garrison intrenched on the Heights of Abraham.
Then the three generals of the United States army descended in a
body--or in three bodies; and the truth is that their three bodies
scarce held them, they were in such a state of flesh when they reached
Kentucky, and of being perpetually overfed while they remained. The
object of their joint visit under a recent act of Congress was to
locate a military asylum for disabled soldiers; and had they stayed
much longer they must have had themselves admitted to their own
institution as foremost of the disabled. Having spent some time at the
Lower Blue Lick Springs, the proposed site--where this summer are over
five hundred guests of our finest Southern society--they afterwards
were drawn around with immense solidity towards Louisville, Frankfort,
Maysville, Paris, and Lexington, being everywhere received with such
honors and provisions that these great guns were in danger of becoming
spiked forever in both barrel and tube.
Upon reaching this town one of them detached himself from the heated
rolling mass and accepted the invitation of young Cobb--who had formed
the acquaintance at West Point--to make a visit in his home. He had
not been there many days before he manoeuvred to establish a private
military retreat for himself in the affections of Mrs. Cobb. So that
his presence became a profanation to Georgiana, whose reverence for her
heroic father burns like an altar of sacred fire, and whose nature
became rent in twain between her mother's suitor and her brother's
guest.
A most pestiferous variety of caterpillar has infested the tops of my
cherry-trees this summer, and during the general's encampment near Mrs.
Cobb I happened several times to be mounted on my step-ladder, busy
with my pruning-shears, when he was decoying her around her
garden--just over the fence--buckled in to suffocation, and with his
long epaulettes golden in the sun like tassels of the corn. I was
engaged in exterminating this insect on the last day of his sojourn.
They were passing almost beneath me on the other side; he had been
talking; I heard her brief reply, in a voice low and full of dignity,
"I have been married, sir!"
"Mother of Georgiana!" I cried, within myself. But had she ever
thought of taking a second husband she must have seen through "Old
Drumbeater," as Sylvia called him. There were times when their
breakfast would be late--for the sake of letting his chicken be broiled
in slow perfection or his rolls or waffles come to a faultless brown;
and I, being at work near the garden fence, would hear him tramping up
and down the walk on the other side and swearing at a family that had
such irregular meals. The camel, a lean beast, requires an
extraordinary supply of food, which it proceeds to store away in its
hump as nourishment to be drawn upon while it is crossing the desert.
There may be no long campaigning before the general; but if there were
and rations were short, why could he not live upon his own back? It is
of a thickness, a roundness, and an impenetrability that would have
justified Jackson in using him as a cotton-bale at the battle of New
Orleans.
Thus in my little corner of the world we have all been at the same
business of love, and I wonder whether the corner be not the world
itself: Mrs. Cobb and the general, Georgiana and I the sewing-girl and
the carpenter; for I had forgotten to note how quickly these two have
found out that they want each other. My arbor is at his service, if he
wishes it; and Jack shall keep silent about the mastodon.
It is true that from this sentimental enumeration I have omitted the
name of Mrs. Walters; but there is a secret here which not even
Georgiana herself will ever get from me. Mrs. Walters came to this
town twenty years ago from the region of Bowling Green. Some years
afterwards I made a trip into that part of the State to hear the
mocking-bird--for it fills those more southern groves, but never visits
ours; and while there I stepped by accident on this discovery: _There
never was any Mr. Walters_. It is her maiden name. But as I see the
freedom of her life and reflect upon the things that a widow can do and
an old maid cannot--with her own sex and with mine--I commend her
wisdom and leave her at peace. Indeed I have gone so far, when she has
asked for my sympathy, as to lament with her Mr. Walters's death.
After all, what great difference is there between her weeping for him
because he is no more, and her weeping for him because he never was?
After which she freshens herself up with another handkerchief, a little
Florida water, and a touch of May roses from the apothecary's.
And I have omitted the name of Sylvia; but then Sylvia's name, like
that of Lot's wife, can never be used as one of a class, and she
herself must always be spoken of alone. However, if Sylvia had been
Lot's wife she would not have turned to a pillar of salt, she would
most probably have become a geyser.
I don't know why, but she went on a visit to Henderson after that
evening in the arbor. I suspect the governing power of Georgiana's
wisdom to have been put forth here, for within a few days I received
from Sylvia a letter which she asked me not to show to Georgiana, and
in which she invited me to correspond with her secretly. The letter
was of a singularly adhesive quality as to the emotions. Throughout
she referred to herself as "the exile," although it was plain that she
wrote in the highest spirits; and in concluding she openly charged
Georgiana with having given her a black eye--a most unspeakable phrase,
surely picked up in the school-room. As a return for the black eye,
Sylvia said that she had composed a poem to herself, a copy of which
she enclosed.
I quote Sylvia's commemorative verses upon her wrongs and her
banishment. They show features of metrical excess, and can scarcely
claim to reflect the polish of her calmer art; but they are of value to
me as proving that whatever the rebuke Georgiana may have given, it had
rebounded from that elastic spirit.