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LEWIS RAND
by
MARY JOHNSTON
Author of _To Have And To Hold_, _Prisoners Of Hope_, etc.
With Illustrations by F. C. Yohn
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1908
[Illustration: I WILL MAKE COURT TO YOU IN A COURT SOME DAY!]
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
TO THE MEMORY OF
JOHN TYLER MORGAN
FOR THIRTY YEARS
UNITED STATES SENATOR
AND THROUGHOUT THE COURSE
OF A LONG LIFE
A GOOD MAN AND A PATRIOT
CONTENTS
I. THE ROAD TO RICHMOND
II. MR. JEFFERSON
III. FONTENOY
IV. THE TWO CANDIDATES
V. MONTICELLO
VI. RAND COMES TO FONTENOY
VII. THE BLUE ROOM
VIII. CARY AND JACQUELINE
IX. EXPOSTULATION
X. TO ALTHEA
XI. IN THE GARDEN
XII. A MARRIAGE AT SAINT MARGARET'S
XIII. THE THREE-NOTCHED ROAD
XIV. THE LAW OFFICE
XV. COMPANY TO SUPPER
XVI. AT LYNCH'S
XVII. FAIRFAX AND UNITY
XVIII. THE GREEN DOOR
XIX. MONTICELLO AGAIN
XX. THE NINETEENTH OF FEBRUARY
XXI. THE CEDAR WOOD
XXII. MAJOR EDWARD
XXIII. A CHALLENGE
XXIV. THE DUEL
XXV. OLD SAINT JOHN'S
XXVI. THE TRIAL OF AARON BURR
XXVII. THE LETTER
XXVIII. RAND AND MOCKET
XXIX. THE RIVER ROAD
XXX. HOMEWARD
XXXI. HUSBAND AND WIFE
XXXII. THE BROTHERS
XXXIII. GREENWOOD
XXXIV. FAIRFAX CARY
XXXV. THE IMAGE
XXXVI. IN PURSUIT
XXXVII. THE SIMPLE RIGHT
XXXVIII. M. DE PINCORNET
XXXIX. UNITY AND JACQUELINE
XL. THE WAY OF THE TRANSGRESSOR
ILLUSTRATIONS
I will make court to you in a court some day (Frontispiece)
You are a scoundrel
Cary saw and flung out his arm, swerving his horse, but too late
Drink to me only with thine eyes
CHAPTER I
THE ROAD TO RICHMOND
The tobacco-roller and his son pitched their camp beneath a gum tree
upon the edge of the wood. It was October, and the gum was the colour of
blood. Behind it rolled the autumn forest; before it stretched a level
of broom-sedge, bright ochre in the light of the setting sun. The road
ran across this golden plain, and disappeared in a league-deep wood of
pine. From an invisible clearing came a cawing of crows. The sky was
cloudless, and the evening wind had not begun to blow. The small,
shining leaves of the gum did not stir, and the flame of the camp-fire
rose straight as a lance. The tobacco cask, transfixed by the trunk of a
young oak and drawn by strong horses, had come to rest upon the turf by
the roadside. Gideon Rand unharnessed the team, and from the platform
built in the front of the cask took fodder for the horses, then tossed
upon the grass a bag of meal, a piece of bacon, and a frying-pan. The
boy collected the dry wood with which the earth was strewn, then struck
flint and steel, guarded the spark within the tinder, fanned the flame,
and with a sigh of satisfaction stood back from the leaping fire. His
father tossed him a bucket, and with it swinging from his hand, he made
through the wood towards a music of water. Goldenrod and farewell-summer
and the red plumes of the sumach lined his path, while far overhead the
hickories and maples reared a fretted, red-gold roof. Underfoot were
moss and coloured leaves, and to the right and left the squirrels
watched him with bright eyes. He found the stream where it rippled
between banks of fern and mint. As he knelt to fill the pail, the red
haw and the purple ironweed met above his head.
Below him was a little mirror-like pool, and it gave him back himself
with such distinctness that, startled, he dropped the pail, and bending
nearer, began to study the image in the water. Back in Albemarle, in his
dead mother's room, there hung a looking-glass, but it was cracked and
blurred, and he seldom gazed within it. This chance mirror of the woods
was more to the purpose. The moments slipped away while he studied the
stranger and familiar in the pool below him. The image was not formed or
coloured like young Narcissus, of whom he had never heard, but he
observed it with interest. He was fourteen, and old for his years. The
eyes reflected in the stream were brooding, the mouth had lost its
boyish curves, the sanguine cheek was thin, the jaw settling square. His
imagination, slow to quicken, had, when aroused, quite a wizard might.
He sank deeper amid the ironweed, forgot his errand, and began to dream.
He was the son of a tobacco-roller, untaught and unfriended, but he
dreamed like a king. His imagination began to paint without hands images
of power upon a blank and mighty wall, and it painted like a young
Michael Angelo. It used the colours of immaturity, but it conceived with
strength. "When I am a man--" he said aloud; and again, "When I am a
man--" The eyes in the pool looked at him yearningly; the leaves from
the golden hickories fell upon the water and hid him from himself. In
the distance a fox barked, and Gideon Rand's deep voice came rolling
through the wood: "Lewis! Lewis!"
The boy dipped the pail, lifted it brimming, and rose from his knees. As
he did so, a man parted the bushes on the far side of the stream,
glanced at the mossed and slippery stones rising from its bed, then with
a light and steady foot crossed to the boy's side. He was a young man,
wearing a fringed hunting-shirt and leggins and a coonskin cap, and
carrying a long musket. Over his shoulder was slung a wild turkey, and
at his heels came a hound. He smiled, showing very white teeth, and drew
forward his bronze trophy.
"Supper," he said briefly.
The boy nodded. "I heard your gun. I've made a fire yonder beneath a
black gum. Adam Gaudylock, I am well-nigh a man!"
"So you be, so you be," answered the other; "well-nigh a man."
The boy beat the air with a branch of sumach. "I want to be a man! But I
don't want to be a tobacco-roller like my father, nor--"
"Nor a hunter like me," the other finished placidly. "Be the Governor of
Virginia, then, or come with me and make yourself King of the
Mississippi! I've watched you, boy! You're growing up ambitious,
ambitious as What's-his-name--him that you read of?"
"Lucifer," answered the boy--"ambitious as Lucifer."
"Well, don't spill the water, my kingling," said the hunter
good-naturedly. "Life's not so strange as is the way folk look at it.
You and I, now,--we're different! What I care for is just every common
day as it comes naturally along, with woods in it, and Indians, and an
elk or two at gaze, and a boat to get through the rapids, and a drop of
kill-devil rum, and some shooting, and a petticoat somewhere, and a hand
at cards,--just every common day! But you build your house upon
to-morrow. I care for the game, and you care for the prize. Don't go too
fast and far,--I've seen men pass the prize on the road and never know
it! Don't you be that kind, Lewis."
"I won't," said the boy. "But of course one plays to win. After supper,
will you tell me about New Orleans and the Mississippi, and the French
and the Spaniards, and the moss that hangs from the trees, and the
oranges that grow like apples? I had rather be king of that country than
Governor of Virginia."
The sun set, and the chill dusk of autumn wrapped the yellow sedge, the
dusty road, and the pines upon the horizon. The heavens were high and
cold, and the night wind had a message from the north. But it was warm
beneath the gum tree where the fire leaped and roared. In the light the
nearer leaves of the surrounding trees showed in strong relief; beyond
that copper fretwork all was blackness. Out of the dark came the
breathing of the horses, fastened near the tobacco-cask, the croaking of
frogs in a marshy place, and all the stealthy, indefinable stir of the
forest at night. At times the wind brought a swirl of dead leaves across
the ring of light, an owl hooted, or one of the sleeping dogs stirred
and raised his head, then sank to dreams again. The tobacco-roller,
weary from the long day's travel, wrapped himself in a blanket and slept
in the lee of his thousand pounds of bright leaf, but the boy and the
hunter sat late by the fire.
"We crossed that swamp," said Gaudylock, "with the canes rattling above
our heads, and a panther screaming in a cypress tree, and we came to a
village of the Chickasaws--"
"In the night-time?"
"In the night-time, and a mockingbird singing like mad from a china
tree, and the woods all level before us like a floor,--no brush at all,
just fine grass, with flowers in it like pinks in a garden. So we smoked
the peace pipe with the Chickasaws, and I hung a wampum belt with fine
words, and we went on, the next day, walking over strawberries so thick
that our moccasins were stained red. At noon we overtook a party of
boatmen from the Ohio,--tall men they were, with beards, and dark and
dirty as Indians,--and we kept company with them through the country of
the Chickasaws and the Choctaws until we came to a high bluff, and saw
the Mississippi before us, brown and full and marked with drifting
trees, and up the river the white houses of Natchez. There we camped
until we made out the flat-boat,--General Wilkinson's boat, all laden
with tobacco and flour and bacon, and just a few Kentucks with
muskets,--that the Spaniards at Natchez had been fools enough to let
pass! We hailed that boat, and it came up beneath the cottonwoods, and I
went aboard with the letters from Louisville, and on we went, down the
river, past the great woods and the strange little towns, and the
cotton-fields and the sugar-canes, and the moss hanging like banners
from taller trees than this gum, to New Orleans. And there the Intendant
would have laid hands on our cargo and sent every mother's son of us
packing, but Miro, that was governor, stood our friend, being frightened
indeed of what Kentucky might do if put to it! And there, on the levee,
we sold that tobacco and flour and bacon; and the tobacco which we sold
at home for shillings and pence, we sold at New Orleans for joes and
doubloons. Ay, ay, and not one picayune of duty did we pay! Ay, and we
opened the Mississippi!"
The speaker paused to take from his pouch several leaves of tobacco, and
to roll them deftly into a long cigar. The boy rose to throw more wood
upon the fire, then sat again at the trader's feet, and with his chin in
his hand stared into the glowing hollows.
"The West!" said Gaudylock, between slow puffs of smoke. "Kentucky and
the Ohio and the Mississippi, and then Louisiana and all that lies
beyond, and Mexico and its gold! Ha! the Mississippi open from its
source--and the Lord in Heaven knows where that may be--to the last
levee! and not a Spaniard to stop a pirogua, and right to trade in every
port, and no lingo but plain English, and Mexico like a ripe
apple,--just a touch of the bough, and there's the gold in hand! If I
were a dreamer, I would dream of the West."
"Folk have always dreamed of the West," said the boy. "Sailors and
kings, and men with their fortune to make. I've read about Cortez and
Pizarro,--it would be fine to be like that!"
"I thought you wanted to study law."
"I do; but I could be a great soldier, too."
Gaudylock laughed. "You would trap all the creatures in the wood! Well,
live long enough, and you'll hear a drum beat. They're restless,
restless, yonder on the rivers! But they'll need the lawyers, too. Just
see what the lawyers did when we fought the British! Mr. Henry and Mr.
Jefferson--"
The boy put forth a sudden hand, gathered to him a pine bough, and with
it smote the red coals of the fire. "Oh!" he cried, "from morn till
night my father keeps me in the fields. It's tobacco! tobacco! tobacco!
And I want to go to school--I want to go to school!"
"That's a queer wanting," said the other thoughtfully. "I've wanted fire
when I was cold, and venison when I was hungry, and liquor when I was in
company, and money when I was gaming, and a woman when the moon was
shining and I wished to talk,--but I have never wanted to go to school.
A schollard sees a wall every time he raises his head. I like the open."
"There are walls in the forest," answered the boy, "and I do not want to
be a tobacco-roller! I want to study law!"
The hunter laughed. "Ho! A lawyer among the Rands! I reckon you take
after your mother's folk!"
The boy looked at him wistfully. "I reckon I do," he assented. "But my
name is Rand."
"There are worse folk than the Rands," said the woodsman. "I've never
known one to let go, once he had man or beast by the throat! Silent and
holdfast and deadly to anger--that's the Rands. If Gideon wants tobacco
and you want learning, there'll be a tussle!"
"My father's a tyrant!" cried the boy passionately. "If he doesn't keep
his hands off me, I'll--I'll _kill_ him!"
Gaudylock took the cigarro from his lips. "You're too fond of that
word," he exclaimed, with some sternness. "All the wolves that the Rands
ever hunted have somehow got into their blood. Suppose you try a little
_un_learning? Great lawyers and great men and great conquerors and good
hunters don't kill their fathers, Lewis,--no, nor any other man,
excepting always in fair fight."
"I know--I know!" said Lewis. "Of course he's my father. But I never
could stand for any one to get in my way!"
"That's just what the rattlesnake says--and after a while nobody does
get in his way. But he must be a lonely creature."
"Do you think," asked the boy oddly,--"do you think I am really like
that,--like a rattlesnake?"
Adam gave his mellow laugh. "No, I don't. I think you are just a poor
human. I was always powerfully fond of you, Lewis,--and I never could
abide a rattler! There's the moon, and it's a long march to-morrow, and
folks sit up late in Richmond! Unroll the blankets, and let's to bed."
The boy obeyed, and the two lay down with the fire between them. The
man's thoughts went back to the Mississippi, to cane-brakes and bayous
and long levees; and the boy's mind perused the road before him.
"When I get to Richmond," he suddenly announced, "I am going to find a
place where they sell books. I have a dollar."
The hunter put his hand in his pouch, drew out a shining coin, and
tossed it across the fire. "There's another," he said. "Good Spanish!
Buy your _Cæsars_ and your _Pompeys_, and when you are a lawyer like Mr.
Jefferson, come West--come West!"
Men and beasts slumbered through the autumn night, waked at dawn, and,
breakfast eaten, took again the road. Revolving cask, horses, dogs, and
men, they crossed the wet sedge and entered the pine wood, left that
behind and traversed a waste of scrub and vine, low hills, and
rain-washed gullies. Chinquapin bushes edged the road, the polished nut
dark in the centre of each open burr; the persimmon trees showed their
fruit, red-gold from the first frosts; the black haw and cedar overhung
the ravines; there was much sassafras, and along the plashy streams the
mint grew thick and pungent-sweet. In the deep and pure blue sky above
them, fleecy clouds went past like galleons in a trade-wind.
The tobacco-roller was a taciturn man, and the boy, his son, never
thought of disburdening his soul to his father. Each had the power to
change for the other the aspect of the world, but they themselves were
strangers. Gideon Rand, as he rode, thought of the bright leaf in the
cask, of the Richmond warehouse, and fixed the price in his mind. His
mind was in a state of sober jubilation. His only brother, a lonely,
unloved, and avaricious merchant in a small way, had lately died, and
had left him money. The hundred acres upon the Three-Notched Road that
Gideon had tilled for another were in the market. The money would buy
the land and the small, dilapidated house already occupied by the
Rands. The purchase was in train, and in its own fashion Gideon's
sluggish nature rejoiced. He was as land-mad as any other Virginian, but
he had neither a lavish hand nor a climbing eye. What he loved was the
black earth beneath the tobacco, and to walk between the rows and feel
the thick leaves. For him it sufficed to rise at dawn and spend the day
in the fields overseeing the hands, to come home at dusk to a supper of
corn bread and bacon, to go to bed within the hour and sleep without a
dream until cockcrow, to walk the fields again till dusk and
supper-time. Church on Sunday, Charlottesville on Court Days, Richmond
once a year, varied the monotony. The one passion, the one softness,
showed in his love for horses. He broke the colts for half the county;
there was no horse that he could not ride, and his great form and
coal-black locks were looked for and found at every race. The mare that
he was riding he had bought with his legacy, before he bought the land
on the Three-Notched Road. He was now considering whether he could
afford to buy in Richmond a likely negro to help him and Lewis in the
fields. With all the stubbornness of a dull mind, he meant to keep Lewis
in the fields. Long ago, when he was a handsome young giant, he had
married above him. His wife was a beautiful and spirited woman, and when
she married the son of her father's tenant, it was with every intention
of raising him to her own level in life. But he was the stronger, and he
dragged her down to his. As her beauty faded and her wit grew biting, he
learned to hate her, and to hate learning because she had it, and the
refinements of life because she practised them, and law because she came
of a family of lawyers. She was dead and he was glad of it,--and now her
son was always at a book, and wanted to be a lawyer! "I'll see him a
slave-driver first!" said Gideon Rand to himself, and flecked his whip.
On the other side of the cask Adam Gaudylock whistled along the road.
He, too, had business in Richmond, and problems not a few to solve, but
as he was a man who never sacrificed the present to the past, and rarely
to the future, he alone of the three really drank the wine of the
morning air, saw how blue was the sky, and admired the crimson trailers
that the dewberry spread across the road. When his gaze followed the
floating down from a milkweed pod, or marked the scurry of a chipmunk at
a white oak's root, or dwelt upon the fox-grape's swinging curtain, he
would have said, if questioned, that life in the woods and in an Indian
country taught a man the use of his eyes. "Love of Nature" was a phrase
at which he would have looked blank, and a talisman which he did not
know he possessed, and it may be doubted if he could have defined the
word "Romance." He whistled as he rode, and presently, the sun rising
higher and the clear wind blowing with force, he began to sing,--
"From the Walnut Hills to the Silver Lake,
Row, boatmen, row!
Danger in the levee, danger in the brake,
Row, boatmen, row!
Yellow water rising, Indians on the shore!"
Lewis Rand, perched upon the platform before the cask, his feet
dangling, his head thrown back against the wood, and his eyes upon the
floating clouds, pursued inwardly and with a swelling heart the
oft-broken, oft-renewed argument with his father. "I do not want to go
to the fields. I want to go to school. Every chance I've had, I've
learned, and I want to learn more and more. I do not want to be like
you, nor your father, nor his father, and I do not want to be like Adam
Gaudylock. I want to be like my mother's folk. You've no right to keep
me planting and suckering and cutting and firing and planting again, as
though I were a negro! Negroes don't care, but I care! I'm not your
slave. Tobacco! I hate the sight of it, and the smell of it! There's too
much tobacco raised in Virginia. You fought the old King because he was
a tyrant, but you would make me spend my life in the tobacco-field! You
are a tyrant, too. I'm to be a man just as you're a man. You went your
way; well, I'm going mine! I'm going to be a lawyer, like--like Ludwell
Cary at Greenwood. I'm not afraid of your horse-whip. Strike, and be
damned to you! You can break every colt in the country, but you can't
break me! I've seen you strike my mother, too!"
"Way down in New Orleans,
Beneath an orange tree,
Beside the lapping water,
Upon the old levee,
A-laughing in the moonlight,
There sits the girl for me!"
sang Gaudylock.
"She's sweeter than the jasmine,
Her name it is Delphine."
The day wore on, the land grew level, and the clearings more frequent.
Stretches of stacked corn appeared like tented plains, brown and silent
encampments of the autumn; and tobacco-houses rose from the fields
whence the weed had been cut. Blue smoke hung in wreaths above the high
roofs, for it was firing-time. Now and then they saw, far back from the
road and shaded by noble trees, dwelling-houses of brick or wood. Behind
the larger sort of these appeared barns and stables and negro quarters,
all very cheerful in the sunny October weather. Once they passed a
schoolhouse and a church, and twice they halted at cross-road taverns.
The road was no longer solitary. Other slow-rolling casks of tobacco
with retinue of men and boys were on their way to Richmond, and there
were white-roofed wagons from the country beyond Staunton. Four strong
horses drew each wagon, manes and tails tied with bright galloon, and
harness hung with jingling bells. Whatever things the mountain folk
might trade with were in the wagons,--butter, flour, and dried meat,
skins of deer and bear, hemp, flaxseed, wax, ginseng, and maple sugar.
Other vehicles used the road, growing more numerous as the day wore into
the afternoon, and Richmond was no longer far away. Coach and chaise,
curricle and stick-chair, were encountered, and horsemen were frequent.
In 1790 men spoke when they passed; moreover, Rand and Gaudylock were
not entirely unknown. The giant figure of the one had been seen before
upon that road; the other was recognized as a very able scout, hunter,
and Indian trader, restless as quicksilver and daring beyond all reason.
Men hailed the two cheerily, and asked for the news from Albemarle, and
from Kentucky and the Mississippi.
"Mr. Jefferson is coming home," answered Rand; and "Spain is not so
black as she is painted," said the trader.
"We hear," quoth the gentleman addressed, "that the Kentuckians make
good Spanish subjects."
"Then you hear a damned lie," said Gaudylock imperturbably. "The boot's
on the other foot. Ten years from now a Kentuckian may rule in New
Orleans."
The gentleman laughed, settled back in his stick-chair, and spoke to his
horse. "Mr. Jefferson is in Richmond," he remarked to Rand, and vanished
in a cloud of dust.
The tobacco-cask and its guardians kept on by wood and stream,
plantation, tavern, forge, and mill, now with companions and now upon a
lonely road. At last, when the frogs were at vespers, and the wind had
died into an evening stillness, and the last rays of the sun were
staining the autumn foliage a yet deeper red, they came by way of Broad
Street into Richmond. The cask of bright leaf must be deposited at
Shockoe Warehouse; this they did, then as the stars were coming out,
they betook themselves to where, at the foot of Church Hill, the Bird in
Hand dispensed refreshment to man and beast.