MR. JEFFERSON
By ten of the Capitol clock Gideon Rand had sold his tobacco and
deposited the price in a well-filled wallet. "Eighteen shillings the
hundred," he said, with grim satisfaction. "And the casks I sent by
Mocket sold as well! Good leaf, good leaf! Tobacco pays, and learning
don't. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Lewis Rand!"
Father and son came out from the cool, dark store, upon the unpaved
street, and joined Adam Gaudylock where he lounged beneath a sycamore.
Up and down the street were wooden houses, shops of British merchants,
prosperous taverns, and dwelling-houses sunk in shady gardens. An
arrow-flight away brawled the river among bright islands. The sky above
the bronze sycamores was very blue, the air crystal, the sunshine
heavenly mild. The street was not crowded. A Quaker in a broad-brimmed
hat went by, and then a pretty girl, and then a minister talking broad
Scotch, and then a future chief justice who had been to market and had a
green basket upon his arm. Gideon drew another breath of satisfaction.
"I've been thinking this long time of buying a negro, and now I can do
it! Mocket says there's a likely man for sale down by the market. Lewis,
you go straight to Mocket now, and tell him I'll wait for him there! Are
you coming with me, Adam Gaudylock?"
"Why," said Gaudylock, with candour, "I have business presently in
Governor Street, and a man to meet at the Indian Queen. And I think I'll
go now with Lewis. Somehow, the woods have spoiled me for seeing men
bought and sold."
"They're black men," said Rand indifferently. "I'll see you, then, at
dinner-time, at the Bird in Hand. I'm going home to-morrow.--Lewis, if
you want to, you can look around this morning with Tom Mocket!" He
glanced at his son's flushing face, and, being in high good humour,
determined to give the colt a little rein. "Be off, and spend your
dollar! See what sights you can, for we'll not be in Richmond again for
many a day! They say there's a brig in from Barbadoes."
He put up his wallet, and with a nod to Gaudylock strode away in the
direction of the market, but presently halted and turned his head.
"Lewis!"
"Yes, father."
"Don't you be buying any more books! You hear me?"
He swung away, and his son stood under the sycamore tree and looked
after him with a darkened face. Gaudylock put a hand upon his shoulder.
"Never mind, Lewis! Before we part I'm going to talk to Gideon." He
laughed. "Do you know what the Cherokees call me? They call me
Golden-Tongue. Because, you see, I can persuade them to 'most
anything,--always into the war-path, and sometimes out of it! Gideon may
be obstinate, but he can't be as obstinate as an Indian. Now let's go to
Mocket's."
The way to Mocket's lay down a steep hillside, and along the river-bank,
under a drift of coloured leaves, and by the sound of falling water.
Mocket dwelt in a small house, in a small green yard with a broken gate.
A red creeper mantled the tiny porch, and lilac bushes, clucked under by
a dozen hens, hedged the grassy yard. As the hunter and Lewis Rand
approached, a little girl, brown and freckled, barefoot and dressed in
linsey, sprang up from the stone before the gate, and began to run
towards the house. Her foot caught in a trailing vine, and down she
fell. Adam was beside her at once. "Why, you little partridge!" he
exclaimed, and lifted her to her feet.
"It's Vinie Mocket," said his companion. "Vinie, where's your father?"
"I don't know, thir," answered Vinie. "Tom knows. Tom's down there, at
the big ship. I'll tell him."
She slipped from Gaudylock's clasp and pattered off toward the river,
where the brig from Barbadoes showed hull and masts. The hunter sat down
upon the porch step, and drew out his tobacco pouch. "She's like a
partridge," he said.
"She's just Vinie Mocket," answered the boy. "There's a girl who stays
sometimes at Mrs. Selden's, on the Three-Notched Road. She's not
freckled, and her eyes are big, and she never goes barefoot. I reckon
it's silk she wears."
"What's her name?" asked the hunter, filling his pipe.
"Jacqueline--Jacqueline Churchill. She lives at Fontenoy."
"Fontenoy's a mighty fine place," remarked Gaudylock.
"And the Churchills are mighty fine people.--Here's the partridge back,
with another freckle-face."
"That's Tom Mocket," said Lewis. "If Vinie's a partridge, Tom's a
weasel."
The weasel, sandy-haired and freckled, came up the path with long steps.
"Hi, Lewis! Father's gone toward the market looking for your father.
That's a brig from the Indies down there, and the captain's our
cousin--ain't he, Vinie? I know who you are, sir. You're Adam Gaudylock,
the great hunter!"
"So I am, so I am!" quoth Adam. "Look here, little partridge, at what
I've got in my pouch!"
The partridge busied herself with the beaded thing, and the two boys
talked aside. "I've till dinner time to do what I like in," said Lewis
Rand. "Have you got to work?"
"Not unless I want to," Young Mocket answered blissfully. "Father, he
don't care! Besides"--he swelled with pride--"I don't work now at the
wharf. I'm at Chancellor Wythe's."
"Chancellor Wythe's! What are you doing there?"
"Helping him. Maybe, by and by, I'll be a lawyer, too."
"Heugh!" said the other. "Do you mean you're reading law?"
"No-o, not just exactly. But I let people in--and I hear what they talk
about. I like it better than the wharf, anyhow. I'll go with you and
show you things. Is Mr. Gaudylock coming?"
"No," replied Adam. "I'll finish my pipe, and take a look at the ship
down there, and then I'll meet a friend at the Indian Queen. Be off with
you both! Vinie will stay and talk to me."
"Yeth, thir," said Vinie, her brown arm deep in the beaded pouch.
The two lads left behind the scarlet-clad porch, the hunter and Vinie,
the little green yard and the broken gate. "Where first? demanded Tom.
"Where is the best place in Richmond to buy books?"
Young Mocket considered. "There's a shop near the bridge. What do you
want with books?"
"I want to read them. We'll go to the bridge first."
Tom hung back. "Don't you want to see the brig from Barbadoes? She's a
beauty. There's a schooner from Baltimore, too, at the Rock Landing. You
won't? Then let's go over to Widewilt's Island. Well, they whipped a man
this morning and he's in the pillory now, down by the market. Let's go
look at him.--Pshaw! what's the use of books! Don't you want to see the
Guard turn out at noon, and hear the trumpet blow? Well, come on to the
bridge! Nancy, the apple-woman, is there too."
The shop near the bridge to which they resorted was dark and low, but
learning was spread upon its counter, and a benevolent dragon of
knowledge in horn spectacles ran over the wares for Lewis Rand. "De Jure
Maritimo, six shillings eightpence, my lad. Burnet's History and
Demosthenes' Orations, two crowns, Mr. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, a great book and dear! Common Sense--and that's Tom
Paine's, and you may have it for two pistareens."
The boy shook his head. "I want a law-book."
The genie put forth The Principles of Equity, and named the price.
"'Tis too dear."
A gentleman lounging against the counter closed the book into which he
had been dipping, and drew nearer to the would-be purchaser.
"Equity is an expensive commodity, my lad," he said kindly. "How much
law have you read?"
"I have read The Law of Virginia," answered the boy. "I borrowed it. I
worked a week for Mr. Douglas, and read The Law of Nations rest-hours.
Mrs. Selden, on the Three-Notched Road, gave me The Federalist. Are you
a lawyer, sir?"
The gentleman laughed, and the genie behind the counter laughed. Young
Mocket plucked Lewis Rand by the sleeve, but the latter was intent upon
the personage before him and did not heed.
"Yes," said the gentleman, "I am a lawyer. Are you going to be one?"
"I am," said the boy. "Will you tell me what books I ought to buy? I
have two dollars."
The other looked at him with keen light eyes. "That amount will not buy
you many books," he said. "You should enter some lawyer's office where
you may have access to his library. You spoke of the Three-Notched Road.
Are you from Albemarle?"
"Yes, sir. I am Gideon Rand's son."
"Indeed! Gideon Rand! Then Mary Wayne was your mother?"
"Yes, sir."
"I remember," said the gentleman, "when she married your father. She was
a beautiful woman. I heard of her death while I was in Paris."
The boy's regard, at first solely for the books, had been for some
moments transferred to the gentleman who, it seemed, was a lawyer, and
had known his people, and had been to Paris. He saw a tall man, of a
spare and sinewy frame, with red hair, lightly powdered, and keen blue
eyes. Lewis Rand's cheek grew red, and his eyes at once shy and eager.
He stammered when he spoke. "Are you from Albemarle, sir?"
The other smiled, a bright and gracious smile, irradiating his ruddy,
freckled face. "I am," he said.
"From--from Monticello?"
"From Monticello." The speaker, who loved his home with passion, never
uttered its name without a softening of the voice. "From Monticello," he
said again. "There are books enough there, my lad. Some day you shall
ride over from the Three-Notched Road, and I will show you them."
"I will come," said Lewis Rand. The colour deepened in his face and a
moisture troubled his vision. The shop, the littered counter, the
guardian of the books, and President Washington's Secretary of State
wavered like the sunbeam at the door.
Jefferson ran his hand over the row of books. "Mr. Smith, give the lad
old Coke, yes, and Locke on Government, and put them to my
account.--Where do you go to school?"
The boy swallowed hard, straightened his shoulders, and looked his
questioner in the face. "Nowhere, sir--not now. My father hates
learning, and I work in the fields. I am very much obliged to you for
the books,--and had I best buy Blackstone with the two dollars?"
The other smiled. "No, no, not Blackstone. Blackstone's frippery. You've
got old Coke. Buy for yourself some book that shall mean much to you all
your life.--Mr. Smith, give him Plutarch's Lives--Ossian, too. He's rich
enough to buy Ossian.--As for law-books, my lad, if you will come to
Monticello, I will lend you what you need. I like your spirit." He
looked at his watch. "I have to dine at the Eagle with the Governor and
Mr. Randolph. When do you return to Albemarle?"
"To-morrow, sir."
"Then I may overtake you on the road. Once I did your father a good
turn, and I shall be glad to have a word with him now. He must not keep
the son of Mary Wayne in the fields. Some day I will ride down the
Three-Notched Road, and examine you on old Coke. Don't spare study; if
you will be a lawyer, become a good one, not a smatterer. Good-day to
you!"
He left the shop. The bookseller gazed after him, then nodded and smiled
at the boy. "You look transfigured, my lad! Well, he's a great man, and
he'll be a greater one yet. He's for the people, and one day the people
will be for him! I'll tie up your books--and if you can make a friend of
Mr. Jefferson, you do it!"
Lewis Rand came out into the sunlight with "old Coke" and Locke,
Plutarch and Ossian, under his arm, and in his soul I know not what
ardour of hero-worship, what surging resolve and aspiration. Young
Mocket, at his elbow, regarded him with something like awe. "That was
Mr. Jefferson," he said. "He knows General Washington and Marquis
Lafayette and Doctor Franklin. He's just home from Paris, and they have
made him Secretary of State--whatever that is. He wrote the Declaration
of Independence. He's a rich man--he's a lawyer, too. He lives at a
place named Monticello."
"I know," said Lewis Rand, "I've been to Monticello. When I am a man I
am going to have a house like it, with a terrace and white pillars and a
library. But I shall have a flower garden like the one at Fontenoy."
"Ho! your house! Is Fontenoy where Ludwell Cary lives?"
"No; he lives at Greenwood. The Churchills live at Fontenoy.--Now we'll
go see the Guard turn out. Is that the apple-woman yonder? I've a
half-a-bit left."
An hour later, having bought the apples, and seen the pillared Capitol,
and respectfully considered the outside of Chancellor Wythe's law
office, and having parted until the afternoon with Tom Mocket, who
professed an engagement on the Barbadoes brig, young Lewis Rand betook
himself to the Bird in Hand. There in the bare, not over clean chamber
which had been assigned to the party from Albemarle, he deposited his
precious parcel first in the depths of an ancient pair of saddle-bags,
then, thinking better of it, underneath the straw mattress of a small
bed. It was probable, he knew, that even there his father might discover
the treasure. What would follow discovery he knew full Well. The beating
he could take; what he wouldn't stand would be, say, Gideon's flinging
the books into the fire. "He shan't, he shan't," said the boy's hot
heart. "If he does, I'll--I'll--"
Through the window came Gaudylock's voice from the porch of the Bird in
Hand. "You Stay-at-homes--you don't know what's in the wilderness!
There's good and there's bad, and there's much beside. It's like the
sea--it's uncharted."
Lewis Rand closed the door of the room, and went out upon the shady
porch, where he found the hunter and a lounging wide-eyed knot of
listeners to tales of Kentucky and the Mississippi. The dinner-bell
rang. Adam fell pointedly silent, and his audience melted away. The
hunter rose and stretched himself. "There is prime venison for dinner,
and a quince tart and good apple brandy. Ha! I was always glad I was
born in Virginia. Here is Gideon swinging down the hill--Gideon and his
negro!"
The tobacco-roller joined them, and with a wave of the hand indicated
his purchase of the morning. This was a tall and strong negro, young,
supple, and of a cheerful countenance. Rand was in high good-humour.
"He's a runaway, Mocket says, but I'll cure him of that! He's strong as
an ox and as limber as a snake." Taking the negro's hand in his, he bent
the fingers back. "Look at that! easy as a willow! He'll strip tobacco!
His name is Joab."
The namesake of a prince in Israel looked blithely upon his new family.
"Yaas, marster," he said, with candour. "Dat is my name dat sho' is!
Jes' Joab. An' I is strong as en ox,--don' know 'bout de snaik. Marster,
is you gwine tek me 'way from Richmond?"
"Albemarle," said the tobacco-roller briefly. "To-morrow morning."
Joab studied the vine above the porch. "Kin I go tell my ole mammy
good-bye? She's washin' yonder in de creek."
Rand nodded, and the negro swung off to where, upon the grassy common
sloping to Shockoe Creek, dark washer-women were spreading clothes. The
bell of the Bird in Hand rang again, and the white men went to dinner.
Following the venison, the tart, and apple brandy came the short, bright
afternoon, passed by Lewis Rand upon the brig from the Indies with Tom
Mocket and little Vinie and a wrinkled skipper who talked of cocoanuts
and strange birds and red-handkerchiefed pirates, and spent by Gideon
first in business with the elder Mocket, and then in conversation with
Adam Gaudylock. Lewis, returning at supper-time to the Bird in Hand,
found the hunter altered no whit from his habitual tawny lightness, but
his father in a mood that he knew, sullen and silent. "Adam's been
talking to him," thought the boy. "And it's just the same as when Mrs.
Selden talks to him. Let me go--not he!"
In the morning, at six of the clock, the two Rands, the negro Joab, the
horses, and the dogs took the homeward road to Albemarle. Adam Gaudylock
was not returning with them; he had trader's business with the merchants
in Main Street, hunter's business with certain cronies at the Indian
Queen, able scout and man-of-information business in Governor Street,
and business of his own upon the elm-shaded walk above the river. Over
level autumn fields and up and down the wooded hills, father and son and
the slave travelled briskly toward the west. As the twilight fell, they
came up with three white wagons, Staunton bound, and convoyed by
mountaineers. That night they camped with these men in an expanse of
scrub and sassafras, but left them at dawn and went on toward Albemarle.
A day of coloured woods, of infrequent clearings, and of streams to
ford, ended in an evening of cool wind and rosy sky. They descended a
hill, halted, and built their fire in a grassy space beside a river.
Joab tethered the horses and made the fire, and fried the bacon and
baked the hoecake. As he worked he sang:--
"David an' Cephas, an' ole brer Mingo,
Saul an' Paul, an' de w'ite folk sinners--
Oh, my chillern, follow de Lawd!"
Supper was eaten in silence. When it was over, Gideon Rand sat with his
back against a pine and smoked his pipe. His son went down to the river
and stretched his length upon a mossed and lichened boulder. The deep
water below the stone did not give him back himself as had done the
streamlet five days before. This was a river, marred with eddies and
with drifting wood, and red with the soil. The evening wind was blowing,
and the sycamore above him cast its bronze leaves into the flood which
sucked them under, or bore them with it on its way to the larger river
and the ultimate sea. This stream had no babbling voice; its note was
low and grave. Youth and mountain sources forgotten, it hearkened before
the time to ocean voices. The boy, idle upon the lichened stone,
listened too, to distant utterances, to the sirens singing beyond the
shadowy cape. The earth soothed him; he lay with half shut eyes, and
after the day's hot communion with old wrongs, he felt a sudden peace.
He was at the turn; the brute within him quiet behind the eternal bars;
the savage receding, the man beckoning, the after man watching from
afar. The inner stage was cleared and set for a new act. He had lowered
the light, he had rested, and he had filled the interval with forms and
determinations beautiful and vague, vague as the mists, the sounds, the
tossed arms of the Ossian he had dared to open last night, before his
father, by the camp-fire of the mountaineers. In the twilight of his
theatre he rested; a shadowy figure, full of mysteries, full of
possibilities, a boy in the grasp of the man within him, neither boy
nor man unlovable, nor wholly unadmirable, both seen, and seeing,
"through a glass darkly."
He turned on his side, and the light went up sharply. A man riding a
beautiful and spirited horse was coming over the hilltop. Horse and
rider paused a moment upon the crest, standing clear against the eastern
sky. In the crystal air and the sunset glow they crowned the hill like a
horse and rider nobly done in bronze. A moment thus, then they began to
pick their way down the rocky road. Lewis Rand looked, and started to
his feet. That horse had been bred in Albemarle, and that horseman he
had met in Richmond. The boy's heart beat fast and the colour surged to
his cheek. There was little, since the hour in the bookshop, that he
would not have done or suffered for the approaching figure. All along
the road from Richmond his imagination had conjured up a score of
fantastic instances, in each of which he had rescued, or died for, or
had in some impossibly romantic and magnificent fashion been the
benefactor of the man who was drawing near to the river and camp-fire.
As superbly generous as any other youth, he was, at present, in his
progress through life, in the land of shrines. He must have his idol,
must worship and follow after some visible hero, some older, higher,
stronger, more subtle-fine and far-ahead adventurer. Heretofore, in his
limited world, Adam Gaudylock had seemed nearest the gates of escape.
But Adam, he thought, was of the woods and the earth, even as his father
was, and as the tobacco was, and as he himself was. His enormous need
was for some one to follow whose feet were above the fat, red fields and
the leafy trails. All this was present with him as he watched the
oncoming figure. Great men kept their word. Had not Mr. Jefferson said
that he would overtake them?--and there he was! He was coming down to
the camp-fire, he was going to stop and talk to the surly giant, like
Giant Despair, who sat and smoked beside it.
Lewis Rand left the river and the windy sycamore and hastened across the
sere grass. "Father, father!" he cried. "Do you know who that is?" In
his young voice there was both warning and appeal. Adam Gaudylock, he
knew, had spoken to his father, but Gideon had given no sign. Suppose,
no matter _who_ spoke, his father would give, forever, no other sign
than that oft seen and always hated jerk of the head toward the
tobacco-fields?
Gideon Rand took his pipe from his lips. "It's Mr. Jefferson," he
answered laconically. "He's the one man in this country to whom I'd
listen."
Jefferson rode up to the group about the camp-fire, checked his horse,
and gave the tobacco-roller and his son a plain man's greeting to plain
men. The eagerness of the boy's face did not escape him; when he
dismounted, flung the reins of Wildair to his groom, and crossed the bit
of turf to the fire beneath the pines, he knew that he was pleasing a
young heart. He loved youth, and to the young he was always nobly kind.
"Good-evening, Mr. Rand," he said. "You are homeward bound, as I am. It
is good to see Albemarle faces after years of the French. I had the
pleasure of making your son's acquaintance yesterday. It is a great
thing to be the father of a son, for so one ceases to be a loose end and
becomes a link in the great chain. Your son, I think, will do you
honour. And, man to man, you must pay him in the same coin. We on a
lower rung of the ladder must keep our hands from the ankles of the
climbers above us! Make room for me on that log, my lad! Your father and
I will talk awhile."
Thus it was that an able lawyer took up the case of young Lewis Rand. It
was the lawyer's pleasure to give aid to youth, and to mould the mind
of youth. He had many protégés, to all of whom he was invariably kind,
invariably generous. The only return he exacted was that of homage. The
yoke was not heavy, for, after all, the homage was to Ideas, to large,
sagacious, and far-reaching Thought. It was in the year 1790 that he
broke Gideon Rand's resistance to his son's devotion to other gods than
those of the Rands. The year that followed that evening on the Albemarle
road found Lewis Rand reading law in an office in Charlottesville. A few
more years, and he was called to the bar; a little longer, and his name
began to be an oft-spoken one in his native county, and not unknown
throughout Virginia.