THE MISSION OF TRUELOVE
Mistress Truelove Taberer, having read in a very clear and gentle
voice the Sermon on the Mount to those placid Friends, Tobias and
Martha Taberer, closed the book, and went about her household affairs
with a quiet step, but a heart that somehow fluttered at every sound
without the door. To still it she began to repeat to herself words she
had read: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the
children of God ... blessed are the peacemakers”--
Winter sunshine poured in at the windows and door. Truelove, kneeling
to wipe a fleck of dust from her wheel, suddenly, with a catch of her
breath and a lifting of her brown eyes, saw in the Scripture she had
been repeating a meaning and application hitherto unexpected. “The
peacemaker ... that is one who makes peace,--in the world, between
countries, in families, yea, in the heart of one alone. Did he not say,
last time he came, that with me he forgot this naughty world and all
its strife; that if I were always with him”--
Truelove’s countenance became exalted, her gaze fixed. “If it were a
call”--she murmured, and for a moment bowed her head upon the wheel;
then rose from her knees and went softly through the morning tasks.
When they were over, she took down from a peg and put on a long gray
cloak and a gray hood that most becomingly framed her wild-rose face;
then came and stood before her father and mother. “I am going forth to
walk by the creekside,” she said, in her sweet voice. “It may be that I
will meet Angus MacLean.”
“If thee does,” answered one tranquil Friend, “thee may tell him that
upon next seventh day meeting will be held in this house.”
“Truly,” said the other tranquil Friend, “my heart is drawn toward that
young man. His mind hath been filled with anger and resistance and the
turmoil of the world. It were well if he found peace at last.”
“Surely it were well,” agreed Truelove sweetly, and went out into the
crisp winter weather.
The holly, the pine, and the cedar made green places in the woods, and
the multitude of leaves underfoot were pleasant to tread. Clouds were
in the sky, but the spaces between were of serenest blue, and in the
sunshine the creek flashed diamonds. Truelove stood upon the bank, and,
with her hand shading her eyes, watched MacLean rowing toward her up
the creek.
When he had fastened his boat and taken her hand, the two walked
soberly on beside the sparkling water until they came to a rude seat
built beneath an oak-tree, to which yet clung a number of brown leaves.
Truelove sat down, drawing her cloak about her, for, though the sun
shone, the air was keen. MacLean took off his coat, and kneeling put
it beneath her feet. He laughed at her protest. “Why, these winds are
not bleak!” he said. “This land knows no true and honest cold. In my
country, night after night have I lain in snow with only my plaid for
cover, and heard the spirits call in the icy wind, the kelpie shriek
beneath the frozen loch. I listened; then shut my eyes and dreamed warm
of glory and--true love.”
“Thy coat is new,” said Truelove, with downcast eyes. “The earth will
stain the good cloth.”
MacLean laughed. “Then will I wear it stained, as ’tis said a courtier
once wore his cloak.”
“There is lace upon it,” said Truelove timidly.
MacLean turned with a smile, and laid a fold of her cloak against his
dark cheek. “Ah, the lace offends you,--offends thee,--Truelove. Why,
’tis but to mark me a gentleman again! Last night, at Williamsburgh, I
supped with Haward and some gentlemen of Virginia. He would have me don
this suit. I might not disoblige my friend.”
“Thee loves it,” said Truelove severely. “Thee loves the color, and the
feel of the fine cloth, and the ruffles at thy wrists.”
The Highlander laughed. “Why, suppose that I do! Look, Truelove, how
brave and red are those holly berries, and how green and fantastically
twisted the leaves! The sky is a bright blue, and the clouds are
silver; and think what these woods will be when the winter is past! One
might do worse, meseems, than to be of God’s taste in such matters.”
Truelove sighed, and drew her gray cloak more closely around her.
“Thee is in spirits to-day, Angus MacLean,” she said, and sighed once
more.
“I am free,” he answered. “The man within me walks no longer with a
hanging head.”
“And what will thee do with thy freedom?”
The Highlander made no immediate reply, but, chin in hand, studied the
drifts of leaves and the slow-moving water. “I am free,” he said at
last. “I wear to-day the dress of a gentleman. I could walk without
shame into a hall that I know, and find there strangers, standers in
dead men’s shoon, brothers who want me not,--who would say behind their
hands, ‘He has been twelve years a slave, and the world has changed
since he went away!’ ... I will not trouble them.”
His face was as sombre as when Truelove first beheld it. Suddenly, and
against her will, tears came to her eyes. “I am glad--I and my father
and mother and Ephraim--that thee goes not overseas, Angus MacLean,”
said the dove’s voice. “We would have thee--I and my father and mother
and Ephraim--we would have thee stay in Virginia.”
“I am to stay,” he answered. “I have felt no shame in taking a loan
from my friend, for I shall repay it. He hath lands up river in a
new-made county. I am to seat them for him, and there will be my home.
I will build a house and name it Duart; and if there are hills they
shall be Dun-da-gu and Grieg, and the sound of winter torrents shall be
to me as the sound of the waters of Mull.”
Truelove caught her breath. “Thee will be lonely in those forests.”
“I am used to loneliness.”
“There be Indians on the frontier. They burn houses and carry away
prisoners. And there are wolves and dangerous beasts”--
“I am used to danger.”
Truelove’s voice trembled more and more. “And thee must dwell among
negroes and rude men, with none to comfort thy soul, none to whom thee
can speak in thy dark hours?”
“Before now I have spoken to the tobacco I have planted, the trees I
have felled, the swords and muskets I have sold.”
“But at last thee came and spoke to me!”
“Ay,” he answered. “There have been times when you saved my soul alive.
Now, in the forest, in my house of logs, when the day’s work is done,
and I sit upon my doorstep and begin to hear the voices of the past
crying to me like the spirits in the valley of Glensyte, I will think
of you instead.”
“Oh!” cried Truelove. “Speak to me instead, and I will speak to thee
... sitting upon the doorstep of our house, when our day’s work is
done!”
Her hood falling back showed her face, clear pink, with dewy eyes. The
carnation deepening from brow to throat, and the tears trembling upon
her long lashes, she suddenly hid her countenance in her gray cloak.
MacLean, on his knees beside her, drew away the folds. “Truelove,
Truelove! do you know what you have said?”
Truelove put her hand upon her heart. “Oh, I fear,” she whispered, “I
fear that I have asked thee, Angus MacLean, to let me be--to let me
be--thy wife.”
The water shone, and the holly berries were gay, and a robin redbreast
sang a cheerful song. Beneath the rustling oak-tree there was ardent
speech on the part of MacLean, who found in his mistress a listener
sweet and shy, and not garrulous of love. But her eyes dwelt upon him
and her hand rested at ease within his clasp, and she liked to hear him
speak of the home they were to make in the wilderness. It was to be
thus, and thus, and thus! With impassioned eloquence the Gael adorned
the shrine and advanced the merit of the divinity, and the divinity
listened with a smile, a blush, a tear, and now and then a meek rebuke.
When an hour had passed, the sun went under a cloud and the air grew
colder. The bird had flown away, but in the rising wind the dead leaves
rustled loudly. MacLean and Truelove, leaving their future of honorable
toil, peace of mind, and enduring affection, came back to the present.
“I must away,” said the Highlander. “Haward waits for me at
Williamsburgh. To-morrow, dearer to me than Deirdre to Naos! I will
come again.”
Hand in hand the two walked slowly toward that haunt of peace,
Truelove’s quiet home. “And Marmaduke Haward awaits thee at
Williamsburgh?” said the Quakeress. “Last third day he met my father
and me on the Fair View road, and checked his horse and spoke to us. He
is changed.”
“Changed indeed!” quoth the Highlander. “A fire burns him, a wind
drives him; and yet to the world, last night”--He paused.
“Last night?” said Truelove.
“He had a large company at Marot’s ordinary,” went on the other. “There
were the Governor and his fellow Councilors, with others of condition
or fashion. He was the very fine gentleman, the perfect host, free,
smiling, full of wit. But I had been with him before they came. I knew
the fires beneath.”
The two walked in silence for a few moments, when MacLean spoke again:
“He drank to her. At the last, when this lady had been toasted, and
that, he rose and drank to ‘Audrey,’ and threw his wineglass over his
shoulder. He hath done what he could. The world knows that he loves
her honorably, seeks her vainly in marriage. Something more I know.
He gathered the company together last evening that, as his guests,
the highest officers, the finest gentlemen of the colony, should go
with him to the theatre to see her for the first time as a player.
Being what they were, and his guests, and his passion known, he would
insure for her, did she well or did she ill, order, interest, decent
applause.” MacLean broke off with a short, excited laugh. “It was not
needed,--his mediation. But he could not know that; no, nor none of us.
True, Stagg and his wife had bragged of the powers of this strangely
found actress of theirs that they were training to do great things,
but folk took it for a trick of their trade. Oh, there was curiosity
enough, but ’twas on Haward’s account.... Well, he drank to her,
standing at the head of the table at Marot’s ordinary, and the glass
crashed over his shoulder, and we all went to the play.”
“Yes, yes!” cried Truelove, breathing quickly, and quite forgetting how
great a vanity was under discussion.
“’Twas ‘Tamerlane,’ the play that this traitorous generation calls
for every 5th of November. It seems that the Governor--a Whig as rank
as Argyle--had ordered it again for this week. ’Tis a cursed piece of
slander that pictures the Prince of Orange a virtuous Emperor, his
late Majesty of France a hateful tyrant. But for Haward, whose guest I
was, I had not sat there with closed lips. I had sprung to my feet and
given those flatterers, those traducers, the lie! The thing taunted and
angered until she entered. Then I forgot.”
“And she--and Audrey?”
“Arpasia was her name in the play. She entered late; her death came
before the end; there was another woman who had more to do. It all
mattered not, I have seen a great actress.”
“Darden’s Audrey!” said Truelove, in a whisper.
“That at the very first; not afterwards,” answered MacLean. “She was
dressed, they say, as upon the night at the Palace, that first night of
Haward’s fever. When she came upon the stage, there was a murmur like
the wind in the leaves. She was most beautiful,--‘beauteous in hatred,’
as the Sultan in the play called her,--dark and wonderful, with angry
eyes. For a little while she must stand in silence, and in these
moments men and women stared at her, then turned and looked at Haward.
But when she spoke we forgot that she was Darden’s Audrey.”
MacLean laughed again. “When the play was ended,--or rather, when her
part in it was done,--the house did shake so with applause that Stagg
had to remonstrate. There’s naught talked of to-day in Williamsburgh
but Arpasia; and when I came down Palace Street this morning, there was
a great crowd about the playhouse door. Stagg might sell his tickets
for to-night at a guinea apiece. ‘Venice Preserved’ is the play.”
“And Marmaduke Haward,--what of him?” asked Truelove softly.
“He is English,” said MacLean, after a pause. “He can make of his face
a smiling mask, can keep his voice as even and as still as the pool
that is a mile away from the fierce torrent its parent. It is a gift
they have, the English. I remember at Preston”--He broke off with a
sigh. “There will be an end some day, I suppose. He will win her at
last to his way of thinking; and having gained her, he will be happy.
And yet to my mind there is something unfortunate, strange and fatal,
in the aspect of this girl. It hath always been so. She is such a one
as the Lady in Green. On a Halloween night, standing in the twelfth
rig, a man might hear her voice upon the wind. I would old Murdoch of
Coll, who hath the second sight, were here: he could tell the ending of
it all.”
An hour later found the Highlander well upon his way to Williamsburgh,
walking through wood and field with his long stride, his heart warm
within him, his mind filled with the thought of Truelove and the home
that he would make for her in the rude, upriver country. Since the two
had sat beneath the oak, clouds had gathered, obscuring the sun. It
was now gray and cold in the forest, and presently snow began to fall,
slowly, in large flakes, between the still trees.
MacLean looked with whimsical anxiety at several white particles upon
his suit of fine cloth, claret-colored and silver-laced, and quickened
his pace. But the snow was but the lazy vanguard of a storm, and so few
and harmless were the flakes that when, a mile from Williamsburgh and
at some little distance from the road, MacLean beheld a ring of figures
seated upon the Gounod beneath a giant elm, he stopped to observe who
and what they were that sat so still beneath the leafless tree in the
winter weather.
The group, that at first glimpse had seemed some conclave of beings
uncouth and lubberly and solely of the forest, resolved itself into
the Indian teacher and his pupils, escaped for the afternoon from the
bounds of William and Mary. The Indian lads--slender, bronze, and
statuesque--sat in silence, stolidly listening to the words of the
white man, who, standing in the midst of the ring, with his back to the
elm-tree, told to his dusky charges a Bible tale. It was the story of
Joseph and his brethren. The clear, gentle tones of the teacher reached
MacLean’s ears where he stood unobserved behind a roadside growth of
bay and cedar.
A touch upon the shoulder made him turn, to find at his elbow that
sometime pupil of Mr. Charles Griffin in whose company he had once
trudged from Fair View store to Williamsburgh.
“I was lying in the woods over there,” said Hugon sullenly. “I heard
them coming, and I took my leave. ‘Peste!’ said I. ‘The old, weak man
who preaches quietness under men’s injuries, and the young wolf pack,
all brown, with Indian names!’ They may have the woods; for me, I go
back to the town where I belong.”
He shrugged his shoulders, and stood scowling at the distant group.
MacLean, in his turn, looked curiously at his quondam companion of a
sunny day in May, the would-be assassin with whom he had struggled in
wind and rain beneath the thunders of an August storm. The trader wore
his great wig, his ancient steinkirk of tawdry lace, his high boots of
Spanish leather, cracked and stained. Between the waves of coarse hair,
out of coal-black, deep-set eyes looked the soul of the half-breed,
fierce, vengeful, ignorant, and embittered.
“There is Meshawa,” he said,--“Meshawa, who was a little boy when I
went to school, but who used to laugh when I talked of France. Pardieu!
one day I found him alone when it was cold, and there was a fire in
the room. Next time I talked he did not laugh! They are all”--he swept
his hand toward the circle beneath the elm--“they are all Saponies,
Nottoways, Meherrins; their fathers are lovers of the peace pipe,
and humble to the English. A Monacan is a great brave; he laughs at
the Nottoways, and says that there are no men in the villages of the
Meherrins.”
“When do you go again to trade with your people?” asked MacLean.
Hugon glanced at him out of the corners of his black eyes. “They are
not my people; my people are French. I am not going to the woods any
more. I am so prosperous. Diable! shall not I as well as another stay
at Williamsburgh, dress fine, dwell in an ordinary, play high, and
drink of the best?”
“There is none will prevent you,” said MacLean coolly. “Dwell in town,
take your ease in your inn, wear gold lace, stake the skins of all the
deer in Virginia, drink Burgundy and Champagne, but lay no more arrows
athwart the threshold of a gentleman’s door.”
Hugon’s lips twitched into a tigerish grimace. “So he found the arrow?
Mortdieu! let him look to it that one day the arrow find not him!”
“If I were Haward,” said MacLean, “I would have you taken up.”
The trader again looked sideways at the speaker, shrugged his
shoulders and waved his hand. “Oh, he--he despises me too much for
that! Eh bien! to-day I love to see him live. When there is no wine
in the cup, but only dregs that are bitter, I laugh to see it at his
lips. She,--Ma’m’selle Audrey, that never before could I coax into
my boat,--she reached me her hand, she came with me down the river,
through the night-time, and left him behind at Westover. Ha! think
you not that was bitter, that drink which she gave him, Mr. Marmaduke
Haward of Fair View? Since then, if I go to that house, that garden at
Williamsburgh, she hides, she will not see me; the man and his wife
make excuse! Bad! But also he sees her never. He writes to her: she
answers not. Good! Let him live, with the fire built around him and the
splinters in his heart!”
He laughed again, and, dismissing the subject with airiness somewhat
exaggerated, drew out his huge gilt snuffbox. The snow was now falling
more thickly, drawing a white and fleecy veil between the two upon
the road and the story-teller and his audience beneath the distant
elm. “Are you for Williamsburgh?” demanded the Highlander, when he had
somewhat abruptly declined to take snuff with Monsieur Jean Hugon.
That worthy nodded, pocketing his box and incidentally making a great
jingling of coins.
“Then,” quoth MacLean, “since I prefer to travel alone, twill wait
here until you have passed the rolling-house in the distance yonder.
Good-day to you!”
He seated himself upon the stump of a tree, and, giving all his
attention to the snow, began to whistle a thoughtful air. Hugon glanced
at him with fierce black eyes and twitching lips, much desiring a
quarrel; then thought better of it, and before the tune had come to an
end was making with his long and noiseless stride his lonely way to
Williamsburgh, and the ordinary in Nicholson Street.