winter's fields and forcing from their barren and frosty breasts the
first of the gladsome flowers, the passion in his veins turned merciful.
The snows he did not love; for beneath the beauty and the softness of
the drifting flakes he saw the treachery of the cold--the cold that
brought but misery to his poor and made them almost forget that ever
again God would bring the summer-time days. But when the earth lived
again and became a mother with a thousand wombs, giving birth each
beautiful moment to every green and blossoming thing; when he turned his
eyes, made world-weary by looking on the suffering his people needs must
bear, unto the blue of the warm skies, where it seemed that the very
heavens were renewing, with some mysterious pigments, their blue and the
white clouds afloat therein; and women went about with a strange new
faith on their brows, while their men grew strong again with hope and
courage, it was then that the thoughts of the Abbe Picot wandered to the
gentler play of happy children, while his fingers, made kind through a
mood quickened by nature, wrought new dreams into song. A poet! Ah, he
told himself, was there anything better than to be a maker of dreams?
Was the good God ever more gracious than when he gave to one's mind to
see and appreciate everything beautiful in a world within which there
was so much of ugliness? Aye, on occasions even to find the very
hideousness of things containing some inner, secret loveliness for the
souls of men? Then, withal, to bless the hand with the art of expressing
the things seen of his heart so others, reading in passing, might know
His wonders too, was of a surety to be markedly favored of destiny. Thus
it was that our good Abbe made sonnets and madrigals with his master
Pierre Ronsard, ballades after the manner of that charming rogue
Francois Villon, and songs quite as exquisite as those of the amorous
troubadour, Bernard de Ventadour, whom he admired more for the structure
of his verses than the sentiment expressed therein.
Probably most of all the Abbe Picot loved the earlier night hours, when,
in fancy, his priestly robes laid aside, he seemed to forget his
chivalry, his strength of arm, and the tenderness of his hands and live
merely to absorb himself in the superficial lives of the men and women
passing in the streets. The garish lights of theaters, cafes, and the
great salons, the thoroughfares congested with carriages, and bewildered
people hastened by fear and the threatening gendarme; the hurried,
half-confused movements of belated shoppers, the roaming groups of
pleasure-seekers, all found him thinking himself as Pierrot with his
Pierrett, the gayest of the revelers. Frequently he would take his stand
within an unused doorway and look with curious kindly interest into
every face that passed. The pretty chattering grisettes; the swaggering
soldier with his impudent leer; the wealthy, from quarters distinguished
for their aristocratic dwellers, out to dabble in questionable joys; the
vagabond stopping, meanwhile munching his miserable crust, to gaze into
the richness of a shop-window at the clothing he might never hope to
wear; the gamin, happy, ignorant, old at ten years, and appallingly wise
in the ways of crime and despairing poverty; a thief with furtive look,
shifting eyes, and hands whose searching fingers curved like the claws
of a bird of prey; a courtesan irresponsibly, artificially gay in her
rented finery; a priest hurrying to shrive some woful dying player on
the boards of existence; a palsied old man tottering on the very edge
of his finished days; a gladsome pink-cheeked youth, buoyed by the hope
and courage born of inexperience, with his years all unfulfilled; a sick
child crying in its mother's impotent arms; birth, death, and all that
passes between found a very human interest in the mind, with a prayer in
the heart of Monsieur l'Abbe, who now deemed it his particular business
in life to be a maker of joys. He knew that none of them were all bad.
The most of them were peculiarly generous and often good. His heart told
him that a knowledge of life was a far, far better equipment for the
soul's physician than a course in theology. To help his men and women,
he argued, he must know them, not only in their more potent wrongs and
uglier misdeeds, but in their pleasing sins, their follies, the gaiety
belonging to the idle, lighter part of their being. And because there
was in his own nature a subdued impulse which, uncontrolled, would have
led him into many of their venial intemperances, he had a confidence in
them wrought of an understanding mind and a sympathetic heart. So this
watcher by the side of the road loved the night and all of her
mysterious, alluring children. In his fancy he followed in and out of
their varied lives until his soul became a part of those to whom he
deemed it the biggest thing in the world to bring joy.
After such a night, again in his home with the day's work and play
ended, kneeling beside his lonely little bed beneath the crucifix, the
sorrow, the shame, the pain, the misery caused by all of life seemed to
surge through his veins like a tempestuous sea overwhelming all before
it. Quickly crossing himself, sighing while gently shaking his head, he
would once again become the good Abbe Jacques Picot. He was, so to
speak, a religious free-lance; a priest without benefice, whose
relations with the authority of the Church were scarcely evident--a
condition somewhat prevalent in France. Yet, unlike many of his brother
clerics, he believed his parish to consist of humanity at large.
"Wherever a heart is broken, a soul is sick, or a body suffering," he
is known to have said, "it is there I have a work to do. _Patria est
ubicumque est bene._ So my task is wherever joy may be made."
Yet withal, at heart and in temperament he was a loyal Parisian.
* * * * *
Just how long the Abbe's meditations had been going on from the moment
he had ceased to read until the concierge, after knocking upon the door,
slipped in and laid a letter upon his lap, it would be difficult to
calculate. Whatever that may have been, for much longer did he read,
reread, and study the missive before him. Finally he raised his good
gray eyes, filled with a sort of an amazing despair, and cried aloud:
"Jacques, Jacques, thou art indeed sore beset. To be one man is of
course to be none at all; to be two is the average lot of the more
fortunate; but to be no less than five, by all the saints in paradise,
is to be worse off than that angel whose right wing was born of heaven
and the left of hell!"
"What is it, my brother?" one of the men within him seemed quietly to
ask. In fact, the wee, small voice appeared so actual that the good Abbe
was startled.
By way of reply, for the hundredth time he read the letter.... It was
from a Doctor Felix Longstreet of Oldmeadow, Kentucky, United States of
America, announcing an inheritance--that is, with conditions. To him it
meant wealth.
"Shall you go?" now inquired the quiet man uneasily.
"It is a green, grassy old name for a town," was the rather irrelevant
reply.
"Do you wish to go?" again came the inquiry from the same anxious
source.
"Kentucky!" he pronounced with not unbeautiful accents. "Kentucky sounds
like poetry for 'out of doors.'"
"What will you do?" insisted several of the little men within at once.
"Things will be different there," argued the Abbe. "It is an old
Protestant community. So said the letter.... You will not be in
unconventional Rue St. Jacques. You cannot have liberties." He advanced
a hundred objections, yet scarcely believing in any of them.
"But I may study," he continued. "I scarcely have an opportunity here.
And my beloved philosophy shall have more time. I might even write my
memoirs.... You know," in a tone of apology to the quiet one, "every
Frenchman who can hold a pen wants to write memoirs.... Besides, cannot
I make the people good Catholics?" This he said for conscience's sake.
"That, you know when you say it, would be next to impossible," came the
prompt objection.
"I can try very hard, very gently."
"Certainly! It will ease your conscience for accepting quiet,
well-ordered years of ease away from the problems of life."
"O, thou tender friend, you are brutally frank.... You help me make up
my mind.... I shall go to this land of Kentucky."
"Do.... 'Au revoir, my happy, sunny France,' you shall say, but many's
the time your poor heart shall break for her freedom, the merry,
care-free streets of Paris, and the road to Amiens we have traveled so
often together."
"Very likely.... I think I shall go," came from the Abbe.
"Are you certain?" again insisted the quiet one, with a note of
suspicious eagerness illy suppressed.
The Abbe looked about him, before replying, as if sensing something
wrong. "I am absolutely sure!" he said a trifle vehemently.
"I am glad," chuckled the quiet one good humoredly. "I wanted to go
myself."
* * * * *
It was thus, after much debating with himself, that Monsieur l'Abbe
Jacques Picot came to live in the old-fashioned home of the many
pillars.
CHAPTER NINE
THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN
Monsieur l'Abbe Jacques Picot, in the old home of many pillars, sat in
the library at his desk writing his memoirs. He was dressed with unusual
neatness in the garb of a French priest. His closely cropped hair showed
a well-shaped head, while his face, freshly shaven, presented strikingly
interesting features. His mouth was big and amiable, his lips full yet
firmly set, his nose almost too large, and his prominent lower jaw
bespoke a strong will. It was a pair of humorous gray eyes, twinkling in
irrepressible goodwill, that lighted and relieved a countenance which
otherwise might have appeared unduly severe.... Can you imagine the
disciple Peter with the eyes of Rabelais? Had he been a saint he would
have been Francis of Assisi.
The room in which he wrote was filled with books and manuscripts. The
library, upon closer inspection, would have shown that it was largely
given to general literature. Subjects upon theology were conspicuously
absent. The tastes of the owner were evidenced by the volumes upon the
table. Poems by Ronsard; Rabelais' "Les Faits et Dicts Heroisques du Bon
Pantegruel," "Twelfth Night" by Shakespeare, and "The Life and
Adventures of Guzman d'Alfarache" by Mateo Aleman.
As he wrote in a memorandum evidently intended for amplification later,
then to be placed in the memoirs, he smiled as if taking a whimsical joy
in what he recorded.
* * * * *
This is what Monsieur l'Abbe wrote:
On the afternoon of September 14, as I took my first walk upon my return
home, I watched, quite unobserved by me, a tow-headed, freckle-faced
boy, just reaching the Dumas stage of his charmed life, wade through the
hot limestone dust of the turnpike, which forms Oldmeadow's chief
street, and, upon reaching the spring just without the town, stand and
cool his feet in the water of which he had drunk but a moment before.
Even to this day I never see a small boy but what, if the opportunity
presents itself, I look to see if he is web-footed. If certain
illustrious warriors of an age when there never appeared to have been
any real boys may be said to have been, like Romulus, suckled by a
she-wolf, so it seems most of the youths I know must have been turned
out by their mothers to be reared by the ducks. At any rate I know what
an instinct all normal, healthy boys have for puddles.
Now I think I have a very acute intuition about boys and their thoughts.
This time it was not different. This self-conscious boy was saying
good-by to the very little boy, more than half baby, that he had been
ever since he could remember. Previously he had been just a child,
without sex-consciousness. All of the fluffy little girls were merely a
part of the landscape. A part, at that, whose existence to him, so far
as their being of any use, was a mystery. To him they were as
superficial in their importance as the mice from which they ran in
horror, or the abominable cats which they chose to pet. He had always
proved sufficient unto his little self, and there was really no one whom
he felt that he could really do without, unless it be mother, father,
and the river. Recognizing his superior physical strength when compared
with that of girls, and measuring all things by this prowess, his
inability to place them in their proper relationship to life increased
with each new feat. There was where his world lay, and girls were
forbidden. It is true Nance Gwyn possessed some recommendatory
qualifications, yet her frequent readiness to tears kept her without the
pale.
Finally it was this same Nance who burst his world like a bubble and
sent him forth upon a quest which would occupy him for the remainder of
his life. Within the past year there had softly and unwittingly crept
upon him a knowledge of her necessity to his well-being. He now saw in a
measure her place in the whole. She was now in the ascendancy, and he
knew in his boyish heart that she always would be. And while he never
doubted it being worth it, he was sure that he had paid a great price.
He had given something that, however much he longed to retain it, he
might never hope to have again. He had given his very little boyhood
with its irresponsible innocence born of this same lack of any
appreciation of sex. For this tenderness that had brought him to know
and feel the thrill of a thousand sweet mysteries in the now glorious
Nance he had given up the circus days, the joy in a dirty face, the fun
of hearing her squeal in response to his torments, and from a sort of
undesirable, weak boykin, in a fluff of little skirts, whose only
redeeming quality was a vain attempt to be like "the fellows," she
became of a sudden a woman-child with all the alluring and delightful
charms of girlhood.
It is only fair to say that had the boy been asked to choose between the
two, he would have unhesitatingly taken the life he knew lay all before
him, unlived, unfulfilled, full of mystery, hope and Her. Yet it was no
disloyalty, no cowardice to spend a day in getting used to the new by
dwelling in tender memory over the old.
So he stretched himself under a hillside tree, and held his head in his
hands with fingers interlaced beneath. His bare knees were crossed with
one wet muddy foot propped in the air, while the other found a hold in
the moss at the roots of his shelter. His eyes wandered through the
green cool leaves above him and noted the wonderful blue of the sky
where the white clouds sailed like great, snow-sheeted ships in a sea of
turquoise. They seemed very beautiful, very kind, very prophetic of the
joy of the long, long days to be. Everything now seemed different. It
was the same colorful late summer heaven of a year ago, it was true, but
to it there had been added a new, more vital meaning. The blue was the
same as that of her eyes and the clouds spelled her name.
It seemed that before he had never discovered that there were so many
girls in the world. Everywhere there was nothing but bright eyes in
lovely fresh faces, always beaming in friendly innocence upon him. He
had scarcely noticed them before. Now they lent a subtle joy, an
alluring mystery to everything with which they were associated. A bit of
ribbon, a piece of lace, was no longer a portion of silk or so much
linen.
For him, of a surety, God had created "a new heaven and a new earth."
Forgotten was the ancient story of Eve and the garden. Now Nance, of the
sun-colored hair, was the first woman. And as he lay in a fine sensuous
health beneath the sky, which brought to him the deep color of her eyes,
it seemed that a voice, calling him from somewhere within the mighty
distance, named him Adam. It unnerved and startled him. Turning upon his
face he burst into tears. His small shoulders shook convulsively, and
for the first time he sobbed as does a man. As his body heaved with the
pain of his unaccountable sorrow, a top with a soiled string fell from
his pocket, and, rolling down the hill, lay neglected in the mud; a bird
in the tree-top above broke the stillness of the afternoon with a
full-throated, joyous song to his mate; a great white cloud, passing
over the sun, cast a soft running shadow across the valley to the
ridges; all nature seemed to sigh, like a sleeping child, or was it the
oaten pipes of Pan, and then to awaken into new life.
[Illustration:
_It was the same colorful late summer heaven of a year ago
it was true, but to it there had been added a new, more
vital meaning. The blue was the same as that of her eyes and
the clouds spelled her name._
_The Boy ceased his sobbing. After a while, looking up with
a tearful, smiling face, he announced, as if to the Voice
that had called him_:
"_Now I must go to work._"]
The boy ceased his sobbing. After a while, looking up with a tearful,
smiling face, he announced, as if to the voice that had called him:
"Now I must go to work."
PART SECOND
TEN YEARS LATER
O MASTER, IF YOU DID BUT HEAR THE PEDLER AT THE DOOR, YOU
WOULD NEVER DANCE AGAIN AFTER A TABOR AND A PIPE; NO, THE
BAGPIPE COULD NOT MOVE YOU: HE SINGS SEVERAL TUNES FASTER
THAN YOU'LL TELL MONEY; HE UTTERS THEM AS HE HAD EATEN
BALLADS AND ALL MEN'S EARS GREW TO HIS TUNES.
--_A Winter's Tale_.
CHAPTER TEN
ON THE MORNING ROAD
The morning road--jocund, robust, strong, and bright--dropped slowly
over the long hill, crossed a merry little river through a covered
bridge, turned to the right, ran sinuously through a green valley for a
mile and a half, quickly gathered a cluster of houses about it, and
promptly became the street of a small town of southern Kentucky. The
crimson of the sunrise, like blushes on the cheeks of a child, patched
the eastern sky. A haze of misty blue lingered above the stream, the eye
thus being able to follow it for miles through the bottom lands. The
mountain tops to the west wore their eternal gray, the shade of the
uniforms of Confederate soldiers. The sun's yellow splendor shimmered
warm and soft as if caressing the pregnant fields. The air was charged
with gentle breezes perfumed from the woodland of the ridges and the
fresh, mellow scent of rich earth, newly stirred by the plow. Orioles,
robins, blue jays, larks: a perfect medley of rollicking song flew by on
joyous wing. A solitary man standing on the hilltop turned slowly from
mountain to valley, from sky to field, seeming to eat and drink and
breathe--to make a part of him by some paganish transubstantiation--the
very day itself. Like a brother to Pan, he belonged to it all, and the
impulse to make himself felt, as the other forces abroad, was strong
within him.... No wonder the entire earth was happy: there had been born
that dawn, full-grown like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus, the
spirit of June.
[Illustration:
_A solitary man standing on the hilltop turned slowly from
mountain to valley, from sky to field, seeming to eat and
think and breathe--to make a part of him by some paganish
transubstantiation--the very day itself._]
* * * * *
A few moments later the eyes of this lone son of the morning sought the
distant village. The gray smoke of wood-fires, bespeaking the approach
of the breakfast hour, arose from the chimneys of friendly kitchens.
Far-away voices, calling the cows to be milked, mingled with snatches of
song, the rattle of well-sweeps and the chopping of wood lent a human
note of melody to the hour. The man's nostrils extended as in
imagination he scented the smell of frying ham. He had slept by the
roadside on the hilltop, and his appetite was healthful and ample. He
had provisions with him, it was true, but for ten days he had eaten his
own cooking by the camp-fire, and he had promised himself a change of
food at the table of the little hotel the virtue of whose menu he had
learned years ago. Besides, while the roving spirit of the road was
strong in his blood, he loved human companionship. This morning he
wanted the touch of some congenial hand.
"All right, Rogue," said he, and the shaggy mare, pulling onto the
turnpike, began to leisurely make her way toward the village. Columbine
was glorying in a glistening new coat of paint--yellow, to be sure.
Pierrett, yes, certainly, the immortal Pierrett, only a trifle blacker,
a bit more burned at the bowl, a little more worn at the mouthpiece.
Following them all--Rogue, Columbine, Pierrett--in single file, was the
happy master of the caravan, Jean Francois. As he walked, hatless,
coatless, head thrown back and eyes upon the sky, he sang. The music, if
music it might be called at all, seemed an improvisation, yet it had a
certain strange, chanting melody in harmony with this picture of the
morning:
"Will you buy any tape,
Or lace for your cape,
My dainty duck, my dear-a?
Any silk, any thread,
Any toys for your head,
Of the new'st and finest, finest wear-a?
Come to the pedler,
Money's a meddler,
That doth utter all men's ware-a."
As he sauntered singing down the hill-road the thoughts of Jean Francois
were in Oldmeadow. This was for more reasons than one. His mood called
for friends, and there were to be found his truest. Also the village in
the valley below him, with its inviting streets and old hotel, recalled
certain pleasant features of the home of Nance and Charles and Doctor
Longstreet. More than all else, less than two weeks and once more he
would be camping on his friendly common by the river. He expected this
summer to be the best in many years. The little freckle-faced King boy,
after four years in a deadly medical college, had graduated in April,
and was now occupying Doctor Longstreet's office, while trying to assume
the old gentleman's practise. There was doubtless a new sign hung from
the post by the door, bearing the legend:
Charles Reubelt King, M.D.
Physician and Surgeon
Doctor Longstreet, having retired, would certainly have more time for
fishing, yarning, and philosophizing. For the matter of that, the
chances were that he would be all the more irascible. This, however,
would prove an amusement for Jean Francois. The old fellow's irony and
wit were truest when brought forth under a passing flash of
irritability.
The summer of a year ago Nance Gwyn had been in Europe. Now and then she
had written Jean Francois humorous and amusing little letters. She had
returned during the spring. Before she left she had grown into quite a
beautiful and charming young woman, yet there still clung to her the
spirit of her childhood.... He wondered if a year in Paris--his
Paris--and Berlin, would spoil her. If she would become worldly,
artificial, and conventionalized. He thought of her old simplicity, her
open-mindedness, her frank disregard of the factitious, her courage to
act, and realized that it would take a veritable revolution to even
modify her temperament.
As for himself, he smiled as he rubbed his hand into his bushy beard,
thinking that, though it scarcely seemed more than a year or two since
he was thirty, yet in reality he had recently passed his fiftieth
birthday. He would have to die some day, he reckoned. Yet if he had ever
grown older at any period of his life he wasn't aware of it. Forever
young, thought he, forever young!... Maybe we--Columbine, Rogue, and
I--are the exceptions. What if we should never die? As long as we were
lusty and the road was at the morning, why should we care? Perhaps we
are immortal!... And he pirouetted gaily like a premiere danseuse.
Unlike the dancer, however, his caper was cut short midway. Rogue came
to a sudden stop. A choking sob from someone seated directly in the
center of the road just beneath the mare's nose brought him to earth.
He stooped and peered beneath the cart, beneath the mare at the
obstruction. He saw the back of a woman, as she sat in the dust, with
her head bowed in her hands. He reckoned her head was in her hands, for
he could not see it. The back was shaking in accompaniment to tears or
laughter, as to which of them he was uncertain. Doubtless both, it being
a woman. Rogue smelled the object good humoredly and then turned her
gaze inquiringly to her master. This was an unforeseen problem hitherto
not dealt with in their varied experience as travelers. Jean Francois
straightened up, smoothed his beard with his hands, gave his trousers a
hitch at his belt, clearing his throat loudly and with ostentation. The
shoulders in the road ceased their sobbing movement long enough to
perceptibly shrug.
"Damn!" ejaculated Jean Francois, beneath his breath.
Then, removing an ample bandanna handkerchief from his pocket, he
signaled by a demonstrative blowing of his nose. This, producing no
effect save to heighten the disturbance of the shoulders before him,
encouraged him to call out:
"I beg your pardon, Madame."
There was no reply.
"Bite her, Rogue, you sacre pig of a zebra," he commanded, with mingled
good humor and disgust showing in his voice as he, at the same time,
stepped around the cart toward the cause of the disturbance.
As he approached, a rather disheveled young woman turned a tearful,
laughing face toward him, and, not rising, cried somewhat trembly, yet
merrily: