The house of Captain Masterton Dows, at Pineville, Kentucky, was a fine
specimen of Southern classical architecture, being an exact copy of
Major Fauquier's house in Virginia, which was in turn only a slight
variation from a well-known statesman's historical villa in Alabama,
that everybody knew was designed from a famous Greek temple on the
Piraeus. Not but that it shared this resemblance with the County Court
House and the Odd Fellows' Hall, but the addition of training jessamine
and Cherokee rose to the columns of the portico, and over the colonnade
leading to its offices, showed a certain domestic distinction. And the
sky line of its incongruously high roof was pleasantly broken against
adjacent green pines, butternut, and darker cypress.
A nearer approach showed the stuccoed gateposts--whose red brick
core was revealed through the dropping plaster--opening in a wall of
half-rough stone, half-wooden palisade, equally covered with shining
moss and parasitical vines, which hid a tangled garden left to its own
unkempt luxuriance. Yet there was a reminiscence of past formality
and even pretentiousness in a wide box-bordered terrace and one or two
stuccoed vases prematurely worn and time-stained; while several rare
exotics had, however, thriven so unwisely and well in that stimulating
soil as to lose their exclusive refinement and acquire a certain
temporary vulgarity. A few, with the not uncommon enthusiasm of aliens,
had adopted certain native peculiarities with a zeal that far exceeded
any indigenous performance. But dominant through all was the continual
suggestion of precocious fruition and premature decay that lingered like
a sad perfume in the garden, but made itself persistent if less poetical
in the house.
Here the fluted wooden columns of the portico and colonnade seemed to
have taken upon themselves a sodden and unwholesome age unknown to stone
and mortar. Moss and creeper clung to paint that time had neither dried
nor mellowed, but left still glairy in its white consistency. There were
rusty red blotches around inflamed nail-holes in the swollen wood, as of
punctures in living flesh; along the entablature and cornices and in the
dank gutters decay had taken the form of a mild deliquescence; and the
pillars were spotted as if Nature had dropped over the too early ruin
a few unclean tears. The house itself was lifted upon a broad wooden
foundation painted to imitate marble with such hopeless mendacity that
the architect at the last moment had added a green border, and the owner
permitted a fallen board to remain off so as to allow a few privileged
fowls to openly explore the interior. When Miss Sally Dows played the
piano in the drawing-room she was at times accompanied by the uplifted
voice of the sympathetic hounds who sought its quiet retreat in
ill-health or low spirits, and from whom she was separated only by
an imperfectly carpeted floor of yawning seams. The infant progeny
of “Mammy Judy,” an old nurse, made this a hiding-place from domestic
justice, where they were eventually betrayed by subterranean giggling
that had once or twice brought bashful confusion to the hearts of Miss
Sally's admirers, and mischievous security to that finished coquette
herself.
It was a pleasant September afternoon, on possibly one of these
occasions, that Miss Sally, sitting before the piano, alternately
striking a few notes with three pink fingers and glancing at her
reflection in the polished rosewood surface of the lifted keyboard case,
was heard to utter this languid protest:--
“Quit that kind of talk, Chet, unless you just admire to have every word
of it repeated all over the county. Those little niggers of Mammy Judy's
are lying round somewhere and are mighty 'cute, and sassy, I tell you.
It's nothin' to ME, sure, but Miss Hilda mightn't like to hear of it. So
soon after your particular attention to her at last night's pawty too.”
Here a fresh-looking young fellow of six-and-twenty, leaning uneasily
over the piano from the opposite side, was heard to murmur that he
didn't care what Miss Hilda heard, nor the whole world, for the matter
of that. “But,” he added, with a faint smile, “folks allow that you know
how to PLAY UP sometimes, and put on the loud pedal, when you don't want
Mammy's niggers to hear.”
“Indeed,” said the young lady demurely. “Like this?”
She put out a distracting little foot, clothed in the white stocking and
cool black prunella slipper then de rigueur in the State, and, pressing
it on the pedal, began to drum vigorously on the keys. In vain the
amorous Chet protested in a voice which the instrument drowned.
Perceiving which the artful young lady opened her blue eyes mildly and
said:--
“I reckon it IS so; it DOES kind of prevent you hearing what you don't
want to hear.”
“You know well enough what I mean,” said the youth gloomily. “And that
ain't all that folks say. They allow that you're doin' a heap too much
correspondence with that Californian rough that killed Tom Jeffcourt
over there.”
“Do they?” said the young lady, with a slight curl of her pretty lip.
“Then perhaps they allow that if it wasn't for me he wouldn't be sending
a hundred dollars a month to Aunt Martha?”
“Yes,” said the fatuous youth; “but they allow he killed Tom for his
money. And they do say it's mighty queer doin's in yo' writin' religious
letters to him, and Tom your own cousin.”
“Oh, they tell those lies HERE, do they? But do they say anything about
how, when the same lies were told over in California, the lawyer they've
got over there, called Colonel Starbottle,--a Southern man too,--got up
and just wrote to Aunt Martha that she'd better quit that afore she got
prosecuted? They didn't tell you that, did they, Mister Chester Brooks?”
But here the unfortunate Brooks, after the fashion of all jealous
lovers, deserted his allies for his fair enemy. “I don't cotton to what
THEY say, Sally, but you DO write to him, and I don't see what you've
got to write about--you and him. Jule Jeffcourt says that when you got
religion at Louisville during the revival, you felt you had a call to
write and save sinners, and you did that as your trial and probation,
but that since you backslided and are worldly again, and go to parties,
you just keep it up for foolin' and flirtin'! SHE ain't goin' to weaken
on the man that shot her brother, just because he's got a gold mine
and--a mustache!”
“She takes his MONEY all the same,” said Miss Sally.
“SHE don't,--her mother does. SHE says if she was a man she'd have blood
for blood!”
“My!” said Miss Sally, in affected consternation. “It's a wonder she
don't apply to you to act for her.”
“If it was MY brother he killed, I'd challenge him quick enough,” said
Chet, flushing through his thin pink skin and light hair.
“Marry her, then, and that'll make you one of the family. I reckon Miss
Hilda can bear it,” rejoined the young lady pertly.
“Look here, Miss Sally,” said the young fellow with a boyish despair
that was not without a certain pathos in its implied inferiority, “I
ain't gifted like you--I ain't on yo' level no how; I can't pass yo' on
the road, and so I reckon I must take yo' dust as yo' make it. But there
is one thing, Miss Sally, I want to tell you. You know what's going on
in this country, you've heard your father say what the opinion of the
best men is, and what's likely to happen if the Yanks force that nigger
worshiper, Lincoln, on the South. You know that we're drawing the line
closer every day, and spottin' the men that ain't sound. Take care, Miss
Sally, you ain't sellin' us cheap to some Northern Abolitionist
who'd like to set Marm Judy's little niggers to something worse
than eavesdropping down there, and mebbe teach 'em to kindle a fire
underneath yo' own flo'.”
He had become quite dialectic in his appeal, as if youthfully reverting
to some accent of the nursery, or as if he were exhorting her in some
recognized shibboleth of a section. Miss Sally rose and shut down the
piano. Then leaning over it on her elbows, her rounded little chin
slightly elevated with languid impertinence, and one saucy foot kicked
backwards beyond the hem of her white cotton frock, she said: “And let
me tell you, Mister Chester Brooks, that it's just such God-forsaken,
infant phenomenons as you who want to run the whole country that make
all this fuss, when you ain't no more fit to be trusted with matches
than Judy's children. What do YOU know of Mr. Jo Corbin, when you don't
even know that he's from Shelbyville, and as good a Suth'ner as you, and
if he hasn't got niggers it's because they don't use them in his parts?
Yo'r for all the world like one o' Mrs. Johnson's fancy bantams that
ain't quit of the shell afore they square off at their own mother. My
goodness! Sho! Sho-o-o!” And suiting the action to the word the young
lady, still indolently, even in her simulation, swirled around, caught
her skirts at the side with each hand, and lazily shaking them before
her in the accepted feminine method of frightening chickens as she
retreated backwards, dropped them suddenly in a profound curtsey and
swept out of the parlor.
Nevertheless, as she entered the sitting-room she paused to listen,
then, going to the window, peeped through the slits of the Venetian
blind and saw her youthful admirer, more dejected in the consciousness
of his wasted efforts and useless attire, mount his showy young horse,
as aimlessly spirited as himself, and ride away. Miss Sally did not
regret this; neither had she been entirely sincere in her defense of her
mysterious correspondent. But, like many of her sex, she was trying to
keep up by the active stimulus of opposition an interest that she had
begun to think if left to itself might wane. She was conscious that
her cousin Julia, although impertinent and illogical, was right in
considering her first epistolary advances to Corbin as a youthful
convert's religious zeal. But now that her girlish enthusiasm was spent,
and the revival itself had proved as fleeting an excitement as the old
“Tournament of Love and Beauty,” which it had supplanted, she preferred
to believe that she enjoyed the fascinating impropriety because it was
the actual result of her religious freedom. Perhaps she had a vague idea
that Corbin's conversion would expiate her present preference for dress
and dancing. She had certainly never flirted with him; they had never
exchanged photographs; there was not a passage in his letters that might
not have been perused by her parents,--which, I fear, was probably one
reason why she had never shown her correspondence; and beyond the fact
that this letter-writing gave her a certain importance in her own
eyes and those of her companions, it might really be stopped. She even
thought of writing at once to him that her parents objected to its
further continuance, but remembering that his usual monthly letter was
now nearly due, she concluded to wait until it came.
It is to be feared that Miss Sally had little help in the way of family
advice, and that the moral administration of the Dows household was as
prematurely developed and as precociously exhausted as the estate and
mansion themselves. Captain Dows' marriage with Josephine Jeffcourt,
the daughter of a “poor white,” had been considered a mesalliance by his
family, and his own sister, Miranda Dows, had abandoned her brother's
roof and refused to associate with the Jeffcourts, only returning to
the house and an armed neutrality at the death of Mrs. Dows a few years
later. She had taken charge of Miss Sally, sending her to school at
Nashville until she was recalled by her father two years ago. It may be
imagined that Miss Sally's correspondence with Jeffcourt's murderer had
afforded her a mixed satisfaction; it was at first asserted that Miss
Sally's forgiveness was really prompted by “Miss Mirandy,” as a subtle
sarcasm upon the family. When, however, that forgiveness seemed to
become a source of revenue to the impoverished Jeffcourts, her Christian
interference had declined.
For this reason, possibly, the young girl did not seek her aunt in
the bedroom, the dining-room, or the business-room, where Miss
Miranda frequently assisted Captain Dows in the fatuous and prejudiced
mismanagement of the house and property, nor in any of the vacant
guest-rooms, which, in their early wreck of latter-day mahogany and
rosewood, seemed to have been unoccupied for ages, but went directly to
her own room. This was in the “L,” a lately added wing that had escaped
the gloomy architectural tyranny of the main building, and gave Miss
Sally light, ventilation, the freshness and spice of new pine boards and
clean paper, and a separate entrance and windows on a cool veranda all
to herself. Intended as a concession to the young lady's traveled taste,
it was really a reversion to the finer simplicity of the pioneer.
New as the apartment appeared to be, it was old enough to contain
the brief little records of her maidenhood: the childish samplers and
pictures; the sporting epoch with its fox-heads, opossum and wild-cat
skins, riding-whip, and the goshawk in a cage, which Miss Sally believed
could be trained as a falcon; the religious interval of illustrated
texts, “Rock of Ages,” cardboard crosses, and the certificate of her
membership with “The Daughters of Sion” at the head of her little bed,
down to the last decadence of frivolity shown in the be-ribboned guitar
in the corner, and the dance cards, favors, and rosettes, military
buttons, dried bouquets, and other love gages on the mantelpiece.
The young girl opened a drawer of her table and took out a small packet
of letters tied up with a green ribbon. As she did so she heard the
sound of hoofs in the rear courtyard. This was presently followed by
a step on the veranda, and she opened the door to her father with the
letters still in her hand. There was neither the least embarrassment nor
self-consciousness in her manner.
Captain Dows, superficially remarkable only for a certain odd
combination of high military stock and turned-over planter's collar, was
slightly exalted by a sympathetic mingling of politics and mint julep
at Pineville Court House. “I was passing by the post-office at the Cross
Roads last week, dear,” he began, cheerfully, “and I thought of you, and
reckoned it was about time that my Pussy got one of her letters from her
rich Californian friend--and sure enough there was one. I clean forgot
to give it to you then, and only remembered it passing there to-day. I
didn't get to see if there was any gold-dust in it,” he continued, with
great archness, and a fatherly pinch of her cheek; “though I suspect
that isn't the kind of currency he sends to you.”
“It IS from Mr. Corbin,” said Miss Sally, taking it with a languid kind
of doubt; “and only now, paw, I was just thinking that I'd sort of drop
writing any more; it makes a good deal of buzzing amongst the neighbors,
and I don't see much honey nor comb in it.”
“Eh,” said the Captain, apparently more astonished than delighted at
his daughter's prudence. “Well, child, suit yourself! It's mighty mean,
though, for I was just thinking of telling you that Judge Read is an
old friend of this Colonel Starbottle, who is your friend's friend and
lawyer, and he says that Colonel Starbottle is WITH US, and working
for the cause out there, and has got a list of all the So'thern men
in California that are sound and solid for the South. Read says he
shouldn't wonder if he'd make California wheel into line too.”
“I don't see what that's got to do with Mr. Corbin,” said the young
girl, impatiently, flicking the still unopened letter against the packet
in her hand.
“Well,” said the Captain, with cheerful vagueness, “I thought it might
interest you,--that's all,” and lounged judicially away.
“Paw thinks,” said Miss Sally, still standing in the doorway,
ostentatiously addressing her pet goshawk, but with one eye following
her retreating parent, “Paw thinks that everybody is as keen bent on
politics as he is. There's where paw slips up, Jim.”
Re-entering the room, scratching her little nose thoughtfully with the
edge of Mr. Corbin's letter, she went to the mantelpiece and picked up a
small ivory-handled dagger, the gift of Joyce Masterton, aged eighteen,
presented with certain verses addressed to a “Daughter of the South,”
and cut open the envelope. The first glance was at her own name, and
then at the signature. There was no change in the formality; it was
“Dear Miss Sarah,” and “Yours respectfully, Jo Corbin,” as usual. She
was still secure. But her pretty brows contracted slightly as she read
as follows:--
“I've always allowed I should feel easier in my mind if I could ever get
to see Mrs. Jeffcourt, and that may be she might feel easier in hers if
I stood before her, face to face. Even if she didn't forgive me at once,
it might do her good to get off what she had on her mind against me. But
as there wasn't any chance of her coming to me, and it was out of the
question my coming to her and still keeping up enough work in the mines
to send her the regular money, it couldn't be done. But at last I've got
a partner to run the machine when I'm away. I shall be at Shelbyville by
the time this reaches you, where I shall stay a day or two to give you
time to break the news to Mrs. Jeffcourt, and then come on. You will do
this for me in your Christian kindness, Miss Dows--won't you? and if
you could soften her mind so as to make it less hard for me I shall be
grateful.
“P. S.--I forgot to say I have had HIM exhumed--you know who I mean--and
am bringing him with me in a patent metallic burial casket,--the best
that could be got in 'Frisco, and will see that he is properly buried
in your own graveyard. It seemed to me that it would be the best thing
I could do, and might work upon her feelings--as it has on mine. Don't
you?
“J. C.”
Miss Sally felt the tendrils of her fair hair stir with consternation.
The letter had arrived a week ago; perhaps he was in Pineville at that
very moment! She must go at once to the Jeffcourts,--it was only a mile
distant. Perhaps she might be still in time; but even then it was a
terribly short notice for such a meeting. Yet she stopped to select her
newest hat from the closet, and to tie it with the largest of bows under
her pretty chin; and then skipped from the veranda into a green lane
that ran beside the garden boundary. There, hidden by a hedge, she
dropped into a long, swinging trot, that even in her haste still kept
the languid deliberation characteristic of her people, until she had
reached the road. Two or three hounds in the garden started joyously
to follow her, but she drove them back with a portentous frown, and an
ill-aimed stone, and a suppressed voice. Yet in that backward glance she
could see that her little Eumenides--Mammy Judy's children--were peering
at her from below the wooden floor of the portico, which they were
grasping with outstretched arms and bowed shoulders, as if they were
black caryatides supporting--as indeed their race had done for many a
year--the pre-doomed and decaying mansion of their master.