ALL these energetic matters happen at aforesaid, is dancing attendance
upon the court. The fame of them travels to Nashville in advance of his
return, and works a respectful change toward him in the attitude of the
public. Hereafter he is to be called “Andrew” by ones who know him well;
while others, less acquainted, will on military occasions hail him as
“Cap'n” and on civil ones as “Square.” On every hand, reference to him
as “horse-faced” is to be dropped; wherefore this history, the effort of
which is to follow close in the wake of the actual, will from this point
profit by that polite example.
The household at the widow Donelson's learns of the Jonesboro valor and
executive promptitude of the young State's Attorney. The blooming Rachel
rejoices, while her Jonesboro, where the horse-faced one, in the
interests of the creditor class drunken spouse turns sullen. His
jealousy of Andrew is multiplied, as that young gentleman's fame
increases. The fame, however, is of a sort that seriously mislikes the
drunken Robards, who is at heart a hare. Wherefore, while his jealousy
grows, he no longer makes it the tavern talk, as was his sottish wont.
Affairs run briskly prosperous with Andrew, and he finds himself engaged
in half the litigation of the Cumberland. There is little money, but
the region owns a currency of its own. Some wise man has said that the
circulating medium of Europe is gold, of Africa men, of Asia women, of
America land. The client's of Andrew reward his labors with land, and
many a “six-forty,” by which the slang of the Cumberland identifies
a section of land, becomes his. Finally he owns such an array of
wilderness square miles, polka-dotted about between the Cumberland and
the Mississippi, that the aggregate acreage swells into the thousands.
Those acres, however, are hardly more valuable than are the brown leaves
wherewith each autumn carpets them.
While the ardent Andrew is pushing his way at the bar, and accumulating
“six-forties,” he continues to board at the widow Donelson's.
The blooming Rachel delights in his society--so polished, so splendidly
different from that of the drunkard Robards! Once or twice, too,
when Andrew, in his saddlebag excursions from court to court, has
a powder-burning brush with Indians and saves his sandy scalp by a
narrowish margin, the red cheek of Rachel is seen to whiten. That is to
say, the drunkard Robards sees it whiten; the purblind Andrew never once
observes that mark of tender concern. The pistol repute of the decisive
Andrew serves when he is by to stifle remark on the lip of the recreant
Robards. But there come hours when the latter has the blooming Rachel to
himself, at which time he raves like one demon-possessed. He avers that
the unconscious Andrew is the lover of the blooming Rachel, and in so
doing lies like an Ananias. However, the drunken one has the excuse of
jealousy; which emotion is not only green-eyed but cross-eyed, and of
all things--as history shows--most apt to mislead the accurate vision of
folk.
[Illustration: 0063]
Andrew overflows of sentiment, and often in moments of loneliness turns
homesick. This is the more marvelous, since never from his very cradle
days has he had a home. Being homesick--one may as well call it that,
for want of a better word--he goes out to the orchard fence, a lonely
spot, cut off from view by intercepting bushes, and devotes himself
to melancholy. This melancholy, as often happens with high-strung,
vanity-bitten young gentlemen, is for the greater part nothing more than
the fomentations of his egotism and conceit. But Andrew does not know
this truth, and wears a fine tragic air as one beset of what poets term
“a nameless grief.”
One day the blooming Rachel discovers the melancholy Andrew, dreamily
mournful by the orchard fence. She watches him unperceived, and her
gentle bosom yearns over him. The blooming Rachel is not wanting in that
taint of romanticism to which all border folk are born; and now, to
see this Hector!--this lion among men!--so bent in sadness, moves her
tenderly. At that it is only a kind of maternal tenderness; for the
blooming Rachel has a wealth of mother love, and no children upon whom
to lavish it. She stands looking at the melancholy one, and would give
worlds if she might only take his head to her sympathetic bosom and
cherish it.
The blooming Rachel approaches, and cheerily greets the gloomy one. She
seeks to uplift his spirits. Under the sweet spell of her, he tells how
wholly alone he is. He speaks of his mother and how her very grave is
lost. He relates how the Revolution swallowed up the lives of his two
brothers.
“And your father?”
“He was buried the week before I was born.”
The two stay by the orchard fence a long while, and talk on many things;
but never once on love.
The drunken Robards, fiend-guided, gets a green-eyed glimpse of them.
With that his jealousy receives added edge, and--the better to decide
upon a course--he hurries to a grog-gery to pour down rum by the cup.
Either he drinks beyond his wont, or that rum is of sterner impulse than
common; for he becomes pot-valorous, and with curses vows the death of
Andrew.
The drunken Robards, filled with rum to the brim, issues forth to
execute his threats. He finds his victim still sadly by the orchard
fence; but alone, since the blooming Rachel has been called to aid
in supper-getting. The pot-valorous Robards bursts into a torrent of
jealous recrimination.
The melancholy Andrew cannot believe his ears! His melancholy takes
flight when he does understand, and in its stead comes white-hot anger.
“What! you scoundrel!” he roars. The blue eyes blaze with such ferocity
that Robards the craven starts back. In a moment the other has control
of himself. “Sir!” he grits, “you shall give me satisfaction!”
Robards the drunken says nothing, being frozen of fear. The enraged
Andrew stalks away in quest of the taciturn Overton who owns those hair
triggers.
“Let us take a walk,” says hair-trigger Overton, running his arm inside
the lean elbow of Andrew. Once in the woods, he goes on: “What do you
want to do?”
“Kill him! I would put him in hell in a second!”
“Doubtless! Having killed him, what then will you do?”
“I don't understand.”
“Let me explain: You kill Robards. His wife is a widow. Also, because
you have killed Robards in a quarrel over her, she is the talk of
the settlement. Therefore, I put the question: Having made Rachel the
scandal of the Cumberland, what will you do?”
There is a long, embarrassed pause. Presently Andrew lifts his gaze to
the cool eyes of his friend.
“I shall offer her marriage. She shall, if she accept it, have the
protection of my name.”
“And then,” goes on the ice-and-iron Overton, “the scandal will be
redoubled. They will say that you and Rachel, plotting together, have
murdered Robards to open a wider way for your guilty loves.”
Andrew takes a deep breath. “What would you counsel?” he asks.
“One thing,”--laying his hand on Andrew's shoulder--“under no
circumstances, not even to save your own life, must you slay Robards.
You might better slay Rachel; since his death by your hand spells her
destruction. Good people would avoid her as though she were the plague.
Never more, on the Cumberland, should she hold up her head.”
That night the fear-eaten Robards solves the situation which his crazy
jealousy has created. He starts secretly for the North. He tells two or
three that he will never more call the blooming Rachel wife.
For a month there is much silence, and some restraint, at the widow
Donelson's. This condition wears away; and, while no one says so,
everybody feels relaxed and relieved by the absence of the drunken
Robards. No one names him, and there is tacit agreement to forget
the creature. The drunken Robards, however, has no notion of being
forgotten. Word comes down from above that he will return and reclaim
his wife. At this the black eyes of Rachel sparkle dangerously.
“That monster,” she cries, “shall never kiss my lips, nor so much as
touch my hand again!”
By advice of her mother, and to avoid the drunken Robards--who promises
his hateful appearance with each new day--the blooming Rachel resolves
to take passage on a keel boat for Natchez. Andrew, in deep concern,
declares that he shall accompany her. He says that he goes to protect
her from those Indians who make a double fringe of savage peril along
the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. Overton, the taciturn,
shrugs his shoulders; the keel-boat captain is glad to have with him
the steadiest rifle along the Cumberland, and says as much; the blooming
Rachel is glad, but says so only with her eyes; the Nashville good
people say nothing, winking in silence sophisticated eyes.
Robards the drunken, now when they are gone, plays the ill-used husband
to the hilts. He seems to revel in the rôle, and, to keep it from
cooling in interest, petitions the Virginia Legislature for a divorce.
In course of time the news climbs the mountains, and descends into the
Cumberland, that the divorce is granted; while similar word floats down
to Natchez with the keel boats.
The slow story of the blooming Rachel's release reaches our two in
Natchez. Thereupon Andrew leads Rachel the blooming before a priest; and
the priest blesses them, and names them man and wife. That autumn they
are again at the widow Donelson's; but the blooming Rachel, once Mrs.
Robards, is now Mrs. Jackson.
Slander is never the vice of a region that goes armed to the teeth.
Thus it befalls that now, when the two are back on the Cumberland,
those sophisticated ones forget to wink. There comes not so much as the
arching of a brow; for no one is so careless of life as all that. The
whole settlement can see that the dangerous Andrew is watching with
those steel-blue eyes.
At the first suggestion that his Rachel has been guilty of wrong, he
will be at the throat of her maligner like a panther.
Time flows on, and a horrible thing occurs. There comes a new word
that no divorce was granted by that Legislature; and this new word is
indisputable. There _is_ a divorce, one granted by a court; but, as an
act of separation between Rachel the blooming and the drunken Robards,
that decree of divorce is long months younger than the empowering act of
the Richmond Legislature, which mistaken folk regarded as a divorce.
The good priest's words, when he named our troubled two as man and wife,
were ignorantly spoken. During months upon months thereafter, through
all of which she was hailed as “Mrs. Jackson,” the blooming Rachel was
still the wife of the drunken Robards.
The blow strikes Andrew gray; but he says never a word. He blames
himself for this shipwreck; where his Rachel was involved, he should
have made all sure and invited no chances.
The injury is done, however; he must now go about its repair. There is a
second marriage, at which the silent Overton and the widow Donelson are
the only witnesses, and for the second time a priest congratulates our
storm-tossed ones as man and wife. This time there is no mistake.
The young husband sends to Charleston; and presently there come to
him over the Blue Ridge, the finest pair of dueling pistols which the
Cumberland has ever beheld. They are Galway saw-handles, rifle-barreled;
a breath discharges them, and they are sighted to the splitting of a
hair.
“What are they for?” asks Overton the taciturn, balancing one in each
experienced hand.
In the eyes of Andrew gathers that steel-blue look of doom. “They are to
kill the first villain who speaks ill of my wife,” says he.