"Elsie, this will never do. Do you love him at all?"
"No, Jack, not as compared to the other--the unattainable. Well, I
should say about as the difference between a--well--say a star and a
little firefly."
A dry, fighting anger clinched my throat and I could scarcely speak. I
could have throttled Braxton Bragg then!
"Tell me, Elsie," I said, controlling my anger and trying to speak
calmly, "tell your big brother all."
But she was silent, her face turned from me; at last she said, "It is
all so strange, Jack; those we love, love us not, and those we do not
love want to marry us even if they are not fit to."
"Not fit to hold your shoe, let alone your heart," I added angrily.
She put her hand over my mouth.
"Have I done wrong? Have I said too much? Come, I must go. I see the
Colonel waiting for me."
I took her by both hands, holding her before me, for I was strangely
worried and I wished to know--I looked earnestly into her eyes.
"Do you love me, Elsie?"
She blushed crimson. In an instant her arms were around my neck.
Shamed and stricken with my own thoughtlessness I tore her arms from me.
"Elsie, forgive me, you don't understand!"
In reply she gave me one shamed, hurt look and fled up the path. I saw
Goff waiting for her.
*CHAPTER XIV*
*GOD AND A BUTTERFLY*
I saw a race for life the other day. It occurred in mid-air in a
kingdom not of earth--not of our own; but the air was sweet where the
fight was on, and the fields were green, and the woods lay calm and
soothing beneath, and the great, kind sun was above.
It was the pursuit of a golden-winged butterfly, one of those filmy
creatures that is more of sky than of earth, made of rainbow and a rose,
of light and a lily's blossom. It seemed strange to me that this
beautiful thing, thrown off from the rim of a rainbow, living on the
nectar of a flower, sleeping on the bosom of a nodding lily and floating
on the breath of a zephyr, so spiritual it was, should fall under the
cruel laws of life, and be forced to fight for its brief but beautiful
existence.
Who were its enemies? Two glorious mocking birds that had sung like
spirits from an heavenly choir around the house all spring and summer,
that had been permitted to live and rear their young in contentment and
happiness and should have held no grudge against any other creature.
Golden-Wings was in the garden, and he was content until that which
sustained life gave out--food. Ay, there is the rub! We would all be
angels if it were not for food, we would be saints but for our stomachs.
He had sucked every flower in his pasture, he must go to pastures fresh
or die. The distance was only a few hundred yards of air, but he knew
that in that air was death. He thought of it a long time as he hovered
from flower to flower; of life, of his mate, of death. Had he been all
spirit he would have stayed forever among the flowers, but he was like
all of us, half spirit and half flesh, and the flesh of him was
rebelling and begging for food. He must go. He rose slowly, and with
uncertain wing, frightened, straight up, every sense awake, every nerve
keyed, his eyes on the lookout for his enemy. Up, up he rose,
quivering, scared, frightened, then he winged his way across the ether
in a flight which proved to be for his life.
The mocking bird is a flycatcher, but not an expert one. Compared with
the swallow, the martin, the crested flycatcher or the bold king bird he
is a poor imitation; but the mocking bird is also a poet and everything
is grist that comes to the poet's mill, from the grasshopper on the
ground to the butterfly in the air.
The male bird saw Golden-Wings and gave him the first heat for his life;
up in the air he darted, circled and swooped. Golden-Wings, terrified,
ducked, dived and escaped. The poet dropped to a twig in disgust and
his mate took up the fight. Golden-Wings saw her coming and his heart
swelled with fear; he stood quivering in the air, he knew not which way
to turn. She darted straight and all but caught him; for a moment in
mid-air they whirled, twisted and tumbled, Golden-Wings, panting and
fluttering for a chance once more for home and love and life, and the
poetess for a morsel to eat. It ended in the butterfly getting above
the bird, which always seemed to be his tactics, and the latter dropped
down in disgust to her mate.
Then, maddened, they both started after Golden-Wings, and it looked as
if this flight was to be his last.
It was a terrible chase that the two poets gave him, the tumbling,
darting, circling of the birds in maddened earnestness. Their wings
were often so close that they fanned him about like a whiff of gold
tissue paper in the wind. Twice they got above him, dropped and missed!
Then he was lost altogether, and only by watching the circling of the
birds could one guess where he was. When seen again he had got above
his enemies, and was steadily pursuing his zigzag, frightened,
graceless, paper-fluttering flight for the distant trees and life!
"Luck to you, O Golden-Wings!" I cried. "For already you have taught me
a lesson for Life. Let us keep _above_ our enemies if we would be safe,
not beneath them--for there we are a prey to their talons, besmirched
with dirt; nor on their level, for there we are no better than they; but
_above_ them where they cannot reach us, and where we may go on to our
destiny with only the sunlight around us and the unseen stars above."
The birds dropped down, baffled, to rest in the top of a sugar-maple
tree. Like all poets, in losing their game they had lost their temper,
and now between panting and hard breathing they could be heard
quarreling. "It was you," said the wife, "you conceited thing; it is
all your fault! I had him once if you had let me alone." "Oh, you had
him, did you," sneered the mate; "if your talents only equaled your
tongue you would be better off!" They almost spat upon each other; they
were beaten and angry and they took it out that way.
Golden-Wings was safe. He was high up in the air. His very flight was
now the flight of victory. Twenty yards more and he would drop down
into the great splotch of green below where his wife was waiting him on
the blossom of a wild cherry.
I was about to cheer him with the silent approval of true applause when
I saw a lightning bolt of red drop from the jagged bar of the dead limb
of a great oak near by, in the midst of the forest and high above the
weary, yet happy Golden-Wings. I paled at the sight, for I knew that no
butterfly would ever escape this new-comer. Even Golden-Wings
recognized his fate, and, paralyzed with fear, stopped his flight in
mid-air in a few yards of his home, and lay quivering in hopeless fear.
Well he might, for the red and white bolt was a red-headed woodpecker, a
very king in the tribe of the flycatchers. Often I had seen him poise
above an air-bound moth, then drop like a dead bird in the air and no
moth would be there.
The hand of the world is against the marauder, be he bird or man. But
they revere the man who robs by rule.
Straight at Golden-Wings he went. The race was up. He used the same
old tactics: above the butterfly he soared, then, gauging the distance
from his own great beak to butterfly beneath he folded his wings and
dropped like a plummet of lead.
I was out that morning with the twelve gauge, smokeless shells and seven
and a half chilled shot. It was thieving crow I had come after, thinking
I might get a shot. To the marauder my thought was as lightning, for
when I caught the first flash of his crimson head, this went distinctly
through my mind: "_Nature is Nature even to tooth and claw, and yet
there is that which says even when a butterfly shall fall. He makes our
lives and marks out our destiny. Sometimes amid injustice, He calls
himself Retribution. And then He has been known to raise up a man, and
a gun, invent smokeless powder and deadly chilled shot, give accuracy of
aim, and, most wonderful of all, the Voice of a Purpose to say that harm
shall not happen to a Butterfly._"
There was no smoke from the report, and so I distinctly saw Golden-Wings
drop joyfully among the green leaves. But a red marauder lies in the
field where he fell.
*CHAPTER XV*
*HICKORIES AND OLD HICKORY*
June, and June as it breaks only over the Middle Basin.
There had been great rains, saturating the leaves and grasses until they
were almost blackened in their deep greenness. There had followed,
flushing the grass on all the hills around the Hermitage, the mauve
tints of coming dandelions, followed by the red, white, and blue flags
of the clovers, until across deep valleys and on distant slopes there
was a pale light much like moonlight.
I had been very busy. There was much for me to do, and I sought it
eagerly, for I wished to forget and not to see. It is what we fail to
forget that hurts. And so I worked.
Colonel Goff, as was his race, had acted straight-forwardly in the
matter of his marriage to Eloise. Over a month ago he had sought out
Aunt Lucretia and told her frankly that he sought the hand of her ward
in marriage, that he wished to marry her and take her at once to
England. He said that his brother, the Earl of Carfax, had died without
heirs, and that he inherited the estate. The family name, he told her,
was Goff, and he had kept it while in America. In the early fall his
attorneys would have every legal provision complete for his return, and
for immediate occupation of his estate. And he told her with equal
frankness why it could not be done sooner, that in his younger days he
had married out of his class, and had been blacklisted by his family for
it, especially by his elder brother; that they had had not only hot
words but a stand-up fight in which he had all but killed, and had
really maimed the older brother for life. "I had to get out," he said
brusquely, "and get out quick. As it was they tried to disinherit me,
but England's laws are greater than England's men. My wife was to
follow, but she died."
My Aunt was a woman of great sense and said nothing. But I noticed that
she thought much, because she was very silent, and that she grew
suddenly very tender to me. When Eloise had gone to Washington my Aunt
went with her. Two things happened before they left, which I remember
quite distinctly.
My Aunt's admiration for the character and achievements of Andrew
Jackson bordered on the idolatrous. As a boy she would take me often to
the Hermitage, and tell me of the wilderness giant who lived there. She
knew more about him than anyone I ever met. She understood the thousand
sides of this man's great nature, from his horse-racing to his religion.
In the spot where he had lived so long there was, of course, a world of
tradition. It came down from lip to lip. Of these stories my Aunt
remembered all. A few days after Goff had talked with her as my Aunt and
I were going over the grounds she stopped before the log-cabin in the
pasture near the great spring where Jackson lived before he built the
present Hermitage.
"Jack," said she, "Andrew Jackson was the gamest thing God ever gave to
humanity, and the gentlest. It is staggering to think what he had to
overcome to do his life's work. The fights, the sicknesses, the
suffering, the slander, the insults, the lies, the butcheries they
called battles, starvation, mutinies of his own men, all met and
overcome by one tall, slim, sallow, pain-wracked man, on one
thoroughbred horse, with a gun in his hand, and two in his eyes. Talk
of Indian fights--Mills, and Cooks and Custers--they were child's play
to the great Creek Nation Jackson had to fight. And England behind
them--selfish always and forever wanting that of others."
She looked at me quickly, and went on: "But he waited and then hit them
hard. No one, from Hannibal to Caesar and Bonaparte, would ever have
attacked Keane and his troops, just landed and in an open plain with New
Orleans at their mercy before them, in the night-time as did Jackson and
his ragged, half-armed militia. No one would ever have risked it but
Jackson; he was greater than them all! For that seemingly foolhardy
night attack saved him. He cut the very vitals out of them in the dark.
He hacked them as a game cock does when he sticks his gaffs into the
very heart of his foe. That was why on January eighth they could not go
over his breastworks, even with the combined force of Packenham and
Gibbs and the troops that afterwards won Waterloo. He had gaffed them
in the ditch in the dark. He cut them into giblets. It was hell with
the lid on. They say it was a useless battle, but they lie, Jack. If
Jackson hadn't stopped them, they would never have given up the
Louisiana Purchase until we drove them out with another war. There are
two kinds of men, Jack--talkers and doers. The talkers are all
orators--they are all liars. They began with Aaron, whom God made a
mouthpiece to Moses. Moses was the doer, but he could not talk. Aaron,
the orator, talked for him, but it is Moses who lives. Jackson was a
Moses, Clay an Aaron, a dead one, Jack, as all Aarons are, and growing
deader every year. All orators, being liars, fool people while they
live. Dead, they do not even fool themselves.
It was Clay and Crawford who let the British make that treaty of
December twenty-fourth in which they said that they would not be bound
by Bonaparte's constructions. At that time Lord Castlereagh had every
reason to believe that Packenham, sent out November twenty-fourth, with
the best army and navy that ever left Portsmouth for a foreign shore,
had taken the 'crown colony of Louisiana,' as they called it. And under
that treaty they would have held it. It was Jackson who stopped them,
just one day before that treaty was signed.
"Yes, Clay is dead," she said laconically; "he ought to be.
"They wanted New Orleans, and they wanted it bad. 'Booty and Beauty'
was the word they passed down the line when they landed and started
across the Chalmette plain, to take the fair Creole City. They were
going to take her and then rape her as they did the cities of Spain, and
they would if Jackson had not gaffed their very vitals out in that night
attack of December twenty-third."
She turned suddenly on me, her eyes ablaze. "Do you think, Jack, if he
had loved a girl and an Englishman wanted her bad enough to take her
right out of his arms that he would have given her up?"