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Title: The Golden Road
Author: Frank Waller Allen
Release Date: March 7, 2011 [eBook #35509]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOLDEN ROAD***
There is night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath.
—George Borrow.
"Good-night, dear Jean François," said she with gaiety.
"May your dreams be of your beloved roads of Picardy." She threw him an elfish kiss from her finger-tips and hastened into her airy improvised bedroom.
NEW YORK
WESSELS & BISSELL CO.
1910
Copyright, 1910, by
Wessels & Bissell Co.
October
ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL
All rights reserved
PREMIER PRESS
NEW YORK
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Happy Pedler Comes to Town 3
II The Jade and the Inquisition 13
III Jean François' Vast Possessions 23
IV The Misadventure of a Circus 35
V Timid Conquest Comes to Town 48
VI The Jade, a Nonentity, becomes the Illustrious Nance 57
VII A Pedler's Pack of Dreams 68
VIII Monsieur l'Abbé Picot of the Brave, Outlandish Heart 74
IX The Child is Father to the Man 86
X On the Morning Road 97
XI The Satisfactory Explanation of Nance 107
XII A Hebe of the Highway 117
XIII The Night in the Greenwood 129
XIV Vicarious Vagabonds 136
XV "If I were Monsieur l'Abbé Picot" 146
XVI Hebe's Farewell to Pan 155
XVII The Day of Faith 163
XVIII The Day of Doubt 171
XIX The Day of Lost Confidence 176
XX Monsieur l'Abbé at Home 185
XXI "Little St. Jacques of the Street" 194
XXII Monsieur l'Abbé Lies Ill 201
XXIII "I would talk with some old lover's ghost, who lived
before the god of love was born" 210
XXIV The Priest and Faun 216
XXV Monsieur l'Abbé Picot Goes upon a Journey 222
She threw him an elfish kiss from her finger-tips and hastened into her
airy improvised bedroom. (Page 135.) Frontispiece
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." Facing page 92
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.
Facing page 98
At the close of a glad day in early June, Nance and I stood watching a horse and van, driven by a stranger of captivating appearance, turn from the down-river turnpike and halt on a grassy knoll overlooking the Ohio. The cart, which was a large two-wheeled affair with little cupboard-like boxes beneath, and a short pair of stairs for mounting stored on the top among a medley of old umbrellas, bore an adventurous, foreign aspect. At least we had seen nothing before so wonderful. Its wheels were low and broad-tired; the shafts were thick and heavy with a prop suspended from each of them, that the weight might be balanced when not supported by the ragged brown mare now pulling it. The body, held rather high above the axle by a pair of big, bowed[Pg 4] springs, was completely closed upon all sides like a circus wagon, though, more than anything else, this queer craft seemed a sort of private Noah's ark. The entrance was in the rear and, as we afterward discovered, could be reached by mounting a wheel, hauling the steps from the roof, and attaching them to small sockets in the door-sill. This amazing and spectacular vehicle was painted a brilliant yellow.
The man idling beside this magnificent equipage was the most picturesque being I have ever seen. He was of medium height with broad, muscular shoulders, sturdy legs like one used to walking much in the open, and a general ease and grace of movement, as if each motion were made to music, indicating a perfect health of body. His features were large and generous with penetrating quizzical gray eyes, a nose slightly Roman, and a wide mouth which seemed continuously to be struggling to suppress a smile. He wore a short bushy beard that needed brushing. His hair was red, heavy, unkempt, and a trifle long, completely[Pg 5] covering his ears. On his feet were stout, heavy-soled, laced boots. Thrust into their tops were well-worn corduroy trousers. His shirt was of dark blue woolen material, open at the neck, showing a corded, hairy chest. He wore no hat.
Upon arriving at the knoll the master of the van sat hastily upon the ground and, as if gravel had been eating into his heels, quickly removed his boots. Then he rubbed his feet slowly and sensuously over the soft cool grass as if it were a specific for drawing fever from blistered soles. Next, quite as suddenly, he arose and went about the business of unhitching the mare from the cart. Just as he was leading her from her burden we, like curious children, drew near and mumbled a bashful good evening.
"How do you do, my dears," he said, with frank good humor.
"My name," I ventured, "is Charles Reubelt King, and hers is Nance Gwyn.... This is our common," I added, with the condescending air of the small[Pg 6] proprietor whose vanity was touched because of not having been consulted concerning its occupancy by the daring incumbent.
"Happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Charles Screwbelt Ring. Miss Nance Gwyn, I am distinctly honored.... And I," said he, with an elaborate bow in which he removed and swept the ground with an imaginary hat, while one hand pressed his heart, "am Jean François, sometimes known as the Umbrella Man, at others as the Happy Pedler.... I am pedler, poet, mender of umbrellas." Here he straightened to his full height, all the time yelling directly at me, "Umbrellas to mend! Umbrellas to mend! No?" he exclaimed with a comical shrug of his shoulders, and then continued, "I am philosopher, vagabond, musician,—a very sad gentleman you see, who am fifth cousin to Master William Shakespeare, and own brother to François Villon, one-time king of the French!" Then, again turning and addressing himself particularly to me, "I own the road, the river, the hills, the[Pg 7] trees, and all the blue summer sky. The stars are mine, too, and I turn 'em out to pasture o' nights."
"O, I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle," he cried to Nance, as if he had forgotten something pertaining to good breeding.
"This lady," here he turned, including in his bow the patient little brown mare waiting at his elbow for the bridle to be removed, "is my mare Rogue. She's not a pretty lass, and she lacks a sense of humor. There are none like her for a pleasant ramble down the road. She loves her sugar like a child.... Shake hands with Miss Gwyn, my dove," he added, while Nance timidly touched the extended hoof.
"Also," continuing the presentations, "Mademoiselle Columbine," and he waved a hand whimsically toward the yellow van. "She is beautiful, now, isn't she, my dears? And she's sound, serviceable, and optimistic. She holds my dreams.... What more could you ask? Yes?"
"And last of all," said he, removing[Pg 8] with a flourish a little, burned, villainous briar-root pipe from his mouth, "this is Pierrett. She's a dirty wench, but sweet and toothsome as parched corn. She is as philosophical as a fisherman, as independent as a church pillar, and she's my soul mate! Eh, Pierrett?"
"You see," he said, addressing me to the exclusion of Nance, as he turned Rogue onto the pasture, "I'm the lone male among all of these females. A sort of Mormon elder, I am; but, tut, man, it's only a brotherly kind of relationship which doesn't entail jealousy.... You see, son, everybody's children are mine—yes, you two's my kiddies—and I pretty much own the world; only, you see, I don't take it and use it except for traveling purposes. All I ask," said he, becoming quite serious, with a far-away expression in his splendid eyes while he pointed down the long white highway, "is a road to roam,—le long du trimard—a river now and then for variety, the sigh of my music in the greenwood, a bit of milk and cheese on a village common[Pg 9] at night, for I love the homely gleam of distant lights, and the stars to sing me to sleep while browsing Rogue twinkles her grass.... Um, ah, doesn't make you sleepy, son, just to hear about it? Yes?"
"Now, Mr. Charles—"
"Reubelt King," I hastened to correct him, as he hesitated with a merry twinkle in his eye.
"—Reubelt King, run along and tell me whose house that is way down yonder on the river."
"The old home of the many pillars?" I questioned. "Monsieur l'abbé Jacques Picot."
"Father Picot?... The hell—O, I beg your pardon, Rogue, Pierrett, Columbine, and your young ladyship!... You females are terribly ubiquitous at times.... No, that's not a cuss-word, Mademoiselle. It means you women are always lingering around a good, healthy, pleasant, cussful male like me.
"Where'd I come from? Just down the chemin, my dears. And if you were impolite enough to ask me where I was[Pg 10] going, that's where—down the road.... Where do I live?"
Jean François sings:
"Is that as you like it, my dears?... My cousin has quite a fancy for the song. He's a sort of trimardeur who once made plays.... He wrote 'em and acted 'em, but, son, I live 'em."
Then, seated upon the grass, he spoke half jestingly, and yet with a serious note of reminiscence in his voice:
"Sometimes I'm Jacques, that melancholy cuss. Sometimes I'm Puck—merry[Pg 11] Robin Goodfellow. You wouldn't believe it, now, would you? Sometimes, Touchstone. Often I am Ariel—
"I have been Romeo, but no more for me.... Nance, you red-headed little jade, how old are you?"
We were preparing to leave. We weren't interested. What did we care about all of this? Who were Ariel and Puck, anyhow? I could see that Nance did not like one bit being a "red-headed jade." She was always very sensitive about the color of her hair and the freckles on her nose.
"Don't go, my kiddies," he suddenly pleaded. "Look-e-here. I'm going to make a big, crackling fire in a minute. Then we'll have a bucket of water from the river. I've a kettle and some eggs aboard the Columbine.... Say, we'll have the one great time of our lives!"[Pg 12]
It took no unusual amount of insisting to make us enter into a game like that with zest. And O, the mysteries of the interior of Mademoiselle Columbine. O, the stories of caliphs and kings and grand viziers and robbers and things. And they were friends of his, too. Personal friends!
It was unpleasantly late when we stole away home to scoldings and to bed. He told us to refer 'em to him, and he'd fix things with the grown-ups. Our parting glimpse, as we ran across the pasture, was Jean François, seated in the grass within the circle of the glowing light of the embers, talking to his pipe. Pretty soon, we knew for he told us, he'd be in bed. He used the stars, he remarked, to button the covers down, and he'd dip 'em into the river to put them out in the morning.
It is time you knew old Doctor Felix Longstreet, Nance Gwyn's Waltonian grandfather. For short, she frequently designated him as "The G. F." His chief happiness lay in the hours he stole from his practise to put in with a rod and minnows on Eagle Creek and in rearing his granddaughter, both of whose parents were dead, in the most unconventional manner possible. With him lived a maiden sister, Miss Barbara. Her gods were convention and propriety. They were the doctor's devils. Truly, Nance lived "between the devil and the deep blue sea!"
"The world of men," I once heard the old doctor remark, "is divided into two classes: those who understand that a river has a heart and those who do not care a tinker's damn if it hasn't." Upon his retiring from the room a half-hour[Pg 14] after this sentence was delivered, Aunt Barbara, after glancing timidly about to be sure that he had gone, ventured to Nance and me, engaged in making a small boat upon the portico, the following:
"He is right. Always right, for that matter!" she exclaimed with vehemence, nervously patting her foot upon the floor. "Now I know of no one who has so many characteristics in common with a stream as my brother Felix. He can be as full of peace and happiness and gentle little ripples to-day, then to-morrow as picturesque with whippy, foamy whitecaps and occasional squalls as the river he loves."
"Very true, Aunt Barbara," commented Nance with deliberateness, "and I know he can flow by in the most exasperatingly placid, disinterested manner possible. Also, should the occasion arise, quickly fill up with ice!"
It would be unfair, however, not to tell you that a more gentle man or true never lived than this old river god. Indeed, he is the veritable reincarnation[Pg 15] of Izaak Walton. It is true old Izaak tended his linen-draper's shop, while Doctor Longstreet tends his pills. It was Jean François who made the remark that the chief difference lay in the fact that the one coated the body on the outside while the other coats it on the inside. Our pedler also pointed out, again, that both were very much alike in loving a friend, a pipe with a bit of philosophy, a quiet stream, and a favorite rod with which to go a-fishing.
Just how long Doctor Longstreet has practised medicine in Oldmeadow, I shall not presume to say. It seems to me as if always he has been there; always smelling delightfully of a mixture of strong tobacco smoke and carbolic acid; always riding over the countryside, or carrying through the town a pair of small leather saddle-bags or a fishing pole. Very frequently both. Nance, who was in a position to know, said that one side of these cases contained pills and the other angle worms.
At any rate, I know that seemingly a very long time ago, in comparison with[Pg 16] myself, he was born in Virginia. In his youth he was graduated from the University at Charlottesville, and later from the Jefferson Medical College. Upon receiving his diploma, entitling him to practise medicine, he came directly to Oldmeadow. Except for four years spent as a surgeon in the Confederate army, he has given his life to this old Kentucky town on the Ohio river. For the present this is enough of him, save to mention that other than Nance, with the sun-colored hair; the river, which embraces "goin' a-fishin'"; and General Robert E. Lee, a name symbolizing all that Virginia and the South mean to him, he loves the little town, with its old-fashioned customs and traditions, which has been the background for most of his activities.
The morning following our glorious introduction to the magnificent Jean François I was out early and bound for the commons. I scarcely expected Nance to be up. I felt that there would be something intimate and personal, perhaps[Pg 17] undefinable, it is true, between this master of the happy caravan and myself because we were both men. I had made up my mind that he was a woman-hater. As I hurried along the street my plans were brutally shattered, for whom should I encounter but the red-headed jade herself, grinning quite wickedly, even though her hand was tightly gripped in that of her Aunt Barbara, whose serious features were drawn together in grim determination.
"I want you, too, Charles Reubelt," said Miss Longstreet curtly, and with evident disapproval not only in her tone, but in the look with which she surveyed my full diminutive person.
"Yes, we want you, Charles Reubelt," Nance reiterated in close, but undetected, imitation of her Aunt Barbara.
Now while this really very charming spinster had no actual command over me, having quite tangible parents two blocks away, yet I acknowledged an assumed authority felt by every boy and girl in Oldmeadow. So, yielding,[Pg 18] I fell in behind, marching meekly to Doctor Longstreet's office.
We entered in single file, Miss Longstreet shoving Nance unceremoniously before her. I lingered, cap in hand, near the open door.
"Felix," she began, in a voice slightly agitated by the fear of the unknown result in approaching the old doctor upon any subject, "do you know where these children were last night?"
"No, my dear Barbara," he replied with irony, looking up from a series of powders he was proportioning with his jack-knife on a piece of newspaper; "were they drowned?"
"No, but she might well have been, for all that you look after her!" she exclaimed, now leaving me out of the arraignment and giving herself solely to Nance.
After carefully lifting each powder onto a small square piece of paper, torn from his writing pad, folding them neatly, and placing all of them in an envelope which he proceeded to seal, then to write directions upon the[Pg 19] back, he again gave his attention to his sister.
"So she has been swimming with Charles Reubelt," he said, in mock horror.
"For heaven's sake, no, Felix. Don't you dare suggest such a thing to her.... The way you do talk!"
"What has she been doing then?" he asked, looking severely over the rims of his spectacles at the offending young lady.
With slow and effective emphasis Aunt Barbara brought her accusation:
"They were out on the common until ten o'clock last night with a tramp, that's what!" You will notice that again I was included in her remarks.
"With what?... With who?" he exclaimed to Nance.
"With Jean François," came the brave reply of the jade.
"Barbara, Barbara," he exclaimed in quick, whispered hisses.
"Yes, my brother," she replied, rising to the seriousness of the occasion.[Pg 20]
"They say that his ears are pointed! That he has legs and feet like a goat!"
"How shockingly unbecoming," and she gazed reproachfully at the culprits.
The doctor glared viciously at each of us in turn; blew his nose resonantly; shook himself like a big Newfoundland, and then, much to Miss Longstreet's chagrin and our astonishment, burst into hearty laughter.
"What!" cried he. "So you two are just discovering my friend, Jean François?... Poet, pedler, philosopher, mender of umbrellas, and player on the pipes," said he, drolly imitating our friend of the night before.
"You knew him all of the time?" I exclaimed.
"Let me see," said the doctor reminiscently; "when did I first discover the happy pedler?... O, yes, the second year after the Abbé Picot came to live in Oldmeadow. I remember now. It has been some five or six years ago.... That's what you youngsters get by going away every summer instead of remaining at home with your betters."[Pg 21]
"Is he a real poet?" ventured Nance, with her accustomed irrelevance.
"Certainly," came the reply. "Hasn't he said so? Besides, he knows his Shakespeare like a scholar.... Cultivate him."
"Cultivate!" cried the now fully alarmed Aunt Barbara. "Felix, you are positively indecorous.... Cultivate a tramp?"
"Barbara, my dear, I assure you, he is quite a gentleman. He likes my pills, he loves the river like a brother, and he knows his Shakespeare. That is quite enough.... What do you want, my dear unwearied sister—a frilled shirt-front? I've seen many a one bowing over you in the old days all togged out in finery who hadn't half so great a heart and half so genuine a manner.
"Now, Nance," he said, turning from the thoroughly squelched Aunt Barbara to us, "Jean François comes with his happy caravan—a name I gave his outfit the first time I saw it—every year when May or June is at her bonniest. Nobody knows just when or where he comes[Pg 22] from, and no one, who loves him, cares. All of a sudden he's here, that's all. He always camps on the green, where you discovered him last night, overlooking the river. Sometimes he's here most of the summer. Sometimes it's just a week, or a month. Then, like he comes, he just goes.
"'It's a fever,' he said to me once in answer to a question as to why he was off, when I met him on the river road, bound west. 'It's a fever that you, old Saddle-bags, can't pill or cuss away.... Au revoir,' and his Columbine moved away.
"Occasionally he returns during the late September days. It is only for a week or a day, however.... I can always tell that he is coming by the wild geese flying. He is a migratory bird—this Jean François of ours."
If the doctor continued to speak of the pedler to Aunt Barbara, we never knew it. Nance and I slipped through the door into the June sunshine and hurried across the village to the common, where camped the master of the happy caravan.
Would it make you happy to know that you possessed, as your heart's own, a long, white, alluring road? A joyous, lovable, intimate road which leads over the hills through a thousand friendly trees, all sheltered beneath the wide blue sky. A road of many moods: a gentle road; a brave, true road; a morning road; a smiling, sunset road; a devil-may-care, starlit road; a lover's moon-whitened road; a road that goes and goes, never returns, yet always is homeward bound. Home to the dingle, the glen, the sheltering greenwood, the chattering little river; the camp of the gipsy. A road bordered by flower-faced fields with drowsing villages, now and then, like ancient inns with bread and cheese and milk.
Such is Jean François' great highway. All the morning he spent telling us of[Pg 24] le long du trimard, to use an expression frequently upon his lips. He told us of the men of the road, their dreams, their strange and adventurous lives. Often he spoke simply of amazing and unlooked-for deeds of heroism. He sang of nymphs, of dryads with wondrous beauty. He talked of marvelous, strong-limbed satyrs, of gentle fauns stealing through the wild-wood. In whispered words, with bated breath, as if he told of sacred secret things, he described to us the days of his brother, the great god Pan.
"There are those," said he, "who say that Pan is dead. They are but blind. Some day, if life is kind, I shall take you to him. When once you hear the immortal music of his oaten pipes you will have discovered the passionate note which will lead you, lead you down the road, over the hills into the far away where youth and the greater love abide, as was meant from the beginning of the world.... Long live the great Pan," cried he.
Then, as if suddenly coming back to this as from another world, his eyes lost[Pg 25] their preternatural expression and became wistful and kind and merry.
"And what do you think of it all, my children?" said he, with a sweep of his hand, which was meant to include all the splendid things he had been telling us. It never seemed to occur to him that he doubtless spoke of much which was utter mystery so far as we were concerned. But that was characteristic of the man. He talked to Nance and me in very much the same manner in which he spoke with Doctor Longstreet.
Nance's reply came as a surprise to me. I was glad her Aunt Barbara was not numbered among those present. With slow and serious mien she said:
"Some day, Jean François, I shall be a gipsy with you."
"Ah, my little jade," said he, with an obvious note of sympathy and gratitude in his voice, "so you have heard the call of the road?... Yes, there will come a time when we'll go hand in hand down the traffic lands. We'll roam forever and a day, forever and away.... You shall help me cry my wares."[Pg 26]
Then, seeing in Nance's face a look which took him at his word, and upon mine questionings bordering upon alarm, he burst into hearty laughter, restoring our poise, and cried:
"You must not take too seriously, my dears, the nonsense of the happy pedler!"
"What of you?" he asked, quickly turning to me. "Have you heard it too—the call of the road? No?"
As for me, I'm distinctly of the town. So, using a phrase kin to his own, I replied:
"Oldmeadow belongs to me," and I launched into a boyish panegyric of my birthplace.
It is a quaint bit of a village, where spectacled old ladies in black lace caps poke case-knives about the roots of rose-bushes, while elderly gentlemen with canes hobble over flag-stone sidewalks to their favorite seats in the spicy, leathery, brown-papery atmosphere of the store. In some features Oldmeadow seems even older than the river, though[Pg 27] I am assured by cracker-barrel historians that this is not a fact. It has been here long enough, however, to become a fixed part of the landscape, which is no more likely to change than the course of the Ohio, or the shape of the Kentucky hills away to the south. The older folk are careful not to die until they have faithfully imparted to the younger people all of their old-fashioned courtesy, gentle virtues, assorted prejudices, and cures for mumps, measles, and rheumatism.
"Oldmeadow herself—" I began, but Jean François interrupted.
"Quite right, son. 'She' is the word. She is distinctly an elderly maiden lady with old-time beauty; a sort of adorable shyness; a certain charming primness which sits upon her head like a Sunday bonnet. She takes a friendly interest in the love affairs of the young if duly governed by a proper regard for propriety. Her conventional amusements she defends from the parson with roguish pleasantry. Over the evening coffee she takes a half-frightened delight in mild gossip.... That's your aunt Oldmeadow,"[Pg 28] concluded Jean François, with a smile.
Oldmeadow rests—I think you will agree with me that "rests" is the word—just high enough to be secure from the June rise, and very timidly peeps, as if she were fully expecting to see some naughty naked little boys in swimming, through the willows over the banks of the most beautiful river in the world. The great, lazy Ohio slowly winds into view from among the hazy hills in the east, lingers for a moment after a manner most friendly, and then, with assumed indifference, drifts away to disappear among other hazy hills in the west.... Do you remember how we used to ask the grown-ups, "Where does the river come from?"... The river is made very human, and the town, which has no railroad to this day, is kept in touch with the outside world by the big, white-collared steamboats which plow their way daily between Louisville and Cincinnati.
When you climb the high banks and get into the village the sidewalks are of[Pg 29] large flat stones, with peppergrass and green old moss growing between them and about the roots of the gnarled honey-locusts which have stood for a hundred years along the primitive gutters. The houses are delightfully old-fashioned and quaint. Some are mere plain white cottages far back from the streets, where vines cover the latticed porches. In the lawns circles and crude stars are made for peonies and sweet williams. Some, however, are more pretentious, being built of stone or brick, with occasional pillars, colonial in manner, with wide old arches above the damp, moss-covered slabs of the floor.
"Your village should be very happy," remarked Jean François, after my conclusion. "Does she not have the river to sing to her; the tree-clad hills for shelter; the good blue sky to smile upon her; grave old homes with green sunny gardens to lend dignity; and the laughing loves of youth to keep warm her heart?... There's the village for a road like mine!"[Pg 30]
Oldmeadow possesses three points of greater pride: her hospitality, which needs no encomium; the "college," of which more anon; and the Old Mansion of Many Pillars.... It was of this home that Jean François now asked the history. Every child in the village knew it, for, was it not, with its mystery, its ghosts, its inviting splendor, the heart's desire of Nance and me ever since, for us, time began?
It stands in an ample yard, amid old pines, locust trees, and lilac bushes, overlooking the river. It is a great square house of the colonial type, with low wings to the right and left. The windows are large, deep-seated, and many-paned. The enhancing feature, however, is the big, broad portico, the roof of which is supported by noble Corinthian columns, spotted and green with moss and ivy. This house is not only the most elegant, inside and out, in Oldmeadow to-day, but in that time it possessed an atmosphere of aristocratic seclusion, amounting in the minds of the children and negroes to mystery.[Pg 31]
Until recent years it had been the property of an old French refugee of the ancient régime. His father had fled from the court of Louis XIV to Louisiana. The son, years later, having gotten into some trouble over a woman, killing his man, which, so far as we are concerned, is another story, came into the river valley of Kentucky and at vast expense built the old mansion as it now stands. To all appearances he had wrought with the expectations of some one sharing the home with him. It was made for happiness, love, and children. At first he was a jolly, gay young fellow, seeking society. After a few years, however, he gradually withdrew from his companions, became silent, morose, and lived altogether to himself. His townspeople saw him seldom, his servant making the necessary trips for supplies. He led the life of a recluse and a student. The reason for this always remained unknown. It served for many a fireside topic on winter evenings. Old men spun gossipy anecdotes concerning it, and the old ladies, romantic tales. Youth built melodramatic[Pg 32] love stories for him, while children made of it the source of fantasy.
Finally, when he sickened and died, beside his servant, Doctor Felix Longstreet alone was with him. Unless the doctor knew, and no one dared question him, the secret of the old Frenchman's life passed with his soul. It was the physician, in compliance with the last commands of the dead gentleman, who corresponded with the heir designated by the will. This was Monsieur Jacques Picot, of Paris, whom he notified of his inheritance and the conditions attached thereto. These were, briefly: That he must come to America and occupy the house; that he could neither sell nor give the property away; that at his demise, however, he could bequeath the estate to whomever he chose. In case the Abbé Picot would not accept these conditions, everything was to revert to a more distant relative, Captain Martin Felon of the French army. It was said the original owner of the old home made these strange demands because of his desire to force all of his kith and kin from[Pg 33] their native country. He was an intense American, and had not forgotten that his father had been a fugitive.
"Ah," cried Jean François, nodding his head with a mysterious air, "that accounts for many things.... Some day I'll take Rogue, Columbine, and Pierrett, go down among the bayous, and discover why a gentleman of the old régime lost heart. Then, maybe, I'll tell you about it.
"Meantime, my dears, don't you think it would be pretty fine for you to grow up and live in this old home as your very own? Yes?... Monsieur l'Abbé cannot live always, I know. I happen to be slightly acquainted with him. He is very kindly disposed toward you. There's no telling what he might do.
"How would it suit you, Nance Gwyn of the sun-colored hair, to one day be mistress of the mansion?"
"I am not quite certain," said she, for the old home had quite a strong hold upon the imagination of Nance as well as all the rest of Oldmeadow's children,[Pg 34] "but I think I should take Columbine and you and the road, first, Jean François."
"First?" exclaimed the pedler, with a humorous twinkle in his eye.
"First," came the very certain reply from the jade; "for some day I mean to have them both."
After a great deal of pleading, bringing to bear everything with which I was acquainted in the art of persuasion, I had succeeded in inducing Jean François to leave his happy caravan for a day and to become friends with our back yard. My family, be it understood, were dining in the country, leaving the premises to my undisputed control from early morning until late afternoon. Our pedler came with trepidation. He scented mischief of a kind which he did not find congenial. He had the greatest aversion to unexpectedly meeting people whom he did not know or did not like. Also he demanded room—the wide spaces of the open. To come about a house, or to enter an enclosure where escape would be fraught with embarrassment, was to him exceedingly painful. His apparent panic reminded[Pg 36] me strongly of some timid, uncertainly tamed animal bravely trying to receive the caresses of human beings. Persistence prevailed, however, and he stole around the house, like someone bent upon a hopeless task, and seated himself upon the woodpile.
He looked about him with evident disapproval. Then, removing Pierrett from his mouth, he addressed her with elaborate politeness:
"Say, my sweet hussy, did you ever notice the personality of a crack in the fence? Have you ever given study to the sins of back yards?... Yes?... Just the other day I heard the old doctor say that you could tell the condition of a man's liver by the appearance of his back yard.... He's right about it."
In general esteem our back yard, if you choose to remember, was second only to the attic. The crack in the fence was its thorn in the flesh. Of course the kitchen opened onto it, or rather, it opened onto the kitchen, for this warm bread-scented producer of tarts is not to[Pg 37] be compared in point of importance with this plot sacredly set apart for make-believers. Here, however, is a fitting place to state that for an inn the kitchen suited admirably, and Betty, though black-a-visaged as a pirate, made a very respectable Mine Host.
The right side was flanked by an impassable high board fence which Grown-ups, I have since learned, built to hide their back-yard sins from their neighbors, the Greens, who possessed a similar assortment. To us, however, it was a stockade erected by no less a personage than our comrade Daniel Boone, famous for his cigars, and served to protect us from the Indians who, in reality, were the half-dozen assorted little Greens, then on the summit of the stone age. These savages weren't at all neighborly, a thing for which we never ceased to be thankful. The really splendid part about it was that at any time, without other warning than a sudden whoop, rocks were likely to be thrown over the fence at our unsuspecting heads. Though once and a while producing a scalp wound[Pg 38] upon our side, it was altogether a very harmless play, with just enough excitement to keep it alive. Besides, in the end, all of the stones the Greenlets ever threw away always found their way back to their side of the stockade. And what matter to any of us if it caused the mothers on either side to cease speaking except in company, and the fathers to have only a mere business bow?
In our back yard was the stable, two parts of which are worthy of mention. There was the hay-loft, reached by a steep and rickety ladder through a hole in the floor, a fine old place in which to hide from visiting dressed-up small boys whose presence was, on general principles, undesirable. Then there were great billows of hay, with sweet, breezy odors, on which one might be cast away on a pitchfork raft for days and days. Above, on the rafters, were drab-colored nests of mud-daubing martins, which easily became gulls, albatross, or distant sails, as the moment might demand.
The very best place of all, as you will hereinafter discover, was our buggy[Pg 39] shed. The floor was nothing more than the good, hard earth. Here and there were little wallowing nests of dust made by some cheerful hen while engaged in an indolent sun-bath. On one side hung the harness, which might be pressed into service for circus purposes. Along the braces lay the monkey-wrench, hammer, nails, and delectable boxes of fascinating axle grease. The rancid smell of this yellowish-black article of lubrication is indissolubly associated with heaven-sent memories of the happiest days. True I never tried it, though I believe you once did with painful results; I always wanted to spread it on a white slice of bread and eat it. The axle grease was a cause for sin. More anon.
In the center stood our phaeton, which served from a coach and four to a low-raking revenue cutter. Behind it was the jolt wagon—so named because of a lack of springs. This caused very delightful sensations to those playing train within, when the vehicle was being driven at a trot over a rough road. Now one of the privileges to be bought, often at a[Pg 40] high price, from the hired man, was the unalloyed joy of putting great daubs of grease upon the axles of the aforesaid phaeton and farm wagon. I have often done without my second piece of chocolate pie, gladly thrusting it surreptitiously down the throat of this previously mentioned man of many virtues, just to get to help at this task. Something second unto it was being allowed to spin the recently attended wheel before removing the jack from beneath it. All of this that you may know the charms of axle grease.... O, the memories of that day of many sins!
Nance, who lived just back of me, with an alley between, had a habit which was good or bad as it suited my purpose. It was to come through a gate in her back fence, which mine did not possess, and enter my domain through a crack in the fence. This entrance, which had been made long ago by the removal of a board, was a constant source of annoyance to me. Since her first appearance years ago, the crack had been worn smooth and glossy by much passing of girl frocks.[Pg 41] She insisted upon being played with and the pity of her possessing neither father, mother, sisters, or brothers of her own was all that saved the crack being securely nailed. It was only when she attempted to force dolls upon me that I sternly rebelled. Of course it was only in the back yard and upon the common that she was allowed my comradeship. When we were fishing or swimming she could not come, though she shed many tears and entered various protests.
Now of all times this was one when a visit from her was not wanted. Jean François acted like she would be welcome, it is true. Just why he so fancied her was then a mystery to me. I'll leave it to you. I had prepared for a really wicked, good time all alone with the happy pedler. In the morning, after playing Indian with the Greens, I hoped we should be buccaneers in the hay until Aunt Bet began to get dinner. Then we were to slip into the house and slide down the banisters until time to eat. The whole afternoon was to be spent greasing the phaeton and the jolt wagon. There was[Pg 42] a new box of axle grease, and a splendid pine paddle with which to apply it.... Suppose you had all of such a great day planned and a red-headed little jade, with a very white frock, taking her welcome for granted, squeezed through the crack of your fence.... Jean François says you can always count upon a woman making her appearance just when you are off on a particularly masculine jaunt.
Well, the Indians had to be postponed. She had once taken a rather awkward left-handed part in a battle and had gone bellowing through the fence, a most unbecoming woman. She wasn't any heroine. The scar, which her Aunt Barbara feels very sure will disappear, may be found in that blessed red hair to this day. So politeness forbade warfare. The hay proved better. It is true I noticed her eyes grow a bit wide with fear as she arose on the rickety ladder. This was fostered by Jean François following closely behind, playing sailor. We made believe that she was a respectable merchantman, while I was a pirate, and the pedler the man-of-war. I swooped down[Pg 43] upon her only to be chased and hard put by the shot and shell of the larger vessel. I feel sure she got the worst of the fight. Then, in the storm, we covered her with hay until her weak little protest from somewhere beneath the billows made me uneasy for her ever again reaching port.
It was the banisters where she surprised all of us.
"I do it all the time at home," she informed us proudly. Just then I ceased to sympathize with her lack of a mother. I, too, wished for a G. F. who domineered a maiden aunt.
"You see," said she, "I never walk down stairs unless Aunt Barbara is around."
Then she illustrated her ability for us, to almost knocking the newel post from its dignified position at the bottom of the stair. We stood watching with awe and a trifle of envy. It was an unfortunate thing in some respects to have parents. Here, however, our joy was interrupted by a call demanding Nance to report for dinner. She departed, and I was left to dissipate on an old-fashioned[Pg 44] circular baluster. Jean François became a spectator, saying that he drew the line at such amusements.
It was the afternoon which caused the telling of this story. History was made. We had the jack under the front wheel of the jolt wagon when she appeared. The umbrella man was unscrewing the nut while I worked the grease. Her frock was a new one. A trace of recent tears told of the folly of playing respectable merchantman upon a sea of hay. Here the wheel was lifted off, placed against the wall, and the glistening axle, already suffering from over attention, was liberally applied with lubricant. When we turned to replace the wheel, there was the jade sitting innocently against the hub. She stepped aside for us, only to expose a neat black ring printed upon a part of her frock which prophesied what awaited her within the immediate future. At first she was inclined to cry. Instead, upon our laughing at her, she became impudent. As each wheel came off, she promptly sat against it, regularly increasing the number of rings. Then she[Pg 45] insisted on at least putting one paddle full on an axle. After that she must be allowed to attend one entire wheel by herself, of course, allowing one of us to remove it. This we did cheerfully. Were we not interested in getting her just as black as possible? Had she not grown exceedingly bold and saucy?... Next she decided to taste the grease. One little finger, on the tip of which was a bit of black tar, was stuck delicately on her outstretched tongue, while she made a face for our delectation.
Suddenly she turned upon us with the information that she was a circus.
"A whole circus?" asked Jean François derisively.
"A whole circus, and I'm going to perform," she informed us.
She then insisted that Jean François and I go away, as she was going to do her act on the horizontal bar. In fact, she commanded us to leave, but whatever we chose to do she nevertheless intended to do her trick. The pedler promptly turned his back and began the imitation of the kind of music played when the[Pg 46] acrobats are out. As for me I stood my ground. She needed an audience, I insisted. Who ever heard of a circus without an audience? Then, quite to my astonishment, Nance proceeded to skin the cat. She sputtered something about getting even at her party—I remembered this afterward—as she heaved her legs between her hands, and a multitude of clothes obscured her features. I was somewhat awed by this bit of prowess. I respected her for it. Still, I, myself, fully intended, so soon as I became a man, to walk on the ceiling. Also I found myself wondering if the immortal Jean François numbered this among his accomplishments.
Just then the climax came, in the shape of her Aunt Barbara, who, silently and suddenly, like death, stood before us.
"Aunt Barbara," she explained as she dropped, a tearful little bundle of apologies, into the dust, "Aunt Barbara, I didn't want to do it before Charles. Really, I didn't, but I just couldn't get him to go away.... I hated to do it, really, but he simply would not leave."[Pg 47]
Then to see her hurried through the crack in the fence with a sharp spank, as she stooped through the opening, almost convinced me that she was one thing on earth God had made without any purpose.
Jean François says there isn't any greater creative force in this world for pity than a very tearful, snuffy, turned-up, little girl-nose.
Less than a month following the events clustered about the rise and fall of the unfortunate circus, a certain tow-headed, freckled-faced boy, whom I knew once upon a time, long ago, might have been found seated on the lar-board side of the ferry float, hidden away from his fellow men, that he might contemplate. I am sure Izaak Walton knew a deal about boys, and that much of his gentle philosophy was developed into tangibility because he occasionally consulted them.
Early in the morning Jean François and Doctor Longstreet had tramped up the river seeking a favorite fishing pool. They had invited the boy to go with them, but even the all-day companionship of his two heroes could not withdraw him from the problem which now completely occupied his mind and heart.... Nance[Pg 49] was spending her time at home, doubtless enjoying certain triumphs of the previous night. The fellows couldn't interest him. The river—his river now—alone seemed adequate. The great stream lay at his feet, stretching away to the Indiana hills, beautiful, calm, majestic, yet sympathetic and inviting to confidences. At any rate, so it seemed to the boy in whose life something new, mysterious, wonderful was coming to birth.
On the evening previous to this thoughtful dabbling in the water there had happened in the life of this boy an event. Not such an event as it might be if you were to find the rainbow's end; more important than if you were granted three wishes by the queen of fairies. You have been expecting these rather commonplace happenings all of your life. This particular event came without the slightest warning or preparation, at least so far as he knew; like you might wake some morning and find your wings attached behind your ears instead of on your shoulder-blades, where you are really expecting to wear them. The boy, it[Pg 50] might be said, was made of marbles and tops and little mud puddles; of rivers and trees and all out of doors; of Daniel Boone, Simon Kenton, and Kit Carson; and, of nights by the winter's fireside, of good adventurous books. For him all of the rest of the world was yet to be created. To him his mother wasn't a woman; she was just mother. Girls, like flies, were inevitable nuisances, mostly to be ignored, but occasionally shot at with a broken bit of rubber band.... He didn't even know that he was ugly. Yet he had learned early that the boys best suited for "knux," fishin', and the like had freckles, snub-noses, and cow-licks. Had not father often remonstrated with mother at too much washing, insisting that it was part of a small boy's portion to get dirty and to sniffle? Hadn't he seen through old Doctor Longstreet's derision when he would take such evident delight in saying to hovering little motherettes:
"Madame, I congratulate you upon the hideousness of your son. Thank God for ugly boys—they make men. A pretty boy, madame, is a misprint—the[Pg 51] wrong title under the wrong picture. I congratulate you!... Ah, it reminds me of the story of—"
Never mind the doctor's story. Sufficient to say it was not about a pirate or a captain of the guards, or I'd tell it here. One thing: he was generally right about boys, angle worms, and pills.
So, in the late afternoon of yesterday, when he was informed by his mother that Nance—Jean François' red-headed jade—was to have a birthday party, and that he was expected to go, his heart became sick and then rebellious. In the first place she held no interest for him. She had always been in the world, he supposed. He couldn't remember when she hadn't lived over the alley. It seemed that always she had made herself conspicuous through the crack in the fence. For the first time he genuinely regretted that he had not nailed it up long ago.
Then another good reason for protest, upon the suggestion that it would not be healthful for him if he failed to attend the party, was the fact that he would have to wash his feet and put on shoes and[Pg 52] stockings. It was under such circumstances he wished he belonged to the Rices, who lived on a shanty boat, fishing for a living. The little Rices never had to wash except accidentally as they got wet helping their father trace his trot-lines, or for fun when they went swimming. This time he pleaded with his mother to let him run to the river and "go-in"; this being a sure way of getting amusement out of an otherwise unpleasant task. However, mother was very serious and father looked like a newspaper with legs to it. He refused to be inveigled into sympathy. So the boy was duly scrubbed, shined, stocking-and-shoed. Thus, feeling very stiff, dry all over, and exceedingly unlike Robinson Crusoe, he was thrust unceremoniously through the crack in the fence with a parting injunction similar to the one he had seen administered to Nance not a great while ago. He did not cry, however, but, very much of a martyr, he tramped with reckless delight over Aunt Barbara's flower-beds to the front door and lifted the knocker. Here he paused[Pg 53] for fully a minute with timid dignity, then let it fall. It seemed an earthquake.
When he had once gotten in, had his hat, a very superfluous piece of wearing apparel, disposed of, he was formally presented to many uncomfortable-looking small boys in the strange disguise of Sunday suits and fluttering, beribboned little girls who now, for the first time, seemed to have the occasion better in hand than himself. The dry feeling now left him for one that was hot and smothery, seemingly caused by having on too much clothing. He accepted the chair thrust beneath him by her Aunt Barbara, whose glance was one of withering disapproval. Knowing that he had surely broken some rule of conduct, his eyes sought the open window as if measuring his chance for escape. Evidently none presented itself, for he turned resignedly to the gay group of tiny flutterers about him. He mentally calculated how many times he could chin the curtain pole if he were allowed to remove his coat; he wondered if she ever tried it; and remembering the cat-skinning[Pg 54] episode he concluded that she was no doubt a practised hand. Suddenly he straightened up and regained a portion of self-respect as he thought how he could throw the whole lot of them out of the window if he chose.
It was then that the games began. Even the boys—Jim, "Capt." "Leggins," and the rest—seemed more at ease, and the chances were, from appearances, he believed, that they were actually going to have some fun. Before he knew just how it happened, and wholly unconscious of its nature, he was in a game in which the reward, or penalty it would have seemed to him, was kissing the upturned cheek of some fluttering little maid. Very abruptly, so it seemed, Nance stood before him. There was a look of mischief in her dancing eyes, a droop of mock timidity about her mouth, and a round, flushed, dimpled cheek was held for his lips. As the other girls were always inclined to let him alone, this was a part of the game he had not anticipated. Just as a drowning man thinks in a second of every wicked act of his[Pg 55] life, so the boy thought of every worm he had ever put on her, of every pinch, every twitch of her hair, of every bit of tantalizing of which he had ever been guilty. Most of all he remembered the vengeance she had promised him for refusing to go away while she skinned the cat.... At any rate, there she stood, her happy little face sparkling from without a perfect mass of fluffy red curls, that, to the boy, seemed quite as bright and beautiful as the sunshine on the river in the early morning. Beneath this hair and lifted cheek stood an eager small body, very much frilled and furbelowed, which to him, for the first time, was very mysterious and alluring. It was decidedly a new experience for him. For a moment he hesitated, uneasy, blushing vigorously; then he glanced behind. Yes, it was there and open! One bound and he was through the window, running and stumbling toward the crack in the fence. For a second Nance gazed in amused amazement at the place left vacant, and out into the night into which he had escaped. Then she turned[Pg 56] to another and the game continued. Within her heart was a feeling of deep satisfaction.
The boy was down in the buggy shed, his coat off, hanging on the bar skinning the cat several times in rapid succession.
"Huh," he exclaimed as he came to a sudden stop. "I bet she couldn't do it agin!" It might be well to here record the fact that so far as anybody ever knew, she never did.
All of this was what passed in review as he sat paddling in the water that June morning. He wondered what Jean François would say when he heard about it. He was filled with pride and humiliation all at one time. An unusual relationship was now evident. She was in the ascendancy.... He wanted to think it all out, if it were possible, and the river, rippling about his bare feet, felt very cool and very soothing.
When our grandfathers were snub-nosed little boys, quaintly dressed in the toggery of near a century ago, every town in the South boasted of its college. It was long before the coming of the state universities and the heavily endowed Church institutions. They were usually the property of some pompous individual whose pedantry and assumption, among the simple folk about him, went by the name of culture and learning. He was usually looked upon as being something sacred. His authority upon matters generally, and letters specifically, was indisputable. That being a day when, though there were no poor, there were also no rich, ancestry and one's mind counted for something. Therefore these old scholars, whose charlatanry was[Pg 58] what they deemed an honest part of pedagogy, were honored with the very highest esteem. These schools soon acquired an atmosphere very dear to the Southern heart: a quiet air of good breeding. This was frequently abused by the institutions themselves inasmuch as it was made an inducement to secure attendance. To-day our very same grandparents are not so proud of the education attained, for that was usually very meager, but of the aristocratic name left to the now tottering buildings.
One of the most popular of all of these in its day was Oldmeadow College. Even to this time its legends are passed by careful and reverent tongues to those born in so unfortunate a period as not to have been able to attend it. In the narrow vision of many of our cracker-barrel philosophers there never existed men so erudite, so acceptably great as many of the old professors. Now and then, with modifications, this was true. Our village had no doubt whatever that she was the moral and culture center of Kentucky. It might please you to know[Pg 59] that from Lexington, with Transylvania University, down to the least hamlet possessed of her college, every town in the State thought the same thing ... feel reasonably sure each one of them was right!
There was but one part of Oldmeadow which might boast of being anything like a hill. On the western edge of the town beside the river this knoll, many feet higher than the surrounding country, was entirely within the college campus. At its apex was the college itself. A brick building consisting of a basement with three stories and a half above it—these stories were higher than the average—made a rather imposing structure which sat like a monitor upon a stool overlooking the conduct of the village spread before it. On the first floor were an assembly and two recitation rooms. In the five apartments on the second lived the President and his family. The third was devoted to music and class rooms. On the pilot-house-like tower, which crowned the building, there rested a huge bell once the property of a boastful[Pg 60] steamboat, the General Litell, which had blown up at a point just below town, in a vain attempt to run faster than a rival. I used to believe the bell, rope and all, had been neatly blown over upon the roof, but I am now inclined to believe that friends must have rescued it from the sand-bar for its present position. It is still a mystery to me how it was ever mounted to where it is to-day.
Now all of this was very long ago, before you knew anything about Oldmeadow and my river beside it. When we first knew the village, you will remember, all that was left of the college was the building, the bell, and the wonderful view of the most beautiful stream in the world, from its windows, or its top. Standing beside the relic of the General Litell, you may see the great Ohio wandering idly, vagabondishly, through the valley, until it looks like a silver thread losing itself in the misty distance. Just think of being able to see, on a clear sunny morning, twenty miles or more of the river you love. By your side it drifts, broad, full of strength, in pleasing sinuosity,[Pg 61] covered by a thousand hurrying little ripples. Beyond it becomes smoother, the yellow of the water turning a clearer green, and motionless it winds in and out among the farms and woodland until it may be followed only by the line of blue vapor between the hills. Here and there hangs the smoke of a steamboat; a forest shuts it momentarily from sight only that you may catch a glimpse of silver sheen, lake-like, smiling in the happy sunshine; a farmhouse, as a silent, contemplative fisherman, sits here and there on the bank; and over it all, as if with satisfaction the master builder were viewing his work, there broods the great mystery.
Though all of these things remained, when we came into our inheritance the college was no longer a "college," but had fallen into the vulgar times of being used as the public school building. Here some erstwhile student held forth for six months in the year, teaching on the first floor, living on the second, his children making a playhouse out of the third.
I will not presume to say how long I had been attending the "college" when, upon[Pg 62] a certain cheerful September morning, I saw old Doctor Longstreet come walking up the campus with the timid fingers of our Nance held protectingly in his own. She seemed very much scared, a trifle knock-kneed, and just a bit too starched up to be as pretty as I acknowledged her in my heart. She passed us—a group of boys at play—with scarcely a look of recognition. I watched them climb the steps into the building, her two huge red plaits seeming to be about all there was of her. These same plaits looked quite lonely and as if they wanted to turn and run for it. I do not think I have ever seen her so humble, so unassuming as she was that day. To be sure it did not last long. Before another week she had figuratively made a crack in the fence and slipped through to victory.
During these early years in school, to prove my prowess, when I believed her looking, I never lost an opportunity to stand on my head. I did not realize at the time how ungallant was the undue advantage I took of her. Long, long since I have learned that she secretly[Pg 63] practised it at home. As a consequence, that which at first so won her admiration soon was the cause of contempt. Though I could never know, she was sure that she could do it with better grace than her one-time hero. I am now told that I only maintained my prestige by my ability to suddenly seize upon and throw down the boy nearest by. This was something of which she might only make a dream.
All of this showing off and the confidence in my own powers fully convinced me how much superior was man to woman. All she could do was to look on—at least so far as I knew—with an occasional attempt at being something, by a sudden and unexpected getting of my tag. This I frequently treated with contempt. Once in a while I risked my reputation for being manly by running pell-mell after her until the tag was successfully recovered.... And yet I was to be humiliated by this red-headed jade.
Jean François had caused consternation by announcing that within a few days[Pg 64] he must be off for the white highways. Already he had remained too long in one place. However much he might love us, he could not afford to let his liver atrophy. Besides, were they not waiting for their happy pedler in another far-off gracious land?... "They await my pack," said he restlessly, "for fine knacks for ladies—pins, points, laces, gloves, and the thousand flimsy, silky things they adore!" And he bowed with a smile full of splendid mockery.... Our hearts were sad. Did we not want him forever?
The story of my humiliation comes here.... You will remember how we used to have to memorize long verses and recite them from the platform on Friday afternoons before visitors and the high and mighty school committee? It was upon such an auspicious occasion. Your speech—I am sure of the terminology—was, "I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying." Mine, with swimming gestures and trembling voice, was "Bingen, Fair Bingen on the Rhine." Who, dear friends, could think of greater recitations[Pg 65] than these? Were they not time-honored? Were they not a part of the tradition of Oldmeadow? Certainly, I answer.
Now Jean François had been prevailed upon to enter for at least one hour beneath a roof. The pedler had serious objections to hats, which he never wore, and houses, which he rarely entered. Yet, out of compassion because of his leaving us, he had come to hear our speech-making. He sat with uneasy grace upon a front bench by Doctor Longstreet, who found much to amuse him in the umbrella man's discomfort.... It was when Nance stood before us, scared white, with tears beneath just the surface of her restless eyes, that Jean François lost his self-consciousness. Mr. Finus Appleblossom, proprietor of the store, chairman of the board, prominent in lodge and church circles, cleared his august throat ostentatiously and swelled with importance. Something seemed to be in the atmosphere.... Then in a very pretty little voice, which at once gained confidence, Nance began a song. Didn't I[Pg 66] know it? Certainly, I assert. Had I not heard Jean François sing it a hundred times, but who, save the jade, would have ever thought of toppling custom, tradition, and the school board by singing a song—a very short one at that—Friday afternoon? And such a song!
This was the song of the jade:
For a moment after she had concluded she stood as if dumb, half-frightened, heart-sick, and then, bursting into tears, with a stifled little cry of despair, she rushed and fell all in a heap at the knees of Jean François. Forgetting all of us, he picked her up in his big, strong arms—she who was but a fragile child—and,[Pg 67] smoothing the rumpled hair from her eyes, kissed her brow.
"Dear little jade," said he quite tenderly, "I didn't know that it made all of this difference."
"You won't go, Jean François?" she smiled through her tears.
"I must," said he regretfully. "I cannot help it.... But next June I'll come again. And every June that follows, as long as I shall live, the happy caravan shall be yours."
A few moments later, as we hurried into the open, I noticed that Nance was actually growing. It had never occurred to me that she would ever be any larger than the day she first thrust herself through my crack in the fence. As she passed with her grandfather, Jean François, and Mr. Appleblossom, she nodded to me quite as if she were an equal. In my humiliation I quite forgot to walk on my hands, a feat I was holding in reserve. Instead, off I skipped down to the river and "went-in" by myself. I felt that the world was very unappreciative and unsympathetic.
"Jean François," Nance was pleased to say very earnestly, "the river and the hills have belonged to us for so very long—I wonder when we will own the old-fashioned home of the many pillars?"... Because of his talking so frequently about it, we had grown to accept as a settled thing the possibility of our one day possessing the house of our heart's desire.
Columbine stood securely packed, the pedler was shod with newly soled boots, the road lay wistfully before him. It was the last beautiful night of our summer. In the early morning, Jean François, mender of umbrellas, would be off, and, for us, the winter. Yet it was not an unhappy gathering beside the September camp-fire. No one might be unhappy with the master of the caravan.
We had cooked a genuine greenwood[Pg 69] supper and eaten it in the twilight. There was bacon held over the embers on a sharpened stick, bread baked in the ashes on heated stones, eggs boiled in Jean François' great kettle, and coffee, black and strong. What else, pray you, could one have wished? Afterward, with the smoke of Pierrett curling about his head and filling the air with the aroma of burning tobacco, he sang for us. He told old tales of men-at-arms in France until our blood grew warm and with him we fought great battles. Sometimes he would speak of fairies, elves, and the people of the woods; or of ghostly visitors to winter firesides; of far-off roads in far-away lands where the fields were always in bloom and the sun always mellow, warm, and soft.... He then told us how houses had souls the same as men and hungered to be loved. It was at this time Nance asked her question about our possessions.
As I have said before, he had frequently talked of our one day possessing the old home, but never with the seriousness with which he now spoke. It was evident[Pg 70] that this time he considered the matter with sincerity.
"So you would really like to grow up and live in the Abbé's house?" said he, answering his questioner by a question.
"It would be the most beautiful thing in the world," was her reply. After a moment's hesitation, as if doubtful of what she should say, she added:
"That is, if—if you would come and live with us, Jean François."
"Thank you, my dear," he replied, with a singular note of tenderness in his voice. "Thank you very much indeed, but that would be impossible. Quite as impossible as your becoming a gipsy. And what would become of Columbine, Rogue, and Pierrett without the dingle and le long trimard? No, that would never do!... But, as for the other, why not?
"Why not, my girl?" was his comment, this time addressed to Pierrett. His rather queer custom of consulting the little briar-root pipe as if it were a conscious being was something to which we had long become accustomed. It was[Pg 71] his way of talking things over with himself. In the same manner he held one-sided discussions with Columbine and Rogue. He was not partial in his family, though I feel sure the shaggy, sure-footed little mare was valued most highly.
"Why not?" he continued. "Monsieur l'Abbé, whom I know full well, illy deserves the home.... He is doing nothing worthy of enjoying such a charming house, is he? Eh?... Monsieur Jacques, where are your poor? Your shabby little brothers of the Parisian street? Where are the pinched hungry mouths with whom you once shared your crusts?... Ah, those were the days of crusts!... Where is the little attic in la Rue St. Jacques?... Let me see, children, is this not what He said to him each night:
"'For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.'
"Now, Monsieur Picot, the voices are[Pg 72] far away. You live in an alien land. Your pleasures, instead of boldly as of old, you take surreptitiously.... One day, you poor renegade, you will die and pass to the only heaven I know of—the long roads and sunlit fields of Picardy.... You haven't an heir by blood in the world. Why not an heir by love? Eh, Pierrett? I knew that you would say, 'Yes.'... I'll suggest it to the old curmudgeon."
"My dears," said he, addressing us, "I know this Monsieur l'Abbé very well. Some day I shall pay him a call and suggest how generous a thing it would be if he were to make his will in your favor. Then, quietly, with exceeding propriety, so as not to offend any member of your family, pass unto his fathers.... I will say, 'Monsieur, He says that "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my—"'"
"Dear Jean François," interrupted Nance, a bit horrified, "how disrespectfully you can talk!... I, too, know Monsieur l'Abbé—"
"But I know him much better than[Pg 73] you, Nance." And he held his hand for her to be silent.
"I think to-night," said he a moment later, "I shall conclude by telling you the story of Monsieur l'Abbé Jacques Picot, of the little Rue St. Jacques, Paris."
Monsieur l'Abbé Picot, in whose heart there dwelt a queer mixture out of which to make a priest, was talking with a letter, written in a strange foreign hand, as it lay upon his knee. The entire morning had been spent at the beloved task of writing a sonnet. The afternoon, in the most miserable part of Paris, he might have been found visiting the homes of his sick and his poor, to whose ills, of body and of spirit, he deemed himself physician. In the evening for an hour he saw that happy laughing première danseuse, Mademoiselle Andree, at the gay little theater near the corner, pirouetting care from the heavy souls of men. In the early night he had but recently ceased to read the book which still lay open on the floor at his side, and for uncounted joyous moments[Pg 75] had fancied himself strutting the streets in the company of the brave D'Artagnan, their swords clanking in their scabbards, their eyes fierce for adventure.
It was thus, upon a day, that his warm love of life would come calling him for the army. At the very thought of men-at-arms his slender nostrils would widen and his imagination sniff the pungent odor of burning powder. There was no doubt in his mind that among his ancestors there had been some great warrior whose passion for fighting was but tempered by his patriotism. And his heroes, were they not Porthos, La Fayette, D'Artagnan, Washington, and Napoleon? Could he have been born to please his own choice of time, other than to have been the captain of the Guards during the reign of Louis XIV—the Louis of his own Dumas, the magnificent—he would have chosen to have fought under the Emperor. Then those escapades of student life at Harcourt! He scarcely dared to dream of such old brave days, now the well-beloved secrets hidden[Pg 76] beneath a cassock and a cowl. They were stored in a memory made all the more sacred by the thought that such adventurous hours dare never be lived again. Then he feared for his impulsive nature. His mind, cooled and brought to the level of every day's simple duty, knew what was his actual and true work in the world. But O, the mischief of his wandering fingers, of his heart when the virile passion of life played riot in his veins. So it was, at times he seemed to know that to lead the battle, to cry for France, to spill one's blood for kings, that, indeed, was to be a man.
Yet when the wild airs of the early springtime came caressing the 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[Pg 77] 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 Abbé 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[Pg 78] 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 Abbé made sonnets and madrigals with his master Pierre Ronsard, ballades after the manner of that charming rogue François 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 Abbé 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, cafés, and the great salons, the thoroughfares congested with carriages, and bewildered people hastened by[Pg 79] 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[Pg 80] 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'Abbé, 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[Pg 81] 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 Abbé 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[Pg 82] 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 Abbé's meditations had been going on from the moment he had ceased to read until the concièrge, 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!"[Pg 83]
"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 Abbé 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 Abbé. "It is an old Protestant community. So said the letter.... You will not be in unconventional Rue St. Jacques. You cannot have liberties."[Pg 84] 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[Pg 85] 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 Abbé.
"Are you certain?" again insisted the quiet one, with a note of suspicious eagerness illy suppressed.
The Abbé 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'Abbé Jacques Picot came to live in the old-fashioned home of the many pillars.
Monsieur l'Abbé 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[Pg 87] 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'Abbé 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[Pg 88] 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[Pg 89] 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,[Pg 90] 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.[Pg 91] 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[Pg 92] 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.
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."
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.
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[Pg 98] 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.
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[Pg 100] single file, was the happy master of the caravan, Jean François. 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:
As he sauntered singing down the hill-road the thoughts of Jean François 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[Pg 101] 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:
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 François. 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 François humorous and amusing little letters. She[Pg 102] 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[Pg 103] we care? Perhaps we are immortal!... And he pirouetted gaily like a première 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 François 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[Pg 104] sobbing movement long enough to perceptibly shrug.
"Damn!" ejaculated Jean François, 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 sacré 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:
"Umbrellas to mend!... Umbrellas to mend!... Fine knacks for ladies. Within this pack are pins, points, laces, and gloves.... I am poet, pedler, and[Pg 105] wandering troubadour. Fair ladies from their tears I rescue. A knight errant of the pack am I!"
Jean François threw up his hands in strong amazement, consternation upon every feature, and his tongue tied by surprise. A moment, that seemed to him as a nightmare in which he struggled in vain attempt for words, and then these expressions came with marvelous speed and versatility.
"Ventre de biche!... Sacré pig of a zebra!... By all the saints in paradise!" he cried with a hundred imprecations. Finally, as if exhausted, he asked rather meekly:
"From what star did you drop?... You little red-headed jade!"
Indeed it was Miss Nance Gwyn, about to cry, a little soiled and mussed, distractingly pretty, pointing a derisive finger as a baton, and shouting with laughter to the helpless and dumbfounded Jean François:[Pg 106]
Columbine had been hauled to the side of the road and Rogue was allowed to nibble blue-grass at her pleasure. A fire had been kindled, and Jean François was broiling bacon speared on the end of a sharpened stick. A coffee-pot was steaming upon a few hot embers raked aside for that especial purpose. A great loaf of white bread lay on a cloth on the bottom of an upturned bucket. Nance, over behind the cart, was arranging her toilet. She had rummaged within the yellow depth of the van, filled with much pedlers' finery, and, among other necessities, discovered a small mirror. This she propped upon the hub against a spoke of the wheel. With its aid she readily set herself to rights.
Just as she appeared, fresh and resplendent[Pg 108] as the morning itself, Jean François announced breakfast. He directed her to be seated on the bank of the turnpike, placed a clean board some two feet square upon her lap, and gave to her two slices of firm bread between which lay several strips of crisply cooked bacon. He then brought her a heavy china cup filled with delicious coffee. This, with sparkling cool water from a spring near the bridge, constituted his offering for the morning meal. After giving himself a like helping, they ate in silence. Once a farm wagon, in which three men rode, was driven by. As they passed, they stared very markedly. The pedler, usually so amiable, scowled furtively at them. Nance became uneasy, for Jean François had scarcely spoken to her since his torrent of French and English invectives which came so volubly upon his surprise at finding her unexpectedly. This was very unlike her old-time friend the umbrella man. She began to realize that it was a very delicate problem with which she had precipitately overwhelmed him. She wondered how he would solve it, yet was[Pg 109] indifferent enough not to offer any assistance.
After the meal, with his usual deliberateness, he drew Pierrett from his pocket, filled her with an adorable mixture, and, with a brand from the fire, proceeded to light her. As the blue smoke curled above his head, he leaned upon his elbow, otherwise his body lay at full length upon the earth, and, at last, looked at the petulant and unhappy Nance.
"Son," said he, without any apparent consideration of the sex implied by the title and as if he were subtly indicating the relationship which he wished them to assume; "son, tell me all about it."
"I ran away," exclaimed Nance in her most bewitching manner.
She had decided upon her method of procedure. She would be seductive, helpless, and appeal to his sympathy and chivalry. A course which he readily perceived was going to make his sexless comradeship rather difficult.
"To be sure, sir," was the reply. And then as if a bit alarmed:
"I sincerely hope that no one will[Pg 110] think for a moment that you have been kidnapped!"
"I shouldn't wonder if they did," she brightened in mischievous delight. "Wouldn't it be exceedingly funny?"
"It would," was the laconic reply, accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders.
Jean François removed Pierrett from his mouth. After examining the pipe carefully, he refilled it, and continued his smoke. Five minutes passed without a word, and then, looking up quite seriously at his charge, he said:
"See here, Nancy Bricktop, are you aware of the fact that you are no longer a ten-year-old child?"
Nance flushed, a trifle embarrassed.
"Anyone but myself," he continued, "would say you were pretty much of a grown-up woman.... My dear child—"
"Now, don't you 'my-dear-child' me," she cried tearfully. "All of them conspire against me, and you aren't a bit better!"
Jean François arose and placed his pipe in his pocket. He walked the[Pg 111] length of the cart a half dozen times. It appeared to be rather a bad beginning.
"Nance," said he, turning and for the first time showing sympathy in his voice and manner, "Come! Tell me all about it. Why did you run away?"
"I—I cannot tell you," she replied, dropping her head.
"O, but you must," said he. "You haven't stolen anything?"
"Perhaps," she smiled archly.
"Seriously, now little jade, forget that I have reminded you that you are grown up, for you are not. Just think of me as the old umbrella man of your barefoot years. I—"
"Of my barefoot years?" she exclaimed. "What do you know—"
"Of the years, my dear," he explained, "when you used to run barelegged and barefoot along the dusty road pleading to go gipsying with me. Do you remember?"
"That's part of why I'm here, Jean François," she said.
"Nance, Nance, Nance," he repeated, slightly exasperated, "go right along and[Pg 112] tell me why you have left Oldmeadow, Doctor Longstreet, and—and the practise of medicine, and dropped like a lost star into my top-o'-the-morning?"
"Charles," said she tearfully.
"Ah, I thought so.... What has he done? Eloped with your Aunt Barbara?... Tell me, tell me!"
"Charles came home," she explained, looking into her lap, "after four or five years of college, imbued with the idea that I was his property.... He acted as if he owned me!" she blurted indignantly.
"Well, doesn't he?" asked Jean François, innocently.
"Doesn't he! Doesn't he!" she flung at him. "That's just what grandfather asked."
"And your Aunt Barbara?" he queried humorously.
"Aunt Barbara," she continued with fine sarcasm, "my precise, correct, conventional Aunt Barbara, who will not acknowledge, Jean François, that she has such vulgar things as legs; this dear, darling devotee of propriety actually[Pg 113] pointed to herself as a horrible example of a too-exacting young woman!... My Aunt Barbara is a silly old ass!"
"How you do mix your genders when you become excited, my dear-a."
"You're a goose!" she exclaimed. "A darling, old adorable goose.... You never liked my Aunt Barbara."
"But my question, Nance ... I thought things were all decided years ago. Do tell me."
"Dr. Charles Reubelt King," she pronounced the name with withering scorn, "was disgustingly presumptuous. He treated me as if he were feeling the pulse of the world and was just about to administer to it the particular pill which would cure all of its ills.... I despise pompousness, pedantry, and unconscious condescension in a man.... As for me—well, if he didn't say it, he acted it. I was nothing. I knew nothing. At my best I was but a red-headed spiritualized slave—and not always quite spiritualized!... I knew nothing!"
"It seems to hurt you pretty bad, Nance," he said mildly.[Pg 114]
"What?... Nothing hurts me!"
"Do you, Bricktop?"
"Do I what?"
"Know anything?" asked Jean François.
"Certainly I do, and you know it, you horrid old pedler. Didn't I sense the real river and the road and the happy hills long, long ago?... And as for you, Monsieur, I know things about you of which our stupid Charles Reubelt has never dreamed. Shall I tell you things, Jean François?"
Jean François raised his hand in protest, shaking his head forbiddingly.
"Never mind," said he, good humoredly.
"Ah, Jean François," she exclaimed in a burst of tenderness, "I preferred the road and—"
"Finish your Dr. Charles, whom you must remember is quite young and possesses a new diploma," said he, interrupting her hastily.
"The undesirable part of it is," said she, obeying, "is that grandfather and Aunt Barbara are on his side. They say[Pg 115] he is such a pretty, nice boy with such an acceptable family and promising prospects. All of which, so far as that is concerned, is true. They thought I should have led him to the altar accompanied by the Oldmeadow brass band, with me dancing in front as David did before the Ark of the Covenant."
"Nance," said Jean François, extending his hand to her, "you are always pretty nearly right. You might have shown more wisdom by not carrying things so far as to run away like a spoiled child.... Here's my hand. I'm with you.... Now tell me how you got here?"
While she entered into the details of her trip he busied himself with hitching Rogue to the cart and turning the face of the caravan about to the north. She had learned through a note, requiring an answer, which Jean François had written to Doctor Longstreet, that he would call about the first of June for his mail at the little town which lay behind them in the valley. She had arrived the night before, and, after learning at the post-office that he had not called, she, doubtless[Pg 116] very foolishly, but with her old-time adventurous spirit, had started out to meet him.
"Come, let's be going," said he. And he helped her onto a little apron-like seat which projected over the shafts and had for a back the front of the body of the van.
"All right, Rogue," said Jean François for the second time that morning, and they were off.
Then it was Nance seemed to discover that they had turned and were going back up the hill from which he had descended only two hours before.
"Where are we going, Jean François?" she asked with slight alarm.
"Back to Dr. Charles Reubelt King," he smiled, "to teach him how not to be a fool!"
Nance frowned for a moment, but saw the old friendly strength restored to the face of the man walking at Rogue's flank, and with a contented little sigh she sank back into the comfortable cushions of Columbine.
Jean François was right when he called himself poet. Not that he was a maker of verse, for, if it were so, no one had ever seen a single rhyme. But that was his which was far better, perhaps, than writing. He possessed all of the wondrous, painful gifts of the builder of dreams. His was the sympathetic eye for beauty in her subtlest forms. Most men see only the outward and more materialistic things: he saw the deeper, truer meaning which lay at the heart of life. He found mysterious kinship in every living thing from the simplest wayside wild blossom to the complicated soul of man. He could clasp hands with an oak and feel the fine yet strong pulsations of unknown forces which gave personality to a hospitable greenwood. Every little scurrying animal that flew from his path he felt was a part of[Pg 118] the great life, and, in a manner, a brother to men. He was a mystic; a lover of ancient lore and the tales of once-upon-a-time; a friend of elves, gnomes, fairies, fays, goblins, and children; and, with all of his knowledge of the world, was exceedingly childlike.
His year had been varied. At times he had worked at bitter tasks and known much of sorrow, despair, hunger, suffering, hardship. He had shared with the poor and loved them. Yet, withal, he had gone through life playing. Without needing a specific reason, he had entered into some of the most whimsical adventures imaginable. His fiftieth birthday found him still a child, making of some of the most serious problems a thing for play. And pray, why not? He filled his place, bore his burdens, but with the graciousness of buoyant youth unlearned in hopelessness and pessimism. He laughed along the way, and the gods, loving him, took care of him and made him happy. Is it any wonder that the elves, the fairies, the children came and ministered unto him? Do you think it anything strange[Pg 119] that the fays should light his fire by night, that the pixies should dance before him in the white moonlight, or that Puck should seal his eyes with magic juice of flower and send him laughing and joyous into the delectable land of dreams?... As I have said, Jean François was right when he called himself a poet.
All of this to help you understand something of the day Nance had as they loafed along the highway, through green sweet-smelling woodlands, by pasture, meadow, field, and plowman, over limpid swelling streams, all in the gentle welcome sunshine of early June. It was always to be remembered as the most wonderful day of all of her life.
For an hour or more after the start, being fatigued by her journey and the strain of her interview with Jean François, she slept. He walked quietly beside the van, now and then directing Rogue by a word, at times lost in thought, unconsciously gazing at the road at his feet; again, with sweeping glance, scanning the beauty of some purple valley watered by a silver thread of a river. Once, some[Pg 120] ladies driving by in an old phaeton became all agog upon seeing the sleeping girl upon the seat. They stopped the pedler and insisted upon his showing them his wares. He did this grudgingly, turning the rear of the cart toward them, apparently to make his goods more accessible, but in reality to hide Nance from their curious gaze. As they drove on, the more bold of them remarked:
"Your daughter is quite beautiful, sir."
"Thank you.... All right, Rogue," said he, and once more they were on the road.
As he walked this time, he studied Nance. She had grown very handsome, Jean François thought. She possessed charm. Her face was strikingly frank. Her hair was soft and sun-colored, with darker shadows here and there. Her eyes, being closed, showed more plainly the long black lashes and well-arched brows, which made her at once both blonde and brunette. The nose was slender, with sensitive and expressive nostrils. Her mouth was rather wide,[Pg 121] with straight lips, the lower of which, like that of Herrick's Julia, seemed bee-stung. The features taken together gave her countenance an intellectual cast, softened and beautified by an air of childlike candor that, when fired by her sparkling, dancing, azure eyes, lent her a look seductive to intoxication. A certain abandon in her sleep brought out more evidently that she was round-limbed, beautifully shaped, and lithe, with lovely swelling breasts.
Jean François began to understand how Charles Reubelt might have been surprisingly in haste. He turned his gaze to the valleys. They were beautiful in a sheer primitive way, and, even if more awake, also decidedly more quieting subjects for one's admiration.
A little later, upon awakening, she insisted upon being allowed to get down beside him and walk on slightly ahead of the caravan. At last her dream had come true. She was idling down le long trimard with Jean François, his Pierrett—a lady upon whom she laid no claim—Rogue, and Columbine. She picked[Pg 122] flowers; teased Rogue by pokes and inoffensive jabs; tantalized the pedler by asking a thousand childish questions, which he answered with becoming patience; ate voraciously and often; ran and jumped the brooks and insisted upon wading until she was threatened; smiled upon the staring, open-mouthed rustics; insisted upon showing goods at places he wished to hurry by, and, for the sake of selling, making outlandish bargains; and ever and anon breaking into song. At least a half dozen times did she sing the pedler's favorite air:
Once she caroled, much to Jean François' delight, an old song he had taught her as having been sung by the debonair Henry of Navarre. It especially pleased him because she sang in French:
In the middle of the afternoon they rested for about two hours in a little glade just off the road. It was here, near a branch, that Nance, while wandering about, discovered a rather curious old arrow-head with which she immediately ran to Jean François.[Pg 124]
"That, my dear," said he, "is an elf-arrow."
"An elf-arrow?" she asked.
"Don't you know the elf people, Nance? Their dances and their songs?
he repeated.
"No," said she, "tell me of the elves."
Upon which he launched into whimsical tales concerning elfin-land and the merry little people of the night and the greenwood. It was a new world which he created for her. To be sure she had been reared on fairy tales—but they were without a semblance of fact. Here were chronicles of a real people as related by their friend. He was authority, for was he himself not an elf-child but a few generations removed?
"Comme extrait que je suis de fée," said Jean François, quoting his brother François Villon.
"Jean François," she said, when they had resumed their way, "did you know I believe that somewhere among my ancestors[Pg 125] there must have been a wonderful gipsy woman? I can fancy her a slender, dark-skinned, black-haired girl with wander-longing in her eyes, loving some bully-rook of a young English gentleman, and, without a thought of to-morrow, allowing herself to be carried off to his home, a sort of stolen bride. Then," said she, "I see her later on, when he has settled down to a very respectable ale-drinking, big-paunched squire, eating her heart out for the roads, the camp, and the crimson sky of morning.... What do you think?"
"I think, young woman," said he, with a humorous twitching about his mouth, "that you must be mistaken. In the first place, such a maid as you describe could not be quite so badly fooled in her man.... In the second place, Nance, Charles isn't really half so stupid as you are making him out to be."
"O!" she exclaimed in hurt surprise.
For the next hour she kept well ahead of him, refusing to be inveigled into any topic of conversation whatever. She could have done nothing more in harmony[Pg 126] with his mood. Jean François wanted a time for thought. Night was coming on. There was a question upon his mind that made him laugh to himself when he realized its nature. It caused him to think of Aunt Barbara. He knew what she would have advised straightway.... What would Nance expect? Should he stop at the next farmhouse and leave her a victim for the spare bedroom? Heaven forbid! And yet—
He raised his eyes and with pleasure watched, as she walked with ample stride before him, the graceful, free motions of her body. After all how like a gipsy's were her movements. He thought of what she had just said concerning a woman who might have been her mother. This led him to wondering about her father and mother. He had never given her parentage a thought before. He knew that they were dead, and that Doctor Longstreet was certainly her grandfather. No elf-child, she. Yet there was a strain of wild, untamed blood in her that he could scarcely account for in the staid, conventional[Pg 127] family of which she was a member. For, notwithstanding his rebellion against Miss Barbara's sense of propriety, the old physician was distinctly the product of the civilization of the aristocratic South.
She is of herself complete, he thought, and no man's child. Then it suddenly occurred to him that she was just such a being to whom he would have loved to have been father. She was his child! The idea pleased him and he smiled. So far as concerned kith and kin he was alone in the world. Also had he not touched her sensitive mind and quickened it into a genuine understanding of the life of the highways, the woodland, and all of the birds therein, the river, the poetry of the starlight, the sunshine and the moonbeams? Had he not shown to her the ways of fairies and elf-kings?... In fact was she—the real, true, immortal she—not his creation? Did not the dominant spirit within her bear a close likeness to his own phantasmagoric soul? Indeed, in his own image he had fashioned her.... She was his child!... He would have her for his daughter. No[Pg 128] one could prevent.... He raised his head and called her.
She, who waited for him to catch up with her, saw a gentle, tender humor in his eyes, a sweet smile upon his lips, which bespoke confidence and trust. With childlike faith she put her hand in his and together they walked down the hill into the coming twilight.
In the dusk, near a little river which came tumbling down from the mountainside, they stopped and prepared their camp for the night. Rogue was unharnessed, led to water, and turned to roam where the grass seemed most toothsome. Jean François knew that she would be standing by the van at morning waiting with patience for her measure of oats. After building a crackling fire of sticks and limbs of dead trees, he went in search of a spring. Some minutes later a great black pot, taken from a hook beneath the cart, was swinging over the flames, the sparkling water beginning to bubble within it.
It was then the pedler climbed upon the wheel, removed the pair of steps from the top, adjusting them at the rear door so one might easily climb in and out of the cart. Next he proceeded to[Pg 130] remove many things from the mysterious depths of Columbine. Nance stood by receiving them. Among many things were these: a smoke-cured old ham, doubtless taken in trade from some lusty farmer; a basket of eggs and a bucket of milk bought at the last farmhouse on the road; a huge loaf of what the housewives term "salt-rising" bread; a flagon of Burgundy wine; a skillet, a coffee-pot, and a teakettle. Then came bundles, boxes, and drawers containing the knick-knacks of the pedler's pack. These he lifted to the earth himself, placing them softly beneath a near-by tree, covering them with a heavy canvas. Afterward, from the front end of the almost empty small room, he produced bedding which he spread down upon one side of the floor. Next, from the side near the open door, he let down a table hinged to the wall and supported by a prop. Above it he hung a mirror; upon it he laid a brush, comb, and a basin; before it he placed an open camp-stool. He had done his best.... Turning to Nance with a characteristically elaborate bow, he said:[Pg 131]
"Now, Titania, ascend the steps of your castle. To your right you will find your dressing-room; to the left, your bed-chamber. Your supper will be served al fresco.... Will you deign to share it with me?"
"With all of my heart, Robin Goodfellow," cried Nance as she walked airily into Columbine.
Jean François poked the mysterious pot, fried ham, scrambled eggs, made coffee, and toasted bread. This they ate by the light of the fire and the stars.
After the meal the pedler filled his pipe, lighted it with an ember, and stretched himself full length upon the earth with his ugly red head propped by his arm. Nance sat gazing into the fire, her knees hugged against her stooping figure, a dream upon her face. The darkness about was intense. The light flickered in ghostly shadows upon the yellow sides and spokes of the van. The steady munching of Rogue, the occasional popping of the fire, the murmuring of the river with the melancholy song of a thousand insects, now loud, now still, as[Pg 132] the breeze came and went, made the sleepy music of the night.
Thus they sat for two hours, neither of them speaking a word. Jean François was occupied with a choice entertainment in which he often indulged. To begin with, in imagination he went over the whole matter of Nance's escapade with Doctor Longstreet and Charles King. He explained her temperament, defending her nobly with a delicate suggestion of his own attitude toward her. Then, again in fancy, he talked of young Dr. King to the jade. All to himself he became quite an old match-maker. This was followed by witnessing them as the occupants of the old home of the many pillars. Here his dreams took unusual liberty; he peopled the house with other and tinier folk than the father and mother.... Here he smiled as he thought of Nance's chagrin could she but see his mind. He looked up and caught her gaze bent upon him.
"Did you ever hear the story of 'The King of Bohemia and the Beggar from Bagdad'?" he asked as he knocked his[Pg 133] pipe, to empty it, upon the heel of his boot, and dropped it into his pocket.
"Never," she said, looking at him interestingly. "If there isn't any moral to it, tell it."
"I'm afraid there is," said he. "It is about a sleepy monarch—"
"O," she exclaimed, light breaking on her face as she remembered an old trick of the childhood days which he had used a hundred times to send her and Charles to bed, "and you dream the tale?... I remember."
"That's right," said the pedler.
"But you say that I am now grown up.... The stars are very bright, the fire is in a friendly communicative mood, I think I shall go to my bed when it pleases me, Monsieur le debonair pedler!"
"Very well," said he, with his accustomed shrug of indifference. Then, after a moment's study of Nance, who had resumed her gazing into the fire:
"Of what has the fire been speaking to-night?... Yes?"
"I have been thinking all evening of babies," she replied with charming candor.[Pg 134]
"What ever made you think of babies?" he asked quickly.
"Did you notice that dear dimpled little red one at the house where we bought the milk?" was her reply.
"I must confess that I did not see the little Indian," he answered.
"Just like a man," said Nance, ignoring his levity, a trifle of scorn in her voice.
"Little babies in the utterly helpless stage," was Jean François' remark, "have always been just without the limit of my appreciation."
"That's because you are a man," she explained.
"Great heavens!" he exclaimed. "'Because you are a man.'... 'Just like a man.' Nance, your phrases show intelligence! I might reply, 'Just like a woman.'... Bah, it positively sounds bourgeois.... Now, honest, lady, don't you really suppose that there are men who actually like infants in their crinkly state?"
"I've always wanted a baby," said Nance irrelevantly, "and some day I mean to have one."[Pg 135]
"Thank God!" was Jean François' very serious ejaculation.
A moment later Nance was upon her feet ready to say good night and away to the pleasant land of sleep.
"Good night, dear Jean François," said she with gaiety. "May your dreams be of your beloved roads of Picardy."
She threw him an elfish kiss from her finger-tips and hastened into her airy improvised bedroom.
"And you, my daughter," murmured Jean François, as he turned upon his back and sought the stars between the interlacing boughs of the sheltering trees, "may you dream of Charles King, the old home of many pillars, of romping merry children, and a great love."
Thus it was the days flew by on romantic wings, each seemingly more filled with adventurous happiness than the last. Up with the promising rosy dawn, a mouthful of oats for the bonnie mare, a bit of bread and a draught of wine for the roadsters, the van packed, and heigh-ho for the alluring highway! It was a joyous, beautiful, glorious road with never a sigh nor a fret, for were they not homeward bound with hearts set to rights?
All day long they idled, never hurrying, stopping to gather flowers, fruit, or to admire a tree, a river, a valley, or a hill. Sometimes they fished for a dinner, or accepted the friendly invitation of a countryman to his table. Ever and anon they would sell a yard of lace, a ribbon, a trinket, a pack of thread. Often they sang, or chattered about kings and cabbages[Pg 137] and things. Nance walked the greater way, but occasionally, tiring, she climbed into the cradling arms of Columbine and from the apron-like seat drove Rogue. In the early afternoon they would rest for an hour or two, sometimes more, if they were tired and the shade enticing. An early nightfall always found them securely camped waiting only for the darkness in which to go to sleep, Nance to dream on her couch in the cart; the pedler to lie upon the soft sweet-scented earth beneath a sheltering tree.
Aye, but they were wonderful, never-to-be-forgotten days! Glad halcyon days! Happy days in Arcady. Days of strange and gentle adventures.... Upon long-sought, rare days life gives us a dream come true, whose realization is even more wonderful than was the fancy. Such days were these.
It was the third or fourth day of such a vagabondish journey that found them at nightfall approaching a beech wood. Here, hidden from the road, beside a clear cool branch, in a charming little dingle about a hundred yards from an[Pg 138] old country meeting-house, they pitched their camp. After things were made snug, Jean François left for a house which could be seen a quarter of a mile away, proposing to buy eggs, cheese, and bread.
Left to herself, Nance discovered a quiet, limpid pool, not far from the van, which appeared to be some two or three feet deep. Testing its temperature with her hand and finding it pleasurable, she dropped her petticoats and stepped gracefully into the water. Her fair body against the dusky twilight seemed that of a naiad. As she stooped, from time to time, and sported in the kissing ripples of her own creation, the loveliness of her was such as to have held captive every faun the greenwood knew. Then she climbed upon the grassy bank and stood for the warm winds of summer to dry her. O, how wonderful it was to be free!
Was she not a part of the great life? Then she thought of the old days, and smiled as she covered her breasts with her hands and sought her clothing.
Upon dressing she stretched herself at[Pg 139] full length beneath a tree and, following her thoughts of the bygone times, began thinking of home folk, Oldmeadow, and Dr. Charles Reubelt King. In the light of the simple, primitive life she now led, coupled with many days of absence, his conduct did not appear quite as disagreeable as at first. Her grandfather was already forgiven. Of course dear conventional Aunt Barbara did not count. She laughed aloud when she thought of how shocked Oldmeadow would be when she came walking along the river road with Jean François. Then, for the first time, it occurred to her to wonder what her reception would be. She dwelt secure in the knowledge that she had been born and reared in the village. To have been an actual son or daughter of Oldmeadow was a virtue which would cover unnumbered sins. The world was judged harshly, but special privileges belonged to natives. Last of all she wondered if Dr. King would ever again dare to kiss her as he had the day before she ran away.
Suddenly she sat up, listening intently. She could hear Jean François talking to[Pg 140] someone as he approached through the trees. She sprang to her feet, alarmed. No one had ever before intruded upon their seclusion, and she resented it now. She was in no very gracious mood for visitors as she stepped into the open that she might see at some distance the companion of the pedler.
There was with Jean François a tall, angular dusky-hued man who walked very erect and with a certain air of command. His forehead was noticeably high and broad; his thin hair as black as a gipsy's; his beard, of the same color, was neatly trimmed, soft, and fell to his waist; his brown eyes sparkled with humor and kindness.
"This gentleman," said Jean François, presenting him to Nance, "is the parson of the little church yonder. He lives in the cottage down the road and gave me this," indicating by a motion of his hand the provisions he was now spreading upon the grass.
Nance bowed and with some distrust inspected the visitor. He bowed graciously, smiling the while.[Pg 141]
"I know your grandfather," he ventured in a pleasant voice, "and I have seen you in Oldmeadow."
"O, yes, I remember you," said Nance quickly, yet without thawing. "Grandfather likes you," she added. Then, frowning and with a touch of sarcasm:
"I suppose you will disapprove of me?"
"Why should I?" he inquired with surprise.
"You are a parson," she said.
"O, I'd forgotten," he laughed, showing a mouthful of splendid teeth. "I suppose I'd better lecture you?" he queried.
Nance laughed, too. His merriment was catching. Then suddenly, with a questioning glance of reproach at Jean François:
"You did not know I was here?"
"Certainly not," he replied. "I love the road."
He seemed to think this sufficient explanation. But Nance was a trifle puzzled.
"A preacher who loves the road," and she shook her head doubtfully. "If you[Pg 142] love it, why don't you follow it then?" She seemed to think that this was sufficient proof that at least he loved but little.
"Why don't you follow it?" she repeated with a touch of conclusiveness, as if no more could be said upon the subject. "St. Francis did.... I love it and I have chosen it. The road is my religion," here she looked up with a suggestion of defiance in her eyes as if anticipating his disapproval, but, upon seeing nothing save interest upon his face, she continued, "My camp-fires at night are a flaming offering upon his altar, the earth, to Pan.... Why don't you take the road?"
Nance was unconsciously posing a trifle.
"It calls me strongly sometimes," he replied, and his eyes became tender and sought the soft shadowy highway through the growing night. The wander-longing was in his face.... Then, quickly recalling himself, he exclaimed:
"Besides I have my work to do! It could not be done on the road.... At least," he hastily corrected, "I could not[Pg 143] do the task I have planned for myself." There was a simple, unconscious note of courage in his voice.
"Why?" asked Nance in wonder.
"There are many and profound reasons. It would not prove pleasant to speak of them. But for one of the least: Do you think," said he, "that vagabondia would mix with the average conventional church community?"
"Become the pastor of vagabondia," she suggested, smiling.
"It would be a hopeless task," he returned.
"How do you stand it?" she inquired, somewhat irrelevantly.
"Why, I've my home and my work," said he, now on the defensive. "It's only occasionally that I hunger for the traffic lands. Then, like to-night, I take my gipsying vicariously."
Jean François straightened up from his work over the fire.
"Jesus, the good Master," said he, "loved the roads, the Judean hills, the laughing Jordan, and to sleep out under the stars at night, did he not?"[Pg 144]
"True," replied the parson.
"He possessed the genuine poetic spirit of vagabondia, my son," continued the pedler, who was older than the visitor. "He followed the roads and sought the hillsides for his couch. It's many a joyous, irresponsible, nomadic journey he made over the countryside. He loved the poor, the common people, the oppressed, the struggler—all save the struggler at the needle's eye—and the happy sunny hills of Arcady."
"I know, my friend," was the reply.
"I also know your point of view, comrade," said Jean François, suddenly melting into sympathy. "You are right. It could not be done. At least in America. You would have to either give up your walk or your talk. The people'd make you.... Let's see—they would call it a sort of highway heresy.... Now, things are vastly different in my sunny France."
"And in Paradise, too, I hope," smiled the parson, with good humor.
The supper had been removed from the fire, and awaited them spread temptingly[Pg 145] upon the grass. The three of them sat facing the flames so they might get the full light upon what the pedler termed Pan's table. They dropped their more serious subject, chattering playfully like a group of care-free children at play.... An hour later this new-found friend arose to go. He extended his hands to them, saying,
"Here's luck, love, and a prayer.... Good night."
They watched him walk leisurely down the road until he was lost from sight in the night. In the distance they could see the twinkling friendly light which called him to his home, and to his task. And they knew that he went gladly.
The next morning at half an hour after sunrise they passed the country church where the gentle parson preached and prayed, and took the rough and picturesque road down the hill for the village which lay beside the river a mile or more below. In those days it was known as the "Old Road," and was as rocky and impassable as it was interesting and adventurous. One never quite knew, as one rounded its many sharp turns, drove close to hazardous declivities and beneath great over-hanging boulders, whether one was to be wrecked by an approaching team, to fall to painful yawning depths, or crushed to an unrecognizable pulp. That no one was hurt was largely due to the fact that the danger was so apparent. At the bottom of the highway, dug and blasted from the hill side, there abided a small[Pg 147] village with the erudite and classical name of Milton.
Jean François was charmed with the old hill road. He lingered at each bend seeking glimpses of the valley away below—almost beneath. Upon every side grew great oaks, spreading beech, and tall, strong hickory. These trees appeared to have forced themselves from the very boulders which surrounded them, partaking of their solidity and massiveness. At intervals were patches of shrubby, ill-smelling "heavenly bushes." At one place, by peering through a ravine, he discovered a large old-fashioned farmhouse perched on the highest point above, guarding, like a sentinel, the small domain of the dead, the near-by community cemetery.
A final turn in the road brought them once more into sight of their beloved river, the magnificent Ohio, which they were to leave no more even to the journey's end. A few moments later they were passing through Milton. Once out on the smooth level turnpike which took them through Hunter's bottom on the[Pg 148] Carrolton way, Jean François turned to Nance, who rode upon the seat, and began talking of their unusual visitor of the night before.
"Nance," said he, "I've been thinking very much about this parson. I have been wondering if he is right. That he does love the road, the dingle, and the gipsy's camp is easy to see. He loves them deeply. Yet he has deliberately foregone any opportunity to go over the hills with his pack. Think of it, my dear-a, he's preaching! He is a seeming paradox.... It is true his home keeps him. He has a four-gabled cottage set in a group of firs with a garden to the right, as you enter, and an orchard to the left. He has a wife who is comely and smiling, and three or four daughters about.... Now, lady, let me ask you a question?"
"Go on."
Jean François deftly filled and lighted his pipe before continuing.
"Nance," he said earnestly as he flicked the burning match into the dust, "I do not think I would make much of a preacher, do you?"[Pg 149]
At first she was inclined to laugh. In one sense the question seemed absurdly ridiculous. Her devil-may-care, whimsical, light-o'-road, brother-o'-Pan, green-woodsy pedler of songs a parson!... But he was serious, so, repressing a smile, she answered him as gravely as she might.
"It is owing to what you call preaching, my dear-a," she replied. "If it is firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, fifthly, sixthly—"
"Please to be serious," he interrupted.
"—Seventhly, ad finem and conclusion," she continued, "with the moral highly evident, like Dr. Thistlewood, Aunt Barbara's pastor, why I should say not."
She accompanied her remarks with a highly significant shrug of the shoulders which she had early learned from the pedler.
"What would you have?" he asked.
"But if it is fighting the battles of the poor, demanding justice for the hungry, being very gentle with folks,—and being natural—"
"Ah, that will do," he interrupted.[Pg 150] "Now, Nance, fancy, if you can, my being a priest, say, like Monsieur l'Abbé Picot."
Her eyes lighted with dancing mischief.
"That is very easy," she exclaimed. "You are now Monsieur Picot."
"Just fancy," he ejaculated, looking up quickly to catch her eye.
"O, certainly. Just imagine, you mean?"
"Yes, Nance, 'just imagine.'"
"Go on, Father," she said, with slight mockery.
"Now," said he, too serious himself to pay attention to her levity, "if I were the Abbé in the old house with my duty staring me in the face like an injured child, and a veritable hell of a conscience hacking at you continually for having left where you were doing something for somebody, and coming where you were helpless, your longing for just every-day human companionship, the road, and all, and all—what would you do?... What would you do, I ask?... What would a man do?"[Pg 151]
For a space she walked in silence. Now she fully realized that he was evidently very sincere in his questionings. The seriousness of the whole thing to him was impressively apparent. Also her answer meant a great deal to him. She must have time. There must be no levity, no mockery, no play in her reply. It must come from her heart to his soul.... She turned to him:
"Dear old friend, you'll give me a little time?... Until to-night?"
"Until to-night," he repeated.
At nightfall they made a camp down on the gravel of the river bank just a short distance below the mouth of the Kentucky river. It was the last night, and each of them was thinking of it. There was a feeling of great sadness in the heart of Jean François, for he realized very surely that he must now renounce the chiefest joy of his life for the sake of the love he bore his friends. He reflected that such things had been done before by better men than he, and he dismissed the self-pity as beneath him.[Pg 152]
Nance sat and watched the old Ohio. There is an extraordinary beauty about the river with the coming of the night. The sun goes down behind the hills slowly, as if sorrowful at leaving the silent waters. The great river glistens in a thousand peaceful shades that play at hide-and-seek among the ripples. When the west had ceased to wear the crimson mantle of her lord the water becomes a lucid green. Then, as twilight comes, the stream grows a somber gray, and more silent still, as the stars climb into the sky. The lights begin to appear in the windows of the homes among the trees and wink, solemn beacons by friendly hearths. The rumble of the paddle of a distant steamboat may be heard in melancholy cadence on the summer breezes. Finally the moon, as if uncertain of the way, comes peeping through the willows and casts her wake across the water.
The night had come.
Jean François came and sat beside her.
"Well, Nance?" said he.
"You asked me, my dear Jean François, what I would do were I Monsieur[Pg 153] l'Abbé Picot and heard the call of Pan?"
"Yes."
"A call to the beautiful, the wholesome, the healthful for body and mind and soul, where I might meet my fellows and become their friend? Where I could and would at times bring gentleness and love into their lives? Where I should meet children and make them see? Women and teach them the value of life?... A road like that, my friend?"
"Yes, I think it is that kind of a road."
"Are you sure of it?"
"Yes, I am sure of it!"
"Well, Jean François," she said as she arose and gave him her hand for good night, "I would listen to Pan. I would take my pack and the long, splendid open road. I'd become the happy pedler. A pedler, I should say, if I were Monsieur l'Abbé Jacques Picot, of little joys for troubled hearts, heartsease for the sad, elfish tales for romping children, merry songs for lovers, and an exceeding great love for all of them.... That is as I[Pg 154] should do, my friend.... Good night," and she was gone.
Jean François sat with his face hidden in his hands. He prayed a little, wept a little, and laughed between his praying and his weeping.
It was the last night.
For once the morning road was disturbed. Its happiness was feigned. The sun lay just as warm upon the field as the week before. The air was quite as soft, as scented, as full of the freshness of spring. The river was fully as beautiful as of old as it flowed lazily by with glorious sunlit waters. Yet, withal, happiness seemed to have fled.
If you had been upon a journey at this time on the way west from Oldmeadow, known as the river road, you would have met two travelers afoot following a horse and van. As you approached them it would easily be noticed that they were playfully chattering in an apparent abundance of spirits. Their greeting would have been one of marked good cheer. You would have felt singled out for their especial attention. Then, after passing, should you have turned to look at the[Pg 156] strange, grotesque figure of the man whom you had already marked as an extraordinary person, and at the genuine easy grace and beauty of the girl, whose startled, wistful face you had seen a moment before, there would have been awakened within you a sense of pity. A picturesque group you would have said, whose air of frivolity seemed but a masque beneath the veneer of which lay sorrow. You would have been right.... The road which one stumbles and falters along in the heart is not always so smooth and alluring as the road at one's feet. For once the great highway had lost its charm.... So, as you passed from hearing, there was a distinct note of sadness in the merry-tuned song which they joined their voices in singing.
ran the song with the plaintive strain which seemed out of place in so jocund an air:
As their voices dwelt upon the words, it appeared to be a bidding good-by to an old, familiar theme, well loved.
As you rode that day, my friend, had you indeed been passing upon the highway, you, too, would have felt the spirit of grief. It would have seemed as if a cloud had for the moment obscured the sun.
They were within a half of a mile of Oldmeadow when Jean François called a halt to his happy caravan. They drew up beneath a tree by the roadside. Whether Nance realized it or not, the pedler knew it to be the end. A week ago he would have laughed in derision had he been told that he would have taken anything so seriously, so painfully, as he now was, after this joyous lark, at the parting of the ways.
"Sit down, Nance."
She obeyed, without protest or interest, as an indifferent child.[Pg 158]
"Nance, my little sister," said he, "we'll soon be home."
"Will we?" She could not see any use in lingering, now that the joy was all gone. She wished to hurry through the agony of the end and the sooner reach the adjustment which she thought would restore the old-time happiness. Why should he care to stop and tell her such painfully self-evident facts.... The sympathy which Jean François expected was not forthcoming.
"I've been thinking a great deal to-day," said he, "about the parson we had at camp the other evening."
"I thought that was all settled last night," she exclaimed in surprise.
"No, it is not, Nance. At least not yet.... He was right, I tell you. For him, in his work and his home lay his task and his happiness. There was the better part. He understood the road. His love of it made you his sister, me his brother. He will always be kinder, gentler, and purer of soul, Nance, because he knows the wander-longing. Yet it would be wrong for him to follow the patter an....[Pg 159] I see it all. He is right. And O, the tenderness in his eyes."
"Yes," came disinterestedly from Nance, "he's right."
"It's best!" exclaimed Jean François, a trifle hurt at no more evidence of understanding.
"For him," she repeated firmly.
"For anybody," insisted the pedler.
"For who?" she asked in scorn.
"For me!" cried Jean François. "For me."
She looked at him for fully a minute with surprise upon her face. Then, with a curl upon her lips, yet a kinder note in her voice to soften the harshness of her words, she slowly, deliberately, replied:
"My good, good friend, Jean François, you lie!"
"Nance!"
"Jean François!"
"Very well, then," said he, with a shrug, "have your way.... As for you, however, my dear, the road can be no more for you."
He had been dreading saying this to[Pg 160] her. It had been upon his lips a dozen times in the last few days, yet his uncertainty as to the wiseness of talking to her at all upon such a subject had kept his mouth closed.... He now continued:
"Like your tall, dark brother of the gentle eyes, your task lies in the better way."
"Dear old Jean François," came the reply, without resentment and with perfect understanding, "there you go preaching already! What do you know about my task? After all, dear-a, it is where my heart leads. If I should choose the merry pack, what of it? I think I should not mind turning back right now, would you? Nobody's seen us! No one knows! Come, my comrade, and away while the call is loud! What do you say? I am ready!"
"You impulsive jade," said he, evidently pleased, "would you banish me from Oldmeadow?"
"Not in a thousand years, you old goose," she replied with tenderness.
"But you will—you surely will, if[Pg 161] you insist on sharing Columbine and Rogue with me. I'll have to discover another green field, another pair of children—"
"And I, Monsieur," she said with gaiety, "I shall again drop from the heavens into your top-o'-the-morning."
"Then I shall go back to my France and the sunny fields of Picardy."
"I love France," was her reply.
"Look!" exclaimed Jean François, pointing up the road.
A doctor's gig was approaching, driven at a rapid gait. Nance's heart almost stopped beating. There could be no doubt as to whom the vehicle belonged. It came nearer and the portly figure of old Doctor Felix Longstreet became evident, and, by his side, young Dr. Charles Reubelt King. Both were vainly trying to appear dignified and severe. Jean François was in the mood that could, with equal ease, pray, cry, or fight.
"With the help of the bon Dieu to fight like hell," he murmured gleefully, as he realized his pugnacious tendencies.
"Good-by for now, dear Jean François,"[Pg 162] whispered Nance; "but another day ... another day.... O, God!"
The gig drew up and stopped with a jerk. Dr. King climbed out; the old doctor shouted in a voice which tried to be severe, yet was tempered with gladness, and trembled with relieved anxiety:
"Get right in here this minute, Nance Gwyn! Your Aunt Barbara has been intensely worried about you. As for me, you know I didn't care a tinker's damn. Charles, there, is a fool!"
Nance was driven rapidly into Oldmeadow, leaving Charles and Jean François to come leisurely with the caravan.
None of the folk of Oldmeadow saw much of me during the years I spent preparing myself to take care of their colics, rheumatism, and occasionally, I assure you, only when it was necessary, to cut off their legs. I also have taken as goodly care of their hearts, their gentle souls, and the love which they have bestowed upon me. You doubtless remember the years at Virginia in which I returned for a few short months each summer and exploited my erudition on the boys who remained at home. Also I strutted in conspicuous glory beside Nance, whom I duly treated with becoming condescension upon the part of one so wholly promising of greatness. Then they almost forgot me, though I felt I was needed betimes to tie tick-tacks upon tempting front doors, during my four[Pg 164] years in the medical college. This was the period during which Nance was learning French and violin at some college in Boston.
Perhaps it was never before made known, but when I graduated I received a very delightful letter from Doctor Longstreet inviting me to come to Oldmeadow and really learn something about medicine! Meanwhile I was to gradually assume his practise so he might have the more time for his river.
"Then," he concluded, "when I shall have taken my immortal rod and crossed the river—praise God not into Indiana, but to some Virginia-like country, where pills are out of fashion and the only restriction worthy of mention is that the truth must needs be told about the fish you catch—you will have everything your own way here."
I might here mention that the only thing the old gentleman had against the river was that it did not flow between Virginia and Kentucky.
"Think of it," he would ejaculate; "so beautiful a river as ours and the[Pg 165] Yankees north of it! It will be different in the next world. Then Virginia shall be on one bank and Kentucky on the other. And Yankee Indiana—" But why speak here of the place to which Indiana is duly consigned for eternity.
At any rate, with a grateful and happy heart I accepted the invitation so generously given me by Doctor Longstreet and, in due time, promptly arrived ready for business.
I had been home less than two weeks. A great deal of this time, it is true, I had given to getting settled in the office of Doctor Longstreet. I had dined once with Nance, however, and had taken part in a few scrappy conversations. There was a slight reservedness upon her part toward me which seemed to be largely because of the almost continuous absence of several years. This I believed would shortly wear off.
One late afternoon we were strolling about her yard and talking of many things: of herself when she would permit it, of Jean François, of Monsieur l'Abbé[Pg 166] Picot, and the happenings of Oldmeadow. Finally we leaned against the fence and gazed across the street at the silent old house of the pillars. Its owner was away and the place looked lonely.
"Well, I'm quite grown up now," smiled Nance jestingly, "and still I have not come into my possessions.... I wonder when, Charles?" she asked, much in her old-time manner.
"When this blessed old village that we have owned for so very long," I replied, with a meaning glance toward my shining new instrument case and pill-bag, which I always carried with me, "increases my collection of patients."
Like untried youth I was unconscious of limitations. That, if Nance wanted it, I could not make money enough to buy the place, never occurred to my dreaming brain.
"It would be really wicked, I suppose, to wish they would go on and get sick," she said, "but I do think they might have you in now and then for a little friendly, advisory chat about their rheumatism, rose-bushes, and the like, that[Pg 167] they might learn how interesting you are."
Since I have had some years in which to think of this episode, I feel that there must have been a trifle of irony in her remark. At the time it appeared serious enough.
"Never mind, Nance," I replied, "my collection of friendships is sufficiently large at present. Anyhow, just think of a statement of account like this:
"To Dr. Charles Reubelt King Dr.
Miss Jemimiah Appleblossom, Cr.
| April 27, to one half-hour's chat on rose-bushes | $10.00 |
| December 2, to fifteen minutes' conversation upon weather | 5.00 |
| Same date, one hour's rheumatism talk | 15.00 |
| Total | $30.00 |
| Please remit." |
"Well, it is all right, Charles, my friend. It will come, and meanwhile we can wait for the time.... Monsieur l'Abbé once said to me, 'Blessed are the makers of dreams, for theirs is to own a river, divers trees, many hills, even a village, and their abode shall be a house in the heart.'"
In my memory I call that the day of faith.[Pg 168]
"Let's go over and sit upon the portico," I suggested. It met with her approval, and a few moments later we were beneath our beloved old pillars.
"I wonder where he is?" she asked.
"Who is?" I said, for I was not interested in any third parties.
"Monsieur l'Abbé," she replied.
"Doubtless in New Orleans," I answered. I might just as well have said New Guinea, for I had mentioned the first place which occurred to me.
Suddenly, from far above in the sunset sky, we heard the faint, plaintive cry of wild geese.
"O, it is the sign of the coming of Jean François," she cried. "He'll be here in less than a fortnight.... Have any of you heard from him?" she asked.
"Your grandfather," I replied, still not interested.
For fully half an hour we sat and looked upon the river, watching the nightfall. It is difficult to talk at such an hour. It brings out all of your sentiments. Old memories crowd your mind and the whole is made sweet by a note of[Pg 169] sadness.... Then Nance turned to me:
"You must tell me all about yourself, Charles, and your plans," she said, with a suddenly deepening interest.
Now what better could a man want? Here I was just out of college, young, untried, and bursting with hope. Was there anything of greater interest, I ask you, than my possibilities, my plans, my expectations? Nance was exceedingly wise. Immediately, and with enthusiasm, I launched into my attainments, and my dreams. With a sweet patience she sat and listened. (I am now inclined to think, Jean François, that, in imagination, she was with you and Rogue and Columbine somewhere upon the road.) Now I feel sure that I must have made a slight mistake in not at least hinting that if I hoped to make any money it was that I might use it to obtain the home of her heart's desire; that if I sought for honors, it was that I might take them to her, placing my triumphs at her feet as her due; and that, perhaps though illy defined in my own mind, all that I was—and[Pg 170] it looked big to me, for had I not toiled for it?—and all that I hoped to be was because, from the old remembered days of childhood I had loved her with all of my life.... I did not hint this. Perhaps I was taking it for granted that she knew. Then you know how ambitious youth can become wrapped utterly in its expectations?... All of this I have since had ample time to see.
"It is time we returned, Charles," she at last broke in, arising from her seat.
We walked through the yard and across the street arm in arm. At the door I bade her good-night, as I had a hundred times before, by raising her flower-scented hand to my lips and kissing it while pressing her fingers ever so tenderly.
It all seemed quite the usual way, Jean François. Now wouldn't that pretty well indicate that a man had some privileges? Eh?
As for the trouble, I'll tell you how it began.
For a very long time I was quite at a loss to determine whether it was the red of her hair or the lips of her large and interesting mouth which caused me to love Nance Gwyn. Even to this day, as a lover of long standing, I am not always certain that I know the whys and wherefores of such an inconsistent mixture of passion and tenderness. There have been moments, such as when a wild whisp of it would come taunting my face with its soft caresses, or when my hands inadvertently must need touch it for a seemingly timeless instant, that I was very sure, as sure as I knew for some reason I loved her with all of my life, that it was her hair. Of one thing I have always been confident: I could never have loved a woman whose hair was other than the color of Nance's.
Of course there were times when I[Pg 172] thought it was for other things than the hair and the lips. Her feet, for example, when I came upon her wading in the Middleton's brook. This hurrying little stream ran through the heart of a small woodland pasture near town. It was in a leafy hollow and its course was over great flat rocks with occasionally sandy-bottomed pools worn by the fall of water. The place was a favorite summer-time haunt of the old days. It was cool, inviting, and dim with an abundance of fern, green moss, and tiny wild violets.
Now, in the first place, how was I to know Miss Nance Gwyn had sauntered down there in the middle of the afternoon? About five o'clock I came in, tired and hot, from a long drive to the country. So soon as I found no calls waiting for me, I thought of the pool in the Middleton's woods. Just before climbing the fence which would bring my destination into view, I heard one of Jean François' songs, but coming from the throat of the adorable Nance:[Pg 173]
I shall steal upon her and surprise her, I thought. So I crept silently over the fence, stepped around a tree, and how should I know with what my eyes were to be greeted?
There she sat like a nymph upon a ledge of projecting rock, idly dabbling[Pg 174] her feet in the shallow water of the pool. But that was not all. Her dress was gathered from beneath her and slightly raised above her knees, disclosing some very frilly, lacy lingerie. I stood as one dumbfounded. I did not know whether to run and doubtless get caught in my hurrying away, or to take it as a matter of course, boldly facing it out. While I was arriving at a decision she raised the slenderest, whitest, most adorable pink-soled foot it would be possible for any woman to possess, with dainty air from the water, bringing her knee beneath her chin, and placed her heel upon the rock upon which she sat. Then she reached behind her for a pair of flimsy silk stockings and some slippers. Never before or since have I seen a picture at once so innocent and yet so seductively beautiful.
All of this took place, you must understand, in a very few seconds. Just here, however, when I was preparing for as hasty and as silent a retreat as possible, she involuntarily raised her face and caught me full in the eyes.[Pg 175]
"Hello, Nance," said I, careless like, as I came forward, "been wading?"
"Wading," she replied, hastily standing, with a look of mingled dismay and anger upon her face. "As for you, Mr. King, I think you had better go!"
"Nance," I began.
"Go!... Did you hear me? I say, go!" she exclaimed, trembling, her cheeks becoming sickly white.
I went precipitately and as I hurried to town I gave myself such a lecture as a man ever got. Yet, in spite of my reproach for an unfortunate incident which happened very innocently, I could not keep from my mind that I was now very sure of another reason why I loved her.
I shall not bore you with the details of my work in once more establishing confidence. And, at that, it was a sort of shaky, at-arms-length confidence. One morning, a few days after the episode of Middleton's brook, Nance came into my office, very properly and charmingly clad, and perched herself upon the top of her grandfather's writing-table. She was extremely saucy-looking, and inclined to be impudent. I came and stood by, looking down upon her. She was unusually pretty and tempting with an air of old-time daring in the tilt of her face.
At that moment I was sure I loved her for the three or four adorable little freckles upon her nose. The sight of these same scarcely perceptible beauty spots, which appeared regularly with the summer, carried me back to a day when[Pg 177] I had made fun of the sun's tampering with her complexion. In those days she chose to sniffle very pityingly, yet becomingly, in the vain attempt to make me repentant. As she sat before me, instead of the handsome young woman she was, I saw an awkward girl of eleven or twelve with spindling legs that were rather uncertain in their movements; long thin arms with small bony hands, all attached to a shapeless little body, the only redeeming feature of which was a truly promising face and wonderfully beautiful hair as red as burnished brass. I remembered that, on many occasions, there was mud between the toes of her bare feet, for she always had possessed a boy's propensity for puddling. This brought to mind the wading I had seen earlier in the week, and I admit I blushed at the contrast presented to my mind.
"Are you still web-footed?" I asked, with a reminiscent smile.
"When I grow to be a very old woman," she replied impudently, "I shall dabble in the puddles in my back yard; climb apple-trees in the spring; and[Pg 178] help my boys make snow men at Christmas time."
Then I had but to see her merry, mischievous face to discover the Nance of my friend, the happy pedler. "Is it her feet or her hair," was rattling through my brain, "or is it the old-day Nance, or the beautiful, splendid young woman now sitting on her grandfather's desk?"
Here she picked up an open knife, a piece of pine from the window sill, drew her lips into a distractingly tempting pucker and began to whistle and whittle in imitation of one of the village's wise-acres at the store. I watched her for a moment with a heart which I was almost sure she could hear thumping away like a trip hammer. Hadn't I seen her whistle a thousand times, it seemed a thousand years ago, and gravely imitate every rheumatic old gentleman who occupied a chair in summer under the awning, or a box in winter behind the stove at Mr. Appleblossom's? Then all of a sudden I knew it was for her thumb. The big barlow had unceremoniously taken a whack at this adorable part of[Pg 179] her hand and, as she smilingly held it aloft, a tiny stream of blood oozed forth and fell on the handkerchief she held beneath it. It was really a mere trifle, but immediately I looked deeply concerned, hauled out my instrument case, and removed what I needed therefrom with much seriousness and dignity. Meantime as I bathed the injured member she looked on, though two tears stood in her eyes, with an impish grin which left no doubt but that she readily saw through my hypocrisy. Anyhow she let me use absorbent cotton, much adhesive plaster, and great yards of bandage with which to bind it. I was a very long time doing the work, and when I had it completed, as I have said before, I was sure it was for her thumb.
Now you know—at least if you are a woman and young and pretty—that a doctor, even if he is doing nothing more than dressing a thumb, may get unusually close to his patient without the least mischievous intentions. Therefore I am sure you will not blame me when I tell you that I was led to it by the soft[Pg 180] caress of her perfumed hair as it now and then brushed dangerously against my cheek; the occasional touch of her knees bringing vividly annoying memories of a few days past, as I busied myself about her; and, as I bent above her, the healthful, sweet odor of her breath in my nostrils; these things, I say, with the alluring mystery of all of her, breathing, pulsating, hot, close beside me, overpowered me and I was trembling when she looked up to thank me. Then, before I knew it or had time to think, I had my arms about her, crushing her to me, and passionately kissing her lips.
It might not be telling things too much just to mention that she fought a brief little battle quite consistent with the temperament of her hair. Then, when she learned how strong and determined were my arms, suddenly she ceased to struggle, her eyes becoming friendly and timid. Ah, surely this was the moment that, while the glorious hair, the feet, the freckles, and the thumb did not lose caste, the heart within me crowned her lips![Pg 181]
"Now, strange to say," commented Dr. King to Jean François, "it was the next day she ran away.... You may understand why, but I do not."
"I do," was the laconic reply of the happy pedler.
The snow had fallen all day in great, heavy, wet flakes until the trees, as if by the magic of Aladdin's lamp, were opulent crystal palaces, while the fence posts were white-cowled mendicants with bowed heads, begging without the gates. As night drew near the cold came with it, bitter and penetrating. A cutting north wind cleared the sky; the stars appeared, shimmering in distant glory, but barren of sympathy; the moon came climbing over the frozen hills, casting her wake upon the uninviting gray waters of the river; the leaping flames from ample cozy hearths flashed hospitable beacons far into the streets; while the crunching snow beneath hurried feet, or the rattle of the wagon of a belated traveler, caused the fireside dreamer to snuggle in his warm corner, thanking life for shelter and for food.[Pg 186]
It was early evening. I sat alone by the glowing backlogs in the great fireplace of my office enjoying that delicious animal sensation which comes to one who, after having been all day in the cold, is now thoroughly warm, drowsy, and reasonably secure in the thought that one will not have to venture forth. As I sat and stared into the embers beneath the andirons my mind, released from the task of the day, naturally sought the channel of its dream-things.
Nance! was she not always in my mind, my heart? Was there ever a time, which the business of the moment did not demand, that I was not building a thousand fancies of her? I was yet childlike enough to imagine myself saving her life from some dangerous disease, telling her dramatically of my passion, and, in the end, receiving the reward of her hand. Aye, what dreams men dare to build!
My practise had so grown with the coming of winter that I did not get to see as much of her as I should have liked, but when I could I sought her and always[Pg 187] found her my splendid, true friend. Yet some mysterious and inexpressible something in her personality and bearing withheld me, so, while she was all that was friendly, there was still a more sacred portal closed to me. What her inclinations and ambitions were I could not discover, save that she was diligently pursuing the study of folk-lore while showing a special interest in my patients. This was markedly so when any of them needed a womanly touch not to be found in their homes. Against my protest she nursed three severe cases entirely through to convalescence. The motherless child of Martin Farewil she brought through double pneumonia; old Sarah Boutwell, a widow, childless and seventy-six, after a lingering spell of fever, died in her arms; Elizabeth Book, a servant living alone on the outskirts of town, gave birth to a bastard, and would have suffered inhumanly from inattention had Nance, to the horror of Oldmeadow and the prostration of Aunt Barbara, not spent the greater part of a month with the woman.[Pg 188]
Notwithstanding this task she had chosen she was just as much alive and as merry as of old. With it all she was becoming more serious and considerate. In fact the care-free, hoydenish girl seemed to have ripened into a strong-hearted, wholesome, healthful woman. She showed an unusual grasp of things, her relation to them, and their value to life. Her humor saved her from taking this new attitude too seriously.
Old Doctor Felix Longstreet, her immortal grandfather, now retired from active practise, had joined the autocratic group of cracker-barrel philosophers. Daily he hobbled with rheumatic legs over the flagstones, bowing gallantly to the women whom he passed, to my office, where he still maintained a desk. There, upon the sidewalk beneath the shade of the honey-locust trees in summer, by the fireplace in winter, he gave many charming dissertations upon politics, fishing, religion, when-I-was-a-boy, and medicine. God bless him for one of the finest gentlemen I ever knew.
Strange to say, Monsieur l'Abbé[Pg 189] Jacques Picot had not returned with September to his house of many pillars. Ever since anybody could remember each Maytime found the good Abbé bound for some other lands; each September, just as regularly as the children were gathered to school, found him again at home. We could always tell of his presence, for once each day he might be seen making his way through Oldmeadow bowing to right and left with easy grace, as he sought the river road for the outing he never failed to take, no matter what might be the condition of the weather. As a consequence, in the late afternoons of fall and winter, his figure, dressed with scrupulous neatness in the garb of a priest, wearing a broad-brimmed soft hat, became quite familiar to the dwellers in Oldmeadow. And while the dates of his annual leave-taking and return were not fixed, it was unusual for him to remain away into the new year. We were ignorant of the cause of his absence, which served on more occasions than one as a topic for conversation.
As for Jean François, of course he never[Pg 190] came near us at all in winter. Some more gentle climate claimed his blessed presence with his happy caravan. Upon his return with Nance in June he had not remained in town more than a week. Just where he spent the remainder of the months he was accustomed to give to Oldmeadow common was another thing of which we were ignorant.
Thus while I sat dreaming of my heart's desire, there came a crunching of the snow, a hearty bursting open of the door, and Nance came stamping into the room followed by Doctor Longstreet puffing like a porpoise. I helped them off with their wraps, placed chairs at the coziest corners of the hearth, threw on a fresh backlog, gave the doctor a little nip of Bourbon, and sat down as close to Nance as the occasion would permit.
"The old house is lighted up," said the Doctor. "I suspect Monsieur l'Abbé has returned."
"Well, I'm glad," said I. "I wonder what has kept him so long?"
"That is what we came by to tell you about," was his answer. Here he cleared[Pg 191] his throat ostentatiously. I knew what was coming.
"My, my!" exclaimed he, "how this cold does get your rheumatism. Um, ah, and my throat is a trifle choked up, too, Charles. I am afraid I shall have to have—"
I passed the demijohn without comment.
"Um, ah Nance!" said he, quizzically, holding aloft a tiny glass filled to the brim, "that's the color of your hair, my dear! Prettiest color on earth? Eh, Charles?"
I gave hearty assent so far as concerned the hair.
"But one thing sweeter, Nance!" he continued, bowing as gallantly as his age would permit; "just one thing sweeter, more inspiring, more retiring, more hell-firing! Ah—ah—you know who she is, Charles?"
Again I bowed my assent, and Nance blushed confusedly.
"You had better tell your tale, Granddad," she admonished, "before it becomes retiring.... No telling, you'll be off on a[Pg 192] fish story in a moment. There is nothing which seems to make the fish you catch weigh more than a little nip of the inspiring—"
"Tut, tut, girl," said he, gathering himself together with amusing mock dignity, "I shall prove that you slander your old grandfather."
"The girl," he began, indicating Nance with a nod of the head, "went to Louisville Tuesday. She came back to-night on the Spreading Eagle. Old Captain Mead was in command. It was his first trip after several months spent south looking after the steamboat company's business during the recent yellow fever epidemic in Mississippi. He had been in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and other places along the route attending to the paralyzed shipping interests and quarantined steamboats. It was in New Orleans that he heard of Monsieur l'Abbé. The priest was not working under the organized relief committee itself, but went here and there with undisciplined yet effective zeal. It seems, so the Captain was told, that this Monsieur[Pg 193] Picot came driving into the city in a cart one day, made his way to the quarters occupied by those of his own nationality, sought information concerning where he might be of use, and set off again."
Nance, who had made several attempts to interrupt Doctor Longstreet, now succeeded.
"Charles, he practically laid down his life for the people. The constant work in all kinds of weather, mud and filth, living on insufficient food, has left him broken and with a miserable cough. Yet as much in need as he was, he worked heroically on, scarcely giving thought to himself. He was not attacked by the fever, but ruined his constitution by nursing those who did have it."
Then the doctor launched more specifically into the affair as related to Nance by the steamboat captain. When he had completed the story and they were leaving, Nance looked up at me with glistening, tearful, yet happy eyes, adding:
"They gave Monsieur Picot the sobriquet of 'the Little Abbé of the Church of the Street.'"
In the old days, you will remember, the Beau Brummel of a Southern steamboat was the captain. He was the pink of courtesy and gallantry, with all the pride of the gentleman of his day. The passengers were received into his cabin with the same hospitality he would have welcomed them ashore in his home. It was a distinction sought after, to eat at the table over which he presided. The lady to whom he offered his arm when dinner was announced was envied by the less fortunate, who must of necessity be content with the company of a less attractive escort.
Thus this master of the Ohio and Mississippi sidewheelers of forty or fifty years ago was to men, either at poker or in business, the soul of honor; to the young bucks the good fellow and manly; and, with apologies to St. Paul, all things to[Pg 195] all women.... Such an officer of the old school was Sam L. Mead of the Spreading Eagle, who, while showing Nance first honors when upon her trip on his boat, told her of his experiences when quarantined by yellow fever.
"Who is that little priest with his robes tucked up, struggling through the street with the yelling dirty brat in his arms?" asked Captain Mead, who was watching the work of the relief corps, of the first passer-by.
"Little St. Jacques of the Streets," was the reply.
"He looks familiar," said the Captain; "what other name is he called?"
"Monsieur Picot, I believe," was the answer.
Monsieur l'Abbé Picot, traveling after a fashion purely his own, found himself in picturesque Louisiana at a time when the yellow fever was upon one of its infrequent but periodic outbreaks. For a time it seemed as if hell had been transferred. Suffering, sorrow, despair reigned in undisputed tyranny.... The Abbé[Pg 196] had sought the state, so he told himself, to pursue a long deferred inquiry into the life of the ancestor who had willed him the home in which he lived in Oldmeadow. When he found anguish, hunger, misery, and death upon every hand he turned with eagerness to a more compassionate task.
Once at it, he toiled incessantly. If he ever rested, no one knew of it. At any time of day or night he always could be found taking food to some half-starved child; carrying upon his back to a more comfortable quarter some old man or woman; cooling the burning bodies of the fever-stricken; bringing the sympathy of tender words and the helpful pressure of ministering hands to the grief-stricken, or shriving some dying adherent of his own religion. His lips wore a great, hopeful smile as he turned from call to call upon his strength. In his eyes shone the light of a mighty faith. Indeed, he had the face of a saint—St. Francis, no doubt. He possessed all the preternatural ability of making his love felt which has ever belonged to those[Pg 197] wondrous souls who give the greater gift. Some even thought that the touch of his strong rough hands had wrought things miraculous.... Had he not—but why tell of it to the unbelieving?
There are just two things of which I shall tell you that wisdom may be justified by her works. One was at Christmastide, the other some weeks later. To fully appreciate the first you must remember that everybody living where he was serving was destitute, needing the mere sustenances of life: bread, meat, shelter, water. When all ate no one had as much as he needed. There was just enough to keep them alive.
A few days before the happy time of holly, mystery, and good cheer, the Abbé, for the first time since he had begun his task, lost his smile. He seemed to be worried and depressed. He went about like a man carrying a weight almost greater than the strength of his heart. His co-workers felt it, and to the sufferers it seemed as if virtue had gone out of him. This continued until the morning of the twenty-fourth of December.[Pg 198]
Had you been about that day you would have seen a weary old priest with shuffling reluctant steps leading an ugly, but good-humored, little ragged brown mare, for whom he showed unusual affection, through the streets. At the horse market where he sold her they secretly laughed at him, for did he not on parting whisper into her furry ears, shed tears upon her neck, and kiss her between her large brown eyes? Yet, strange as it may seem, as he turned into the street where grief was waiting for his compassionate hands, he wore the old-time smile and, beneath his breath, sang a queer outlandish tune. Nevertheless you still could not have fathomed the heart of St. Jacques of the Streets.
Early that night he again stole away and this time sought the garish stores all aglow with lights, tinsel, toys, and hurrying crowds. From place to place he went, dogging in and out of shops, gazing long into inviting windows, as if in search of some particular thing. At last he discovered a little Frenchman whose small business occupied a mere[Pg 199] hole in the wall. The shop was given to Frenchy trifles of much glitter, and brilliant paints galore. After a deal of gesticulation, more rapid talking and bargaining, the shopman and the Abbé began making a thousand small bundles with something bright and happy in each. Then, leaving a clerk in charge, after piling the stuff into a hand-cart, they set off for the district upon which despair battened most hideously. Monsieur l'Abbé Picot was playing Santa Claus to hundreds of starved, eager little hearts.
When some disgruntled man saw fit to grumble about the waste of money, one of the nurses, a big, brawny Irish laborer, promptly knocked him down, accompanying his blow with the startling scriptural reference:
"An' did ye niver hear of the allibister box, ye Dutch pig?"
As I have written, it was a week later when they discovered that he had not eaten his portion of food for many days. Watching him, they found that he conveyed[Pg 200] it secretly to certain children whose mothers and fathers had died of the fever. When they confronted him with his neglect of himself, he lied.
"Lied like a gentleman, this little St. Jacques," said the Captain, who knew.
It was no use to remonstrate. He came to give his life and he was giving it. Who would dare to say this was not his privilege? And he had remained faithfully until the blessed cold had come and hell had withdrawn her flaming despair.
That is how, my friends, Monsieur l'Abbé Picot proved his heart.
It was eleven o'clock, or after, when I sat beside a roaring fire of recently renewed backlogs debating whether I should sleep upon the couch pulled close beside the fireplace, or bundle up and face the cold for five blocks to my home. I had arisen and was drawing the lounge toward the hearth when, again, after a crunching of the snow outside, there came a timid knock on the door. I opened to find a shivering, bent old man upon the threshold whom I recognized straightway as the servant at the old home of the many pillars. He hurriedly informed me in his cracked and high-pitched voice that I was wanted at once by Monsieur l'Abbé Picot, who was ill.
Ten minutes later, upon entering the big cheerful library, I found the man whom I now thought of as St. Jacques of[Pg 202] the Streets seated by the fire in a great armchair drawn close to the blaze. His closely cropped head was supported by a pillow, a decanter of wine sat on the table beside him, while Prosper, the old servant, stood by to anticipate any wish. I was shocked at the appearance of the Abbé. I had never before thought of him as little, yet now I saw him not only small, but emaciated. While his countenance was cheerful, yet suffering and deprivation had left their cruel stamp upon him. He seemed slight, worn, and world-weary. He was excessively nervous. A slight fever caused a hectic flush in his sunken, close-shaven cheeks, and lent a preternatural brilliancy to his eyes.
"You will pardon me, Monsieur Doctor," he said politely, yet in a voice which startled me because of a note which was familiar to my ear, "for calling you out into such a night as this, but Prosper," indicating his servant by a wave of the hand, "threatened to take matters upon himself and, knowing something of the nature of his blisters and nostrums, I consented to your being consulted. It is[Pg 203] terrible weather to make a man leave comfortable quarters, and I'm sorry."
Of course I assured him of my readiness to attend him. I told him that I thought there was nothing too severe for one to do if it might bring him relief. Upon examination I discovered Monsieur Picot much worse off than he believed himself to be.... While I was not quite sure, desiring to see other developments before fully making up my mind, I felt that my patient was in for a battle the successful outcome of which was equal to about one chance in a hundred.
"First thing, Monsieur," I said, after taking his temperature, his pulse, looking at the tongue, and asking a multitude of questions, "you must go to bed immediately."
"For the night, you mean?" he questioned, with eyes searching penetratingly into mine.
"For several days, Monsieur. It is absolutely necessary," I added, anticipating trouble upon that score.
With a shrug of his shoulders he threw up his hands, a thing which I[Pg 204] had seen Jean François do a thousand times, with protest upon every feature. Then, appearing to suddenly lose courage, he gave up, letting his hands drop limply into his lap.
"Mon Dieu! If I must, I must.... Prosper, assist me."
We helped him into the adjoining bedroom and into the big four poster. He sank back among the pillows with an air of utter weariness. By a strong will he had kept himself up and about. He had exerted every power at his command to conquer his growing weakness. He had hoped to win and had determined, as a last resort, that stimulants and medicine would save the day. Then, when he discovered it to be beyond his strength, he surrendered completely. I looked into his face, outlined against the whiteness of the linen, and for the first time noticed that he appeared old. As aged as old Prosper himself, whose alarmed countenance stared questioningly at me upon every turn.
I prepared his medicine and yelled the directions into Prosper's deaf ears.[Pg 205] Then I placed a chair by the bed and sat down, taking a thin fevered hand into my own.
"My friend," said I to the Abbé, "you must be very quiet. You need rest. A few weeks of peace and good food should start you well on toward recovery."
"One moment, Monsieur Doctor," said he with a weary gesture of the hand, "I've a request."
"Certainly. What is it?" I asked.
"Do you think I shall be ill for any length of time?"
"I shall know more about that to-morrow," was the reply.
"Yes, I know," he smiled. "But remember that I am not a child. I'm an old man—at least I feel it—and life is not as alluring as it was once. Tell me frankly, shall I be very sick?"
"It is more than likely, Monsieur," I answered.
"More than likely—more than likely," he repeated reflectively, "and who knows save the good God—and who knows?"
Here he ceased to talk, closed his eyes restfully, and became more quiet. For[Pg 206] an hour I sat and watched him. Had it not been for an occasional pressure of his fingers in my hand I should have thought him asleep. Finally he opened his eyes and with childlike sympathy sought mine.
"Monsieur Doctor," he said, "I have not yet made the request."
"O," I said with surprise. I had thought it referred to the duration of his illness.
"You say I shall die?" he said.
"No, I have not said so," I answered.
"Very well. We'll not discuss it. No matter.... But the request.... On my desk you will find an envelope upon which is the address of a dealer in horses in the city of New Orleans. Inside the envelope is three hundred dollars. It will be enough, I am sure.... That sum should pay a passage to New Orleans and return and buy a little mare, should it not, Monsieur?"
"It would be more than enough," I replied, puzzled.
"It is asking a great deal of you, Monsieur," he said with hesitancy.[Pg 207]
"It is nothing.... Nothing would be too much," and I pressed the hand of the little St. Jacques in sympathy. I was beginning to understand.
"Thank you," he continued gratefully. "If—if I should die, Monsieur, would it be asking too much of you to go to that city and inquire of the dealer for the little mare left with him last twenty-fourth of December by the Abbé Picot? He will remember, and he promised me to keep her at my disposal for three months. Buy her from him, Monsieur, and bring her back here with you. She is a part of this estate and my will gives her into hands that love.... Would this be asking too much, Monsieur Doctor? It is a great deal."
"It shall be done," I assured him.
This was the nearest he ever came to telling anything to confirm the words of the Captain concerning the service which he gave his brothers of the south.
It was well into the morning when I arose to leave. After repeating directions to Prosper about the medicine and[Pg 208] the temperature of the room, I went to his bed, for he was not asleep.
"I shall call about noon," I said, "and hope to find you better."
"My friend," said he rather abruptly, "if I should need a nurse other than old Prosper, whom would you likely get for me?"
"I scarcely know," I answered. "You will need someone. Prosper has not the strength to give you constant attention.... Perhaps Miss Gwyn might help. She has often nursed cases for me. Living just across the street, I do not see why she would not at least run in now and then."
"Ah," he sighed with evident relief. "Could you—do you suppose she would come to-morrow? You see," he said with eagerness, "I may become too ill before long to tell her about the house. Prosper, you know, is such a deaf old curmudgeon. He's good enough. Do not think I do not love Prosper.... But do you think she would come?"
"I am sure she will come," I answered. "Especially if it is your request."[Pg 209]
"I thank you. I think I should like it very much indeed to have her occasionally in to see me.... Good-night, Monsieur Doctor.... You are very kind."
Again he sank restfully into his pillows.
I waited for a moment by the library fire before wrapping myself securely against the cold. The wind roared in merciless gusts through the trees. The old house cracked and moaned as if shaken to the foundation by the blast. Just before stepping out into the night, I glanced through the half-open door at the children's little St. Jacques. He himself was sleeping as peacefully as a child.
Two days later we were seated in the firelight near the bed of Monsieur Picot. He had rallied some, though I was unable to say whether or not it was merely temporarily. The large old room was played upon by the flickering flame and a thousand ghostly shadows stole about the furniture and hid in the darkest corners. The bright, feverish face of the Abbé could be seen among the pillows. The rest of the bed was hidden by the half-drawn curtains. Nance sat upon a stool and gazed at the embers, beneath the andirons, from time to time lifting her face, aglow with interest. My patient, whom I cautioned to become less animated for his nerves' sake, was speaking. For many minutes he had been telling us of some of the strange and wonderful happenings[Pg 211] within his old house, so long a mystery for the children of Oldmeadow.
"Now as for ghosts," said he whimsically, "it is a matter of choice. Frankly I rather like them, Mademoiselle.... Now there is the old lover's ghost of the banquet hall in the west wing. He's such a gentle, tobacco-loving shade. I assure you he is fully as harmless as a spinster. He is almost domesticated. A little timid, however, and a bit suspicious of you.... He—comes—every—Christmas—eve," he slowly and solemnly reiterated, with a twinkle in his eye, "and sits and dreams over the empty banquet table. The feast is ended. The spoils strew the table. Among the empty glasses and forgotten viands lies a broken fan. Here my gentle friend is to be found. He is a solemn spook.... Perhaps it is his liver, Monsieur Doctor.... Thus he sits with bowed head before the wreck of tasted pleasures, and seems to dream of another day. You may enter as quietly as you please, yet, with a sort of hurt expression about him, as if, though quite unconsciously, yet surely, you had[Pg 212] gently broken his heart, he fades away like the smoke. This look of reproach upon his face, doubtless because of his knowledge of your innocent intentions, is tempered by plainly written forgiveness. When he is gone you catch the faint odor of tobacco, with the still more subtle perfume of a handkerchief, as if a lady had at least been present in his dreams."
"I think I should love him," ventured Nance, speaking softly.
"I hope you will, my daughter," was the Abbé's reply.... Then he continued:
"Perhaps my friendly ghost has something to do with the Love Story of the East Room and the Duel in the Wine Cellars.... Yes?" and he waited for an answer.
"Go on!" cried Nance gleefully, looking at me with an appeal to share her delight in the adventures of the old house.
"Prosper tells me," continued the Abbé, "that every midsummer's eve—you know I am always away in midsummer and I only know this of old Prosper—there[Pg 213] is a beautiful quaintly dressed lady of the long ago who makes her abode in the great east room. She is a very weepy, pretty lady, at first, Prosper asserts. Then, when a great splendid buck of a fellow in laces and frills and long-plaited powdered hair comes climbing up by way of the portico, she quickly becomes very beautiful and the light of her eyes brightens the whole room. In fact it is this very brilliancy which attracts another gentleman who comes from the hallway. Immediately, with much bowing, he invites the gallant cavalier off to the wine cellars, where blood is spilled.... Now I tell Prosper it is merely rats he hears with his deaf old ears.
"'Non, Monsieur,' he insists; 'what of the casks of good red wine I find spilled upon the floor the morning following midsummer eve?'"
"He's right, Monsieur," said Nance simply. "I myself have seen the light and believed it elf-fire."
"I believe you, my dear-a," he replied.
"Go on," said she.[Pg 214]
"Then there is the cabinet with the hidden drawer, and the secret stairway we shall climb when I am well.... Ah, it is at the top of the magic stairway where old Jacques finds his forest of Arden.... Some day you shall know.... There are the merry ghosts of two happy children in the very heydey of youth. There is the spook of an old vagabond who sleeps in dingles in phantom greenwoods. There, my children, are a thousand dreams of mine: the ghosts of yesterday; there the little narrow streets of old Paris—St. Jacques, Rue de l'Abbé de l'Epee, the Rue de la Fouarre; there, gentle Amiens and her great cathedral; a long, white road—le trimard—through Picardy; a tiny garret in the Rue St. Jacques, where first I knew all the bright hopes and brave fancies of youth. All—all these and a thousand more at the top of my secret stairs, and some day, le bon Dieu knows how soon, I shall bequeath it all—all to you!"
Then Nance bade him be quiet and began to smooth his brow with her hand.[Pg 215] Presently he fell into a troubled sleep, murmuring of roads and rivers and tree-clad hills.
"I think we had better go, Charles," said she, leading the way into the library and closing the door after us. Old Prosper with the wonderful eyes, and who was deaf, was with his master.
On another day, while alone with old Prosper and Nance, he turned to her and said:
"Nance, did I ever tell you about the Priest and the Faun, whom I found in my blessed attic at the top of my secret stairway?... Yes?"
"Are you feeling quite strong enough, Monsieur Jacques?" was her gentle answer.
"Better than I shall ever feel again," came the reply.
"I should like to hear about them," she said.
"When I found them," he began, "the Priest was seated upon a stool. His head was bowed, about his neck was the rosary, the crucifix of which he held in his hand. Upon his face was sorrow, a great pity, infinite patience, gentleness. His features though rugged were softened and refined[Pg 217] by the strength and compassion of his heart.
"His brother, the Faun, stood facing him. He was closely enough like the Priest for their relationship to be seen at once. Yet he who stood was a trifle larger of body, with features bearing a wild and inhuman cast of countenance. His small bright eyes glistened in astonishment mingled with anger. The wide, large-lipped mouth was twisted into a leer of contempt. The small pointed ears twitched nervously. In his hand there was the branch of an oak all clustered with leaves and acorns.
"'So you would remain here,' said the Faun in a preternatural, highly pitched voice which had the sound of the wind in the tree-tops, 'and count your weary beads?... You—you would do good to man,'" he smiled.
"'I would, my brother,' came the reply in a quiet, even tone, yet compassionate withal.
"'Ah! Out with you,' fairly shouted the Faun, 'you are no brother of mine! I—I,' he laughed shrilly, 'am brother[Pg 218] to the trees, to the hills, to the river, to the old god Pan, but never—
"'Ah,' he cried, changing his tone to one of gentle pleading not unlike a summer's breeze on the river, 'come! Come with me where the wild thyme grows, where the rhododendron climbs the mountainside with sinuous grace, where the lusty trout leap out of their clear course from sheer joy of living! Come with me to the dingle where my cousin the gipsy camps o' night. Where their maidens frolic in enticing nakedness in the streams and the old crones chant their witches' songs. Come where men are brave and strong and virile like my sire, the oak. Come where the berries shall stain your mouth with gladness; the frolicsome squirrel shall call you comrade; the fairies and elves, even the goblins of hell, shall dance about you in moonlit revels; the great-limbed satyrs shall teach you their bacchanalian bouts; while with amorous-breasted dryads you will discover the delectable madness of passion.... You shall roam the wide earth—free, alive, with love and an open heart! Come!'[Pg 219]
"At this the priest stood, and anger lit his face. The resemblance between them was now more marked.
"'Come with me, brother to Pan,' cried he. 'Come into the house of the poor, the broken of spirit, the conquered, the beaten, the hopeless who have fallen in the battle! Come into the house of death, of shame, of ignominy. Come into the hovels of wretched, diseased hearts and leprous souls! Come where children are born into crime, and the breasts of mothers secrete the poisonous milk of lust! Come where all of the misery of hell reigns, brutalizing, dwarfing, killing the souls of men. Come and let your slender Faun's fingers bring hope and health and opportunity.... Come?'
"Thus they struggled, the Faun and the Priest, threatening, pleading, defying. Sometime the Faun fled to his greenwood; often the Priest to his people. Rarely, as if they would effect a compromise, did they go together: the Priest gladly to the hills; the Faun with terror into town. And to-day they yet wrangle.[Pg 220]
"I have wondered in my heart, Nance, which one of them would win."
"It is when they go together, first to the dingle, then to the street, that I like them best. That comes nearest to the way of solution," she said, with a smile as comprehending as it was sympathetic.
"The Priest must come to nature; the Faun, at least occasionally, to town. May not old Pan with his pipes be the brother of the Man with the heart of God?" she asked.
"I have given a great deal of time to living, Nance, and little enough to thinking, but I feel that you speak the truth."
An hour later Monsieur l'Abbé, dreaming of France with her sunny fields, her morning roads, and happy village streets, discovered a boy fishing by a merry little stream.
"Do you live here?" questioned Monsieur Picot, indicating the town near by.
"Yes," returned the boy, "I live when I am here," meaning the river and the hills, "but I stay in the town. I know it is natural to live in the fields.... Was[Pg 221] it not queer that the good God should make that which is right so different from that which is natural?"
"But the good God did not, my son," replied the priest.
"Are you sure, sir? My master thinks He did."
"Your master is wrong, my lad.... Tell me, your face seems familiar to me," said the Abbé, "have I ever seen you before?"
"You have," replied the boy; "I am your soul."
And Monsieur l'Abbé smiled in his sleep.
As Monsieur l'Abbé Picot's illness grew and he became largely unconscious as to what was going on about him, the more closely Nance confined herself to nursing. Because of many urgent calls I was forced to be away from them more than I liked, but old Doctor Longstreet spent many hours of each day reading in the library, adjoining the bedroom, in case he should be needed. But dear little Nance, whose face became thin and whose eyes grew large with watching, scarcely left her patient.
Then there came the day when old Prosper went across the river in a small skiff to a neighboring city a few miles away, returning two hours later with the parish priest. He was an old man of delicate frame, with the thoughtful,[Pg 223] patient cast of countenance of the student. After the confession, upon his return to the library, his face wore a very gentle and peaceful expression. I have wondered at the strange words he must have heard. He came from a charge whose sins were doubtless exceedingly commonplace. Was there any rare and startling tale stirring his heart? What were the struggles and experiences of the soul of this adventurous brother of St. Francis of Assisi? If there was anything to startle, it could be guessed only from the preoccupied manner in which he sat looking into the fire with eyes which, when you caught them, were brimming with wonder and with tears. The three of us, though no words were then or ever spoken, shared with profound sympathy a common sorrow, which we alone fully understood.
"I shall remain with you," he said. We nodded our approval, his being the only words spoken.
All night long we kept a prayerful vigil beside the troubled bed of Monsieur l'Abbé. For hours I leaned above him[Pg 224] in the darkened room, lit only by the firelight, giving him what assistance and relief lay in my power. Nance, at the east window, gazed out into the impenetrable darkness. For hours at a time she stood and looked as into space and without so much as moving. Now and then she came to my side and raised questioning eyes to my face. Upon shaking my head she would return to her place, like a sentinel upon duty. At last, when the gray dawn shone ghastly and ugly over the snow-covered landscape, my patient appeared to grow easier and from a restless suffering night he sank into a very gentle sleep. I closed the curtains about his bed and, stealing softly across the floor, stood beside Nance.
The day was breaking. Together we stood and watched the sky turn from its sickly pallor of many weeks' duration into wonderful shades of gold and then to glorious crimson. All of the east was streaked with red. Together we watched the winter's sun peep over the edge of the world and restore the hope of the land[Pg 225] with a smile. Together we stood and watched and waited while the Master painted. Unconscious of anything but the present need of the heart, forgetful of anything which now lay eternally behind, I tenderly placed my arm about her, and Nance, with the sob of a grief-stricken child, laid her weary head upon my breast. The sunlight from over the hills and the river burst into the room like an irresponsible, happy youth and flooded it with light.
"I shall need you very much now, dear," she said simply. Suddenly from the bed we heard him call:
"My children!"
We hastened to his side and drew the curtains.
"The sun!" exclaimed he. "I own the sun," he smiled at me.
Then for a moment he caressed it and seemed to drink in its life and beauty as it shone in lusty splendor upon his counterpane.
"Will you place some pillows behind me?" he requested.
"Now, that will do. Thank you, my[Pg 226] dear-a," he smiled feebly at Nance, who had deftly arranged him so that he half-way sat up.
"Ah, my little jade, I'm off for the long, white highway.... My children, yours is the old home—
"Do not interrupt me!" he exclaimed. "I must speak now, for they are waiting, for me.... The old house, the old Prosper, the books, and my pleasant ghosts—I shall leave them and yet take them, that being a special privilege allowed choice spirits—all, all yours, my dears.... As for me," here he smiled in an old familiar whimsical way, "I'm off for Paradise!"
Nance fell sobbing to her knees and buried her face in her hands.
"What," he cried, with unnatural strength, accompanied by flights of fantasy, "have you not heard me say, many's the time, that when I should come to die—"
He stopped long enough to place a hand upon the head of the kneeling girl.
"Ah, Nance, the word must not hurt you.... When I should come to die,"[Pg 227] he continued, "I hoped to find myself, on passing, in a certain little house in the Rue St. Jacques, with Rogue and Columbine waiting at the door while the good angel would be saying, 'Monsieur Picot, my compliments.... Here, my dear Monsieur, there are no poor, no sick, no broken-hearted. There is nothing at all to be done—no task for the little Abbé of the Church of the Street. Take your blessed caravan and follow le long trimard of your heart's desire.... I—I, eternal Wayfarer, am Death, and this—this is Paradise.'
"Au revoir, my son.... Au revoir, my daughter.... I'm off—off for France!" Here he seemed to gather a moment's strength.... He attempted to sing:
"I'm off, my dear-a, for Picardy, for beautiful Amiens, Rouen, to black Rennes, for dear old Paris, for the road from Lille to Dunkerque."
Here his voice grew faint and it was with an effort he whispered:[Pg 228]
"Sometimes, my dear-a, come here to the green and watch for me as of old.... Who knows? Who knows, my children? Perhaps I shall be gone forever and a day.... Perhaps," and he rose from his pillows, "perhaps—au revoir—
"Rogue, you sacré pig of a zebra, home.... Home!"
And Monsieur l'Abbé Jacques Picot had gone upon his journey.
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