Oldfield Part 6

"And so he does, when he doesn't happen to want her to stay at home,"

said old lady Gordon, with a cynical laugh. "But I've never known a husband pious enough to like his wife's religion to interfere with his own comfort or wishes. And Tom really needed Anne a good deal more than her church did. There are men who are as sure to go wrong if their wives leave them alone, as s.h.i.+ps are to drift without their rudders--and Tom Watson was one of these. He had little or no intellectual resources,--none at all, probably, within himself,--and he was consequently entirely dependent upon companions.h.i.+p. That sort of male animal always is, and if he can't get good company he takes bad, simply because he has to have company of some kind. Every sensible woman understands that sort of man, especially if she is married to him; and she knows, too, just what she's got to do, unless she's willing to take the certain consequences of not doing it. Any other woman than Anne would have thought she was lucky when Tom didn't take to anything worse than cards."

Lynn was glad when the breakfast was over. He did not like his grandmother in this mood nearly so well as he had liked her in the kindly responsive one of the night before; and yet, although he knew her but slightly, he felt sure that this mood was more natural, or, at all events, more habitual, to her, than the other. It was most likely this instinctive feeling which had unconsciously kept him--during the talk with her on the previous day--from speaking of the beautiful girl whom he had seen. He now felt more distinctly, though still without knowing why, that he did not wish to hear his grandmother speak of her or of her environment, as he now knew that the old lady would speak. He already understood enough, remembering the kind things which the doctor's lady had told him, to antic.i.p.ate the different presentation of the widow Wendall and her family that his grandmother would certainly make.

He left her as soon as he could, offering his engagement with Dr.

Alexander as a ready excuse. Pa.s.sing out into the quiet, empty big road, he walked along under the old locust trees which lined one side of the way. The locusts were flowering, and the long cl.u.s.ters of pure white flowers, swinging among the dull gray-green of the feathery foliage, filled the fresh air of the May morning with wholesome sweetness. The shrubs in the yards, bordering the length of the big road with the vivid verdure of new leaves, were also in bloom. The young man smelled the honeysuckle blossoming thick over the sick man's window, but he did not look that way. He looked, naturally enough, in the opposite direction, where the silver poplars stood, since the interests and the sympathies of youth must always lie on the other side of life's big road, away from all affliction and pain.

He was not sorry to find that the doctor had gone into the country in answer to an urgent call, and that the visit to the invalid consequently must be postponed. He was sorry, however, to see the white curtain of the house behind the poplars hanging precisely as it had hung on the previous day; and, although he walked to the top of the hill beyond the house and, turning, strolled slowly back again in front of the window, he had no second glimpse of Doris. Thus idly strolling, he went along the big road, stopping now and then to lean over a fence to look at the hyacinths and tulips, which were at their sweetest and brightest in most of the front yards; or to linger beside the rosy clover fields to drink in the fragrance and to watch the vernal happiness of the birds. He paused occasionally to lift his hat smilingly to the friendly faces which smiled at him from the vine-wreathed windows and the wide-open doors; but, loiter as he might, he saw nothing more of the girl of whom he was thinking and hoping to meet, and although he delayed his return as long as he could, he was still back at his grandmother's house all too soon.

No one could walk through Oldfield a second time on the same morning without a visible or audible explanation to a public who had plenty of leisure to note the few pa.s.sers-by, and to speculate upon their possible destination, and to discuss the most probable reasons for their going up or coming down the big road. Lynn had an instinctive perception of this, little as he knew of the life of the village. Accordingly he now paused uncertainly at his grandmother's gate and stood still, not knowing what to do with the perfect day, with the ideal Ides of May.

Looking idly toward the northern hilltops, he saw the figure of a horseman suddenly break the sky line and rush galloping downward into the village. Onward thundered the big black horse and his strange rider, sweeping by like a whirlwind, and speeding on and on, till they vanished over the southern hilltops. A light cloud of dust floated for a moment between the farthest green and the farthest blue, and then that too disappeared, and the coming and going of the wild apparition might well have been some trick of a fantastic imagination. And yet Lynn had received a curiously distinct impression of the man's appearance in this s.p.a.ce of time, brief almost as a lightning flash. He had seen the foreign dress, the great boots so long that they were slit to the knee; the blood-red handkerchief tied loosely around the neck, and, most distinctly of all, the sinister expression of the dark, deeply lined face and the wildness of the black eyes under the wide, flapping, soft brim of the large sombrero hat. Altogether it was so strange, so unreal an interruption of the peace of this pastoral spot, that the young man could only stand silent gazing after it in bewildered surprise.

"That's Alvarado! You've seen one of the sights of the country," his grandmother called out to him from her place by the window.

"Who is Alvarado?" he asked, when he had entered the room.

"That is a question which a good many people have been asking for a good many years, and n.o.body has ever had a satisfactory answer," old lady Gordon replied.

Smiling her sardonic smile, she deliberately turned down the leaf of the novel which she had been reading as usual, and laid it on her lap. She was always amused by these histrionic appearances of Alvarado which so terrified most of the Oldfield people. It had indeed long been known all over the Pennyroyal Region that, while other folks always drove hastily into the nearest fence corner whenever they saw Alvarado coming, old lady Gordon invariably kept straight along in the middle of the big road--never turning one hair's breadth to the right or the left--and that Alvarado was always the one who had to turn out. She said nothing of this, however, and thought nothing of it; but she told her grandson all that she knew or that any one knew of Alvarado.

He was a Spaniard who had suddenly appeared in the vicinity of Oldfield, some twenty-five years before. No one had any knowledge of him previous to that time, and no one had ever known where he came from. Yet, for some reason never clearly understood, his coming had, nevertheless, been a.s.sociated from the first with the scattering of the Gulf pirates which had followed the deposing of their last king. It is true that Lafitte was long since gone to render his awful account of the terrible deeds done in the body--with perhaps his desperate service at the battle of New Orleans as the largest item on the other side of the blotted ledger.

But the death of Lafitte in 1826 did not immediately free the Gulf from its fearful scourge. The pa.s.sing of piracy was gradual, very gradual indeed, and even long drawn out, as the traders of the Pennyroyal Region knew only too well, through their close and continual connection with New Orleans by route of the flatboat. There was, therefore, to the minds of the Oldfield people, nothing improbable in the continued existence of numbers of Lafitte's followers, who were younger than himself and consequently not yet really old men. Still, while there was no impossibility or even any improbability in Alvarado's being a comrade of Lafitte, there appeared no actual proof that he ever had been. According to old lady Gordon's account, the princ.i.p.al grounds of suspicion were these: his appearance, which was otherwise unaccounted for, just at the time that the pirates were being driven from the Gulf and out of the Gulf states; his frequent, long, and mysterious absences at sea after his coming to live in the vicinity of Oldfield; the fabulous sums of gold and silver fetched home by him from these voyages, when he was known not to have any visible means of making money; the many curious weapons of marine warfare scattered through his strange house, which was half a fort, half a farmhouse, and wholly barbaric in its rough richness of furnis.h.i.+ng; the generally credited rumor that he habitually wore a coat of mail; the well-known fact--open for every pa.s.ser-by to see--that he kept a horse standing continually at his gate, day and night, for years, saddled and bridled, with pistols in the holsters, apparently ready for instant flight.

Many of these things old lady Gordon had seen with her own eyes. Most of them she knew to be true, but she had never gone to his house, although he had at one time received a measure of social recognition, when--according to old lady Gordon--there had been something like real society in Oldfield. He was rather a handsome man after a sinister, foreign fas.h.i.+on, although he had been past youth when he first came to Oldfield, and he had a das.h.i.+ng way with him which fascinated the un.o.bservant. It was in this manner that he was thrown with Alice Fielding, the colonel's prettiest and youngest daughter, so old lady Gordon said.

"You mean the old gentleman whom I saw yesterday? That stately, beautiful old man with the silver hair curling on his shoulders, and wearing the long black cloak?" Lynn said.

"That's the man, but I wish you might have seen him in those days. He was just about as fiery as Alvarado, though in a slightly more civilized way, and he never wanted Alice to have anything to do with him. He never wanted the Spaniard around his house at all. No man like Colonel Fielding--English in every drop of blood--ever wants anything to do with any foreigner. But there's no use in trying to manage a girl like Alice Fielding,--a little, soft, say-nothing, characterless thing,--there's nothing in her strong enough to get a good firm hold on. She's blown like a feather this way and that way by the strongest influence--good or bad--that she falls under. You'll find the kind, and plenty of them, all over the world. The Fielding negroes used to say Alvarado threw a spell over Alice. I presume he did, but it was the spell which that sort of man always throws over that sort of girl. She was a flighty, vain little creature, and flattered of course by his being so madly in love. That was plain enough for anybody to see. n.o.body ever doubted that he loved her. But she had never thought of marrying him until she was terrified into doing it. She was probably in love with John Stanley so far as she was capable of loving any man. It was said they were upon the verge of becoming engaged to be married. I don't know about that, but there was no doubt of John's loving her. It took him years to get over her marriage to Alvarado."

"I don't understand. Why did she marry him?" asked Lynn.

"Through sheer fright mixed with a kind of silly romance, as nearly as anybody ever could make out. It happened in this way. There was some kind of a party at Colonel Fielding's. There always was something going on while his girls were young and gay; and there is plenty of room in the jailer's residence for any kind of entertainment--and many's the ball and dinner they gave! That night Alvarado was one of the guests, as he often was. n.o.body knows what led up to the outbreak, but he suddenly fell on the floor in convulsions, stiff and stark and black in the face, and actually foaming at the mouth--a sight, they said, to make the strongest shudder. The doctor was hurriedly called out of the supper room and at once shut the door of the room in which Alvarado was lying--at the point of death as everybody thought. As the guests huddled together whispering, it flew all over the house that he had taken poison and that he refused to take an antidote unless Alice would consent to marry him. Your father was there and saw her go into the room, and he said afterwards that she looked as much like a dead woman then, as she did a year later when she lay in her coffin. No one, except those who were in the room, ever knew what happened, but the colonel presently came to the door and sent for the preacher. It was a dancing party, or he would have been there already, as almost everybody else was. But it didn't take long to fetch him, and he married Alvarado to Alice Fielding then and there."

"And John Stanley?" inquired Lynn.

"He knew nothing of the marriage till he came to see Alice on the next Sunday as he always did. He didn't live in Oldfield at that time. He had gone away soon after another unlucky affair which most men wouldn't have worried about, but which seems to have had a lifelong effect upon him.

He was always a sensitive, high-strung fellow and deeply religious--full of lofty ideals and all that sort of thing--even then, when he was hardly more than a lad. He had come here only a week or so before to take an a.s.sistant's place in the clerk's office. He was a cousin of Jack Mitch.e.l.l, the county clerk--that's the way he happened to come. Well, Jack Mitch.e.l.l was a politician and as high a talker and as low a doer as was to be found betwixt the c.u.mberland and Green River, which is saying a good deal. I reckon he couldn't be more than matched in these days. I haven't noticed much change in politicians during the last quarter of a century. Jack had been elected by a large majority, and was reelected, and had his hand fairly on a higher rung of the political ladder, when he made a false step and slipped. The trouble came from a foolish quarrel caused by drink. Jack Mitch.e.l.l always was quarrelsome when in liquor, and on that day he happened to accuse another Kentuckian of cowardice. That, of course, was crossing the dead-line. It was just the same then that it is now and always will be, till our blood and training are different. And the fact that the man who had been branded as a coward was a worthless loafer, made no more difference then then it would make now. The wretch who had been 'insulted' rose up, as soon as he was sober enough, and borrowed a shot-gun and went to wipe out his dishonor, just as if he had been a real gentleman. Jack, with his usual luck, was not in the office when his enemy, who was still drinking heavily, suddenly appeared in the doorway, levelling the gun. He was not so drunk, though, that he didn't know that he was aiming at a boy whom he had never seen before, in place of the man whom he had come to kill.

He knew it well enough, for he muttered something about killing the young one if he couldn't get the old one. But John Stanley was too quick for him. Jack's pistol lay handy, as it always did, as pistols always do, hereabouts. The boy hardly knew what was happening before he had shot dead a man whose name he didn't know--a man whom he had never seen or heard of before."

"What a strange story," Lynn said. "I think I have never heard a stranger one."

"Oh, I don't know about it's being strange. Of course somebody had to be killed," old lady Gordon responded indifferently.

"Somebody had to be killed--and why?" repeated Lynn, wonderingly; for, although to the manner born he was not to the manner bred.

"Oh, well, when things get into that shape somebody's bound to be killed! When a Kentuckian is accused of cowardice he has to kill somebody to prove his courage. There's nothing else to be done--apparently. And it might as well have been Betts as anybody else."

She yawned, and swayed her turkey-wing fan.

"It would all have blown over and have pa.s.sed, as all such things pa.s.s in this country, if John Stanley hadn't been morbid about it, if he had been at all like other people. Of course he was acquitted at the examining trial. There were plenty of witnesses to the fact that he fired in self-defence. The family of the man who was killed never made a motion toward taking the matter up, and they would have been ready enough to do it if they could have found any pretext for blaming John.

They were, in fact, rather looked down on for taking it so easy. But John has never forgiven himself; he has always thought he might have done something else than what he did. He has rarely mentioned it to any one, but I understand that he once told Miss Judy that, if it were to do over again, he would run the risk of being killed himself rather than take the life of any human being. As I have said, he was always very religious, even then, and this was, I suppose, the reason why he brooded so over the affair. To this day he's more like a praying monk shut up in a cell than he's like the famous judge of a large circuit."

"Of course he never married," said Lynn.

"Oh, yes, he did--but not for a long time; not for years and years after that Spanish tiger had made an end of that foolish little kitten. Alice lived only a few months. They said that Alvarado wasn't unkind; that he even tried to be kind in his way. But Alice seemed to hate him--as much as she was capable of hating anybody--when she found out how he had tricked her; that he hadn't taken poison at all when he pretended he had, and that the awful-looking foam on his lips had come from chewing soap."

"Don't--don't!" cried the young man. "Leave the romance. Tell me about Judge Stanley--though he too has done what he could to spoil the story by marrying. What sort of woman is his wife? Poor little Alice!"

"I've never seen his wife. She has been here only once or twice, for a few days at a time. They say she is a high-flier and very ambitious.

John didn't begin to go up very high in the world till after he had married her. She no doubt makes him a much better wife than Alice ever could have made. A silly, big-eyed, clinging, crying little woman who doesn't weigh a hundred pounds can drag down the strongest man like a mill-stone around his neck. That apparently harmless little creature managed to ruin the lives of two big strong men--each worth half a dozen of her for all useful purposes. John Stanley certainly has never seen a day's happiness, and there can be no sort of doubt that Alvarado has been partially demented ever since her death. His craziness seems to take the form of senseless litigation. He appears unable to keep away from the court-house when he knows that John Stanley is here, and he is always bringing lawsuits on ridiculous pretexts, so that the judge is compelled to rule them out of court. Alvarado is forever trying to find a chance to pick a quarrel with the judge, but he might just as well give it up. He will never be able, no matter how hard he tries, or how insulting he may be, to drag John Stanley into a duel or even into a quarrel."

"Why?" asked the young man in surprise, not understanding. "Is the Spaniard such a terrible person? Is the judge afraid?"

"Afraid--John Stanley afraid!" repeated old lady Gordon, scornfully. "He never knew what fear was. For calm, cool, unflinching courage in the face of the greatest danger, I have never known his equal. If I could remember and tell you some of the brave things that that man has done.

Why, when he was only a lad he seized a lamp which had exploded and coolly held it in his bare hands--with the blazing oil burning the flesh to the bone--till he could carry it to a place of safety, rather than endanger the lives of other people by throwing it down. No longer than a year or two ago he nearly lost his own life by saving an old negro woman from a runaway horse. John Stanley is no more afraid of Alvarado than he is of me. It's all on account of his queer notions of religion, of humanity, and of the sacredness of human life. It all grew out of that unlucky accident of his youth, a matter that another man would not have given a second thought to. His fear, his horror of shedding blood has gradually grown more and more intense, until it seems to have become a positive mania. Nothing now can ever drive him from it. Alvarado may as well give up trying to provoke him into a quarrel. But he on his side is quite as determined as John Stanley. He will never give it up; he's no doubt been at the court-house hatching some plot this very day. I often wonder what the end will be, should both of the men go on living. To think of all the wrong and wretchedness that one foolish baby face can cause!"

Lynn did not cry out again, half in earnest and half in jest, begging his grandmother to spare romance; but he got up, silently, and took a turn or two about the room. He was genuinely shocked to find himself feeling the repulsion which her lack of womanliness forced upon him. The merciless cynicism revealed by everything that she said might have amused him had he heard it from another person; but he was uncontrollably repulsed by it coming from his father's mother. He was glad when she began to speak of other subjects, and less moving ones, although these also were interwoven with the history of the Pennyroyal Region.

She was not a native of Oldfield. Her birth-place lay farther up in that country on the "Pigeon Roost Fork of the Muddy, which is a branch of Green River," on the very spot thus described by Was.h.i.+ngton Irving's Kentucky cla.s.sic. But Irving had only heard of "Blue Bead Miller," the famous hunter and Indian fighter, whom he has immortalized in that charming tale under his real name; and old lady Gordon had known him in her childhood and early youth. Many a time she had seen him in her father's house, where he would often come, bringing his rifle, "Betsy,"

for her mother to "unwitch." And this, her mother--who was young and city-bred, and full of wondering interest in all these strange ways of the wilderness--would always do with girlish delight, gravely running her slim white fingers up and down the grimy barrel, as one who works a beneficent charm, while the grim old woodsman looked on with unquestioning faith.

Near this old home on the Pigeon Roost Fork was the Roost itself, that marvellous mecca of the wild pigeons, where countless billions of gray wings darkened the great woods on the sunniest midday; and where unnumbered trillions of the weightless, feathered little bodies crushed the great limbs of the mightiest giants of the forest. And this wondrous sight, too, old lady Gordon had seen many times, long before Audubon saw it to describe it for the wonderment of the whole world.

She had not much to tell of the bridegroom with whom she came as a young bride to live in Oldfield; she spoke mainly of journeying on horseback over the Wilderness Road, and of pa.s.sing the place called "Harpe's Head," which had then been very recently named for a most hideous tragedy. It was a story full of grewsome romance, this tale of the unheralded coming of two monsters among a simple, honest, scattered, yet neighborly, woods-people. The two were brothers, or claimed to be, but there was no outward likeness between them. One was small, and not in any way calculated to attract attention; while the other was far above the ordinary stature of men, and so ferocious of aspect that the very sight of him chilled the beholder with fear. Neither of the men ever wore any head covering, and both had wild, manelike, red hair, and complexions of "a livid redness"--whatever that may have been--such as left a lasting impression of horror upon all who encountered them. They were soon known throughout the length of Wilderness Road as Big Harpe and Little Harpe. They lived close to the road, and almost immediately after their coming travellers began to disappear, never to be heard of again, or to be found long afterward to have been murdered. A very pall of terror spread gradually over the whole Pennyroyal Region; arson, robbery, and atrocities unspeakable followed murder after murder, and yet the few, far-apart people of the terror-stricken country could only tremble in helpless fear, till the murder of a woman led to the tracing of the long, wide, deep track of blood and crime to the door of the Harpes.

"When they murdered a woman, the whole country rose up as one man. And it was just the same then that it is now when the same thing happens,"

old lady Gordon said grimly. "The best men in the Pennyroyal Region--as good and as G.o.d-fearing men as could be found in the world--hunted the Harpes like wild beasts. They beat the whole wilderness for the monsters, until they found them at last. Little Harpe managed to escape; it was not known how, and he was never seen or heard of again. But it was Big Harpe who had been the leader; he was the one that the men wanted most, and they now had him fast like a wild animal in a trap. Yet not one of his captors touched him; not one of them spoke to him; they all merely sat still with their eyes on him, and waited for the woman's husband to come."

"History repeats itself--especially in Kentucky," Lynn said.

Old lady Gordon smiled her most sardonic smile. "The skull of Big Harpe's head stayed on the end of a pole by the side of the Wilderness Road through a good many years. The place where it was put up is still called 'Harpe's Head'--I presume it always will be."

All this was before old lady Gordon came as a young bride to live in Oldfield; but another band of robbers and a.s.sa.s.sins still terrorized that part of the Pennyroyal Region. The cavern in which the band made its den was on the other side of the Ohio River, but it was Kentucky that suffered most from its ravages. Many a richly laden flatboat was never heard of after it was known to have stopped at the entrance to Cave-in-Rock, as the place was called in the beginning of the last century, and as it is called at the present time. Many a gold-laden boatman, who had unknowingly pa.s.sed down the river without stopping at the Cave-in-Rock, was beguiled into entering it on his way homeward--only to vanish forever off the face of the earth. The cavern would seem to have offered powerful temptations to the unwary traveller.

The cave itself was then as it is now a most curious and interesting survival of prehistoric times. It is a single chamber in the solid rock, opening at the river's brink, two hundred feet long and eighty feet wide, its sides rising by regular stages after the manner of the seats in an amphitheatre. Its walls are covered with strange carvings cut deep in the stone; there are representations of several animals unknown to science, and there are also inscribed characters which have led those learned in such matters to believe the cavern to have been the council house of some ancient race. But nothing was known of these things while Cave-in-Rock remained the hiding-place of robbers and a.s.sa.s.sins. The terrified country round about Oldfield knew the place only by vague hearsay as a drinking, gambling resort, wherein boatmen and all unwary travellers going up or down the Ohio were lured to destruction. No one who entered the awful mystery of the cavern ever came out to tell what he had seen or what had befallen him. It seemed--so old lady Gordon said--as if the hand of the law would never be able to lay hold upon actual proof of the crimes committed at Cave-in-Rock, but when the band was ultimately run to earth, an upper and secret chamber was found to be filled with the bones of human beings.

The grandmother and the grandson sat silent for a s.p.a.ce after she grew weary of story-telling. They were thinking in widely different ways of the wild, true tales of these terrific pa.s.sion storms which had swept Kentucky throughout her existence. Was another fair portion of the good green earth ever so deep-dyed in the blood of both the innocent and the guilty?

"And yet through all we have always been a most religious people," the young man said musingly.

"Very!" responded the old lady, who was growing hungry. "None more so.

We've about all the different religions that anybody else ever had, and we've started one or two of our own."

X

RELIGION IN OLDFIELD