The Choir Invisible

J >> James Lane Allen >> The Choir Invisible

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

The custom of the backwoods country ran that a man must not be left to build
his house alone; and one day some weeks before this wagons had begun to roll
in from this direction and that
direction out of the forest, hauling the logs for Joseph's cabin.
Then with loud laughter and the writhing of tough backs and the straining of
powerful arms and legs, men old, middle-aged, and young had raised the house
like overgrown boys at play, and then had returned to their own neglected
business: so that to him was left only the finishing.He had finished it and
furnished it for the simple scant needs of pioneer life.But on this, his
wedding morning, he had hardly left the town, escorted by friends on
horseback, before many who had variously excused themselves from going began
to issue from their homes: women carrying rolls of linen and pones of bread;
boys with huge joints of jerked meat and dried tongues of the buffalo, bear,
and deer. There was a noggin, a piggin, a churn, a homemade chair; there was
a quilt from a grandmother and a pioneer cradle--a mere trough scooped out
of a walnut log. An old pioneer sent the antlers of a stag for a hat-rack,
and a buffalo rug for the young pair to lie warm under of bitter, winter
nights; his wife sent a spinning-wheel and a bundle of shingles for
johnny-cakes. Some of the merchants gave packages of Philadelphia groceries;
some of the aristo-cratic families parted with heirlooms that had been
laboriously brought over the mountains--a cup and saucer of Sevres, a pair
of tall brass candlesticks, and a Venus -mirror framed in ebony. It was
about three o'clock in the afternoon when John Gray jumped on the back of a
strong trusty horse at the stable of the Indian Queen, leaned over to shake
the hands of the friends who had met there to see him off, and turned his
horse's head in the direction of the path that led to the Wilderness Road.

But when he had gone about a mile, he struck into the forest at right angles
and rode across the country until he reached that green woodland pathway
which led from the home of the Falconers to the public road between
Lexington and Frankfort. He tied his horse some distance away, and walking
back, sat down on the roots of an oak and waited.

It was a day when the beauty of the earth makes itself felt like ravishing
music that has no sound. The air, warm and full of summer fragrance, was of
that ethereal untinged clearness which spreads over all things the softness
of velvet. The far-vaulted heavens, so bountiful of light, were an
illimitable weightless curtain of pale-blue velvet; the rolling clouds were
of white velvet; the grass, the stems of bending wild flowers, the drooping
sprays of woodland foliage, were so many forms of emerald velvet; the
gnarled trunks of the trees were gray and brown velvet; the wings and
breasts of the birds, flitting hither and thither, were of gold and scarlet
velvet; the butterflies were stemless, floating velvet blossoms."Farewell,
Kentucky! farewell!" he said, looking about him at it all.
Two hours passed. The shadows were lengthening rapidly. Over the forest,
like the sigh of a spirit, swept from out the west the first intimation of
waning light, of the mysteries of coming darkness. At last there reached his
ear from far down the woodland path the sounds of voices and laughter--again
and again--louder and louder--and then through the low thick boughs he
caught glimpses of them coming. Now beneath the darker arches of the trees,
now across pale-green spaces shot by slanting sunbeams. Once there was a
halt and a merry outcry. Long grape-vines from opposite sides of the road
had been tied across it, and this barrier had to cut through. Then on they
came again: At the head of procession, astride an old horse that in his
better days had belonged to a mounted rifleman, rode the parson. He was
several yards ahead of the others and quite forgetful of them. The end of
his flute stuck neglectedly out of his waistcoat pocket; his bridle reins
lay slack on the neck of the drowsy beast; his hands were piled on the
pommel of the saddle as over his familiar pulpit; his dreamy moss-agate eyes
were on the tree-tops far ahead. In truth he was preparing a sermon on the
affection of one man for another and ransacking Scripture for illustrations;
and he meant to preach this the following Sunday when there would be some
one sadly missed among his hearers. Nevertheless he enjoyed great peace of
spirit this day: it was not John who rode behind him as the bridegroom:
otherwise he would as soon have returned to the town at the head of the
forces of Armageddon.

Behind the parson came William Penn in the glory of a new bridle and saddle
and a blanket of crimson cloth; his coat smooth as satin, his mane a
tumbling cataract of white silk; bunches of wild roses at his ears; his
blue-black eyes never so soft, and seeming to lift his feet cautiously like
an elephant bearing an Indian princess.

They were riding side by side, the young husband and wife. He keeping one
hand on the pommel of her saddle, thus holding them together; while with the
other he used his hat to fan his face, now hers, though his was the one that
needed it, she being cool and quietly radiant with the thoughts of her
triumph that day--the triumph of her wedding, of her own beauty. Furthermore
show was looking ahead to the house-warming that night when she would be
able to triumph again and also count her presents.

Then came Major and Mrs. Falconer. Her face was hidden by a veil and as they
passed, it was held turned toward him: he was talking, uninterrupted.

Then followed Horatio Turpin and Kitty Poythress; and then Erskine and his
betrothed, he with fresh feathers of the hawk and the scarlet tanager
gleaming in his cap above his swart, stern aquiline face. Then Peter, beside
the widow Babcock; he openly aflame and solicitous; she coy and discreetly
inviting, as is the wisdom of some. Then others and others and others--a
long gay pageant, filling the woods with merry voices and laughter.

They passed and the sounds died away--passed on to the town awaiting the, to
the house-warming, and please God, to long life and some real affection and
happiness.

Once he had expected to ride beside her at the head of this procession.
There had gone by him the vision of his own life as it was to have been.

Long after the last sound had ceased in the distance he was sitting at the
root of the red oak. The sun set, the moon rose, he was there still. A loud,
impatient neigh from his horse aroused him. He sprang lightly up, meaning to
ride all night and not to draw rein until he had crossed the Kentucky River
and reached Traveller's Rest, the home of Governor Shelby, where he had been
invited to break his travel.

All that nigh he rode and at sunrise was far away. Pausing on a height and
turning his horse's head, he sat a long time motion-less as a statue. Then
he struck his feet into its flank and all that day rode back again.

The sun was striking the tree-tops as he neared the clearing. He could see
her across the garden. She sat quite still, her face turned toward the
horizon. Against her breast, opened but forgotten, lay a book. He could
recognize it. By that story she had judged him and wished to guide him. The
smile smote his eyes like the hilt of a knight's sword used as a Cross to
drive away the Evil One. For he knew the evil purpose with which he had
returned.

And so he sat watching her until she rose and walked slowly to the house.

XXII

IT was early autumn when the first letters from him were received over the
mountains. All these had relation to Mount Vernon and his business there.

To the Transylvania Library Committee he wrote that the President had mad a
liberal subscription for the buying of books and that the Vice-President and
other public men would be likely to contribute.

His sonorous, pompous letter to a member of the Democratic Society was much
longer and in part as follows:

"When I made know to the President who I was and where I came from, he
regarded me with a look at once so stern and so benign, that I felt like one
of my school-boys overtaken in some small rascality and was almost of a mind
to march straight to a corner of the room and stand with my face to the
wall. If he had seized me by the coat collar and trounced me well, I should
somehow have felt that he had the right. From the conversations that
followed I am led to believe that he knows the name of every prominent
member of the Democratic Society of Lexington, and that he understands
Kentucky affairs with regard to national and international complications as
no other living man. While questioning me on the subject, he had the manner
of one who, from conscientiousness, would further verify facts which he had
already tested. But what impressed me even more than his knowledge was his
justice; in illustration of which I shall never forget his saying, that the
part which Kentucky had taken, or had wished to take, in the Spanish and
French conspiracies had caused him greater solicitude than any other single
event since the foundation of the National Government; but that nowhere else
in America had the struggle for immediate self-government been so necessary
and so difficult, and that nowhere else were the mistakes of patriotic and
able men more natural or more to be judged with mildness.

"I think I can quote his very words when he spoke of the foolish jealousies
and heartburnings, due to misrepresentations, that have influenced Kentucky
against the East as a section and against the Government as favouring it:
'The West derives from the East supplies requisite to its growth and
comfort; and what is perhaps of still greater consequence, it must of
necessity owe the secure enjoyment of indispensable outlets for its own
production to the weight, influence, and future maritime strength of the
Atlantic side of the Union, directed by an indissoluble community of
interest, as One Nation.'

"Memorable to me likewise was the language in which he proceeded to show
that this was true:

"'The inhabitants of our Western country have lately had a useful lesson on
this head. They have seen in the negotiations by the Executive, and in the
unanimous ratification by the Senate of the treaty with Spain, and in the
universal satisfaction of that event throughout the United States, a
decisive proof how unfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a
policy in the General Government and in the Atlantic States unfriendly to
their interests in regard to the Mississippi. . . . Will they not henceforth
be deaf to those advisers, if such there are, who would sever them from
their Brethren and connect them with Aliens?'

"I am frank to declare that, having enjoyed the high privilege of these
interviews with the President and been brought to judge rightly what through
ignorance I had judged amiss, I feel myself in honour bound to renounce my
past political convictions and to resign my membership in the Lexington
Democratic Society. Nor shall I join the Democratic Society of Philadelphia,
as had been my ardent purpose; and it will not be possible for me on
reaching that city to act as the emissary of the Kentucky Clubs. But I shall
lay before the Society the despatches of which I am the bearer. And will you
lay before yours the papers herewith enclosed, containing my formal
resignation with the grounds thereof carefully stated?"

To Mrs. Falconer he wrote bouyantly:

"I have crossed the Kentucky Alps, seen the American Caesar, carried away
some of his gold. I came, I saw, I overcame. How do you think I met the
President? I was riding toward Mount Vernon one quiet sunny afternoon and
unexpectedly came upon an old gentleman who was putting up some bars that
opened into a wheat-filed by the roadside. He had on long boots, corduroy
smalls, a speckled red jacket, blue coat with yellow buttons, and a
broad-brimmed hat. He held a hickory switch in his hand. An umbrella and a
long staff were attached to his saddle-bow. His limbs were so long, large,
and sinewy; his countenance so lofty, masculine, and contemplative; and
although he was of a presence so statue-like and venerable that my heart
with a great throb cried out, It is Washington!"

"My dear friend," he wrote at the close, "it is of no little worth to me
that I should have come to Mount Vernon at this turning-point of my life. I
find myself uplifted to a plane of thought and feeling higher than has ever
been trod by me. When I began to draw near this place, I seemed to be
mounting higher, like a man ascending a mountain; and ever since my arrival
there has been this same sense of rising into a still loftier atmosphere, of
surveying a vaster horizon, of beholding the juster relations of surrounding
objects.

"All this feeling has its origin in my contemplation of the character of the
President. You know that when a heavy sleet falls upon the Kentucky forest,
the great trees crack and split, or groan and stagger, with branches snapped
off or trailing. In adversity it is often so with men. But he is a vast
mountain-peak, always calm, always lofty, always resting upon a base that
nothing can shake; never higher, never lower, never changing; from every
quarter of the earth storms have rushed in and beaten upon him; but they
have passed; he is as he was. The heavens have emptied their sleets and
snows on his head,--these have made him look only purer, only the more
sublime.

"From the spectacle of this great man thus bearing the great burdens of his
great life, a new standard of what is possible to human nature has been
raised within me. I have seen with my own eyes a man whom the adverse forces
of the world have not been able to wreck--a lover of perfection, who has so
wrought it out in his character that to know him is to be awed into
reverence of his virtues. I shall go away from him with nobler hopes of what
a man may do and be.

"It is to you soley that I owe the honour of having enjoyed the personal
consideration of the President. His reception of me had been in the highest
degree ceremonious and distant; but upon my mentioning the names of father
and brother, his manner grew warm: I had touched that trait of affectionate
faithfulness with which he has always held on to every tie of kin and
friendship. That your father should have fought against him and your brother
under him made no difference in his memory. He had many questions to ask
regarding you--your happiness, your family--to some of which I could return
the answers that gave him pleasure or left him thoughtful. Upon my setting
out from Mount Vernon, his last words made me the bearer of his message to
you, the child of an old comrade and the sister or a gallant young soldier."

Beyond this there was nothing personal in his letter and nothing as to his
return.

When she next heard, he was in Philadelphia, giving his attention to the
choosing and shipment of the books. One piece of news, imparted in perfect
calmness by him, occasioned her acute disappointment. His expectation of
coming into possession of some ten thousand dollars had not quite been
realized. An appeal had been taken and the case was yet pending. He was
pleased neither with the good faith nor with the good sense of the counsel
engaged; and he would remain on the spot himself during the trial. He added
that he was lodging with a pleasant family. Then followed the long winter
during which all communication between the frontier and the seaboard was
interrupted. When spring returned at last and the earliest travel was
resumed, other letters came, announcing that the case had gone against him,
and that he had nothing.

She sold at once all the new linen that had been woven, got together all the
money she otherwise could and despatched it with Major Falconer's consent,
begging him to make use of it for the sake of their friendship--not to be
foolish and proud: there were lawyers' fees it could help to pay, or other
plain practical needs it might cover. But when the post-rider returned, he
brought it all back with a letter of gratitude: only, he couldn't accept it.
And the messenger had been warned not to let it be known that he was in
prison for debt on account of these same suit expenses; for having from the
first formed a low opinion of his counsel's honour and ability and having
later expressed this opinion at the door of the court-room with a good deal
of fire and a good deal of contempt, and being furthermore unable and
unwilling to pay the exorbitant fee, he had been promptly clapped into jail
by the incensed attorney, as well for his poverty and for his temper and his
pride.

In jail he spent that spring and summer and autumn. Then an important turn
was given to his history. It seems that among the commissions with which he
was charged on leaving Lexington was one from Edward West, the watchmaker
and inventor, who some time before, and long before Fulton, had made trial
of steam navigation with a small boat on the Town Fork of the Elkhorn, and
who desired to have his invention brought before the American Philosophical
Society of Philadelphia. He had therefore placed a full description of his
steamboat in John's hands with the request that he would enforce this with
the testimony of an eye-witness as to its having moved through water. At
this time, through Franklin's influence, the Society was keenly interested
in the work of inventors, having received also some years previous from
Hyacinthe de Magellan two hundred guineas to be used for rewarding the
authors of improvements and discoveries. Accordingly it took up the subject
of West's invention but desired to hear more regarding the success of the
experiment; and so requested John to appear before it at one of its
meetings. But upon looking for this obscure John and finding him in jail,
the committee were under the necessity of appearing before him. Whereupon,
grown interested in him and made acquainted with the ground of his
unreasonable imprisonment, some of the members effected his release--by
recourse to the attorney with certain well-direct threats that he could
easily be put into jail for his own debts. Not only this; but soon
afterwards the young Westerner was taken into the law-office of one of these
gentlemen, binding himself for a term of years.

It was not until spring that he wrote he humorously of his days in jail; but
when it came to telling her of the other matter, the words refused to form
themselves before his will or his hand to shape them on the paper. He would
do this in the next letter, he said to himself mournfully.

But early that winter Major Falconer had died, and his next letter was but a
short hurried reply to one from her, bringing him this intelligence. And
before he wrote again, certain grave events had happened that led him still
further to defer acquainting her with his new situation, new duties, new
plans.

That same spring, then, during which he was entering upon his career in
Philadelphia, she too began really to live. And beginning to live, she began
to build--inwardly and outwardly; for what is all life but ceaseless inner
and outer building?

As the first act, she sold one of the major's military grants, reserving the
ample, noble, parklike one on which she had passed existence up to this; and
near the cabin she laid the foundations of her house. Not the great
ancestral manor-house on the James and yet a seaboard aristocratic Virginia
country-place: two story brick with two-story front veranda of Corinthian
columns; wide hall, wide stairway; oak wood interior, hand-carved, massive;
sliding doors between the large library and large dining-room; great
bedrooms, great fireplaces, great brass fenders and fire-dogs, brass locks
and keys: full of elegance, spaciousness, comfort, rest.

In every letter she sent him that spring and summer and early autumn, always
she had something to tell him about this house, about the room in it built
for him, about the negros she had bought, the land she was clearing, the
changes and improvements everywhere: as to many things she wanted his
advice. That year also she sent back to Virginia for flower-seed and shrub
and plants--the same old familiar ones that had grown on her father's lawn,
in the garden, about the walls, along the water--some of which had been
bought over from England: the flags, the lilies, honeysuckles, calacanthus,
snowdrops, roses--all of them. Speaking of this, she wrote him that of
course that most of these would have to be set out that autumn, and little
could be done for grounds till the following season; but the house!--it was
to be finished before winter set in. In the last of these letters, she ended
by saying: "I think I know now the very day you will be coming back. I can
hear your horse's feet rustling in the leaves of--I said--October; but I
will say November this time."

His replies were unsatisfying. There had been the short, hurried, earnest
letter, speaking of Major Falconer's death: that was all right. But since
then a vague blinding mist had seemed to lie between her eyes and every
page. Something was kept hidden--some new trouble. "I shall understand
everything when he comes!" she would say to herself each time. "I can wait."
Her buoyancy was irrepressible.

Late that autumn the house was finished--one of those early country-places
yet to be seen here and there on the landscape of Kentucky, marking the
building era of the aristocratic Virginians and renewing in the wilderness
the architecture of the James.

She had taken such delight in furnishing her room: in the great bedstead
with its mighty posts, its high tester, its dainty, hiding curtains; such
delight in choosing, in bleaching, in weaving the linen for it! And the
pillowcases--how expectant they were on the two pillows now set side by side
at the head of the bed, with the delicate embroidery in the centre of each!
At first she had thought of working her initials within an oval-shaped vine;
but one day, her needle suddenly arrested in the air, she had simply worked
a rose.

Late one afternoon, when the blue of Indian summer lay on the walls of the
forest like a still sweet veil, she came home from a walk in the woods. Her
feet had been rustling among the brown leaves and each time she had laughed.
At her round white throat she had pinned a scarlet leaf, from an old habit
of her girlhood. But was not Kentucky turning into Virginia? Was not
womanhood becoming girlhood again? She was still so young--only
thirty-eight. She had the right to be bringing in from the woods a bunch of
the purple violets of November.

She sat down in her shadowy room before the deep fireplace; where there was
such comfort now, such loneliness. In early years at such hours she had like
to play. She resolved to get her a spinet. Yes; and she would have
myrtle-berry candles instead of tallow, and a slender-legged mahogany table
beside which to read again in the Spectator and "Tom Jones." As nearly as
she could she would bring back everything that she had been used to in her
childhood--was not all life still before her? If he were coming, it must be
soon, and she would know what had been keeping him--what it was that had
happened. She had walked to meet him so many times already. And the
heartless little gusts of wind, starting up among the leaves in the woods,
how often they had fooled her ear and left her white and trembling!

The negro boy who had been sent to town on other business and to fetch the
mail, soon afterwards knocked and entered. There was a letter from him--a
short one and a paper. She read the letter and could not believe her own
eyes, could not believe her own mind. Then she opened the paper and read the
announcement of it printed there": he was married.

That night in her bedroom--with the great clock measuring out life in the
corner--the red logs turning slowly to ashes--the crickets under the bricks
of the hearth singing of summer gone--that night, sitting by the
candle-stand, where his letter lay opened, in a nightgown white as white
samite, she loosened the folds of her heavy lustrous hair--wave upon
wave--until the edges that rippled over her forehead rippled down over her
knees. With the loosening of her hair somehow had come the loosening of her
tears. And with the loosening of her tears came the loosening of her hold
upon what she, until this night, had never acknowledged to herself--her love
for him, the belief that he had loved her.

The next morning the parson, standing a white, cold shepherd before his
chilly wilderness flock, preached a sermon from the text: "I shall go softly
all my years." While the heads of the rest were bowed during the last
moments of prayer, she rose and slipped out.

"Yes," she said to herself, gathering her veil closely about her face as she
alighted at the door of her house and the withered leaves of November were
whirled fiercely about her feet, "I shall go softly all my years."

XXIII

AFTER this the years were swept along. Fast came the changes in Kentucky.
The prophecy which John Gray had made to his school-children passed to its
realization and reality went far beyond it. In waves of migration, hundreds
upon hundreds of thousands of settlers of the Anglo-Saxon race hurried into
the wilderness and there jostled and shouldered each other in the race
passion of soil-owning and home-building; or always farther westward they
rushed, pushing the Indian back. Lexington became the chief manufacturing
town of the new civilization, thronged by merchants and fur-clad traders;
gathered into it were men and women making a society that would have been
brilliant in the capitals of the East; at its bar were heard illustrious
voices, the echoes of which are not yet dead, are past all dying; the genius
of young Jouett found for itself the secret of painting canvases so luminous
and true that never since in the history of the State have they been
equalled; the Transylvania University arose with lecturers famous enough to
be known in Europe: students of law and medicine travelled to it from all
parts of the land.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15