The Choir Invisible
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James Lane Allen >> The Choir Invisible
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He liked to dwell on the picture of her as a little school-girl herself:
sent fastidiously on her way, with long gloves covering her arms, a white
linen mask tied over her face to screen her complexion from tan, a sunbonnet
sewed tightly on her head to keep it secure from the capricious winds of
heaven and the more variable gusts of her own wilfulness; or on another
picture of her--as a lonely little lass--begging to be taken to court, where
she could marvel at her father, an awful judge in his wig and his robe of
scarlet and black velvet; or on a third picture of her--as when she was
marshalled into church behind a liveried servant bearing the family
prayer-book, sat in the raised pew upholstered in purple velvet, with its
canopy overhead and the gilt letters of the family name in front; and a
little farther away on the wall of the church the Lord's Prayer and the
Commandments put there by her father at the cost of two thousand pounds of
his best tobacco; finally to be preached to by a minister with whom her
father sometimes spilt wine on the table-cloth, and who had once fought a
successful duel behind his own sanctuary of peace and good will to all men.
Here succeeded other scenes; for as his interest deepened, he never grew
tired of this restorative image-building by which she could be brought
always more vividly before his imagination.
Her childhood gone, then, he followed her as she glided along the shining
creeks from plantation to plantation in a canoe manned by singing black
oarsmen: or rode abroad followed by her greyhound, her face concealed by a
black velvet riding mask kept in place by a silver mouth-piece held between
her teeth; or when autumn waned, went rolling slowly along towards
Williamsburg or Annapolis in the great family coach of mahogany, with its
yellow facings, Venetian windows, projection lamps, and high seat for
footmen and coachman --there to take a house for the winter season--there to
give and to be given balls, where she trod the minuet, stiff in blue
brocade, her white shoulders rising out of a bodice hung with gems, her
beautiful head bearing aloft its tower of long white feathers.
Yet with most of her life passed at the great lonely country-house by the
bright river: qazing wistfully out of the deep-mullioned windows of diamond
panes; flitting up and down the wide staircase of carven oak; buried in its
library, with its wainscoted walls crossed with swords and hung with
portraits of soldierly faces: all of which pleased him best, he being a
home-lover. So that when facts were lacking, sometimes he would kindle true
fancies of her young life in this place: as when she reclined on mats and
cushions in the breeze-swept balls, fanned by a slave and reading the Tatler
or the Spectator; or if it were the chill twilights of October, perhaps came
in from a walk in the cool woods with a red leaf at her white throat, and
seated herself at the spinet, while a low blaze from the deep chimney seat
flickered over her face, and the low music flickered with the shadows; or
when the white tempests of winter raved outside, gave her nights to the
reading of "Tom Jones," by the light of myrtleberry candles on a
slender-legged mahogany table.
But he had heard a great deal of her visits at the other great country
places of the day. Often at Greenway Court, where her father went to ride to
hounds with Lord Fairfax and Washington; at Carter's Grove; at the homes of
the Berkeleys, the Masons, the Spottswoods; once, indeed, at Castlewood
itself, where the stately Madam Esmond Warrington had placed her by her own
side at dinner and had kissed her check at leaving; but oftenest at Brandon
Mansion where one of her heroines had lived--Evelyn Byrd; so that, Sir
Godfrey Knell having painted that sad young lady, who now lies with a heavy
stone on her heavier heart in the dim old burying-ground at Westover, she
would have it that hers must be painted in the same identical fashion, with
herself sitting on a green bank, a cluster of roses in her hand, a
shepherd's crook across her knees.
And then, just as she was fairly opening into the earliest flower of
womanhood, the sudden, awful end of all this half-barbaric,
half-aristocratic life--the revolt of the colonies, the outbreak of the
Revolution, the blaze of way that swept the land like a forest fire, and
that enveloped in its furies even the great house on the James. One of her
brothers turned Whig, and already gone impetuously away in his uniform of
buff and blue, to follow the fortunes of Washington; the other siding with
the "home" across the sea, and he too already ridden impetuously away in
scarlet. Her proud father, his heart long torn between these two and
between his two countries, pacing the great hall, his face flushed with
wine, his eyes turning confusedly, pitifully, on the soldierly portraits of
his ancestors; until at last he too was gone, to keep his sword and his
conscience loyal to his king.
And then more dreadful years and still sadder times; as when one dark
morning toward daybreak, by the edge of a darker forest draped with snow
where the frozen dead lay thick, they found an officer's hat half filled
with snow, and near by, her father fallen face downward; and turning him
over, saw a bullet-hole over his breast, and the crimson of his blood on the
scarlet of his waistcoat; so departed, with manfulness out of this world and
leaving behind him some finer things than his debts and mortgages over dice
and cards and dogs and wine and lotteries. Then not long after that, the
manor-house on the James turned into the unkindest of battlefields; one
brother defending at the head of troops within, the other attacking at the
head of troops without; the snowy bedrooms becoming the red-stained wards of
a hospital; the staircase hacked by swords; the poor little spinet and the
slender-legged little mahogany tables overturned and smashed, the portraits
slashed, the library scattered. Then one night, seen from a distance, a vast
flame licking the low clouds; and afterwards a black ruin where the great
house had stood, and so the end of it all forever.
During these years, she, herself, had been like a lily in a lake, never
uprooted, but buried out of sight beneath the storm that tosses the waves
back and forth.
Then white and heavenly Peace again, and the liberty of the Anglo-Saxon race
in the New World. But with wounds harder to heal than those of the flesh;
with memories that were as sword-points broken off in the body; with glory
to brighten more and more, as time went on, but with starvation close at
hand. Virginia willing to pay her heroes but having naught wherewith to pay,
until the news comes from afar, that while all this has been going on in the
East, in the West the rude border-folk, the backwoodsmen of the Blue Ridge
and the Alleghanies, without generals, without commands, without help or
pay, or reward of any kind, but fighting of their own free will and dyeing
every step of their advance with their blood, had entered and conquered the
great neutral game-park of the Northern and the Southern Indians, and were
holding it against all plots: in the teeth of all comers and against the
frantic Indians themselves; against England, France, Spain,--a new land as
good as the best of old England--Kentucky! Into which already thousands upon
thousands were hurrying in search of homes --a new movement of the race--its
first spreading-out over the mighty continent upon its mightier destiny.
So had come about her hasty marriage with her young officer, whom Virginia
rewarded for his service with land; so had followed the breaking of all
ties, to journey by his side into the wilderness, there to undergo hardship,
perhaps death itself after captivity and torture such that no man who has
ever loved a woman can even look another man in the face and name.
Thus ever on and on unwittingly he wove the fibres of her life about him as
his shirt of destiny: following the threads nearer, always nearer, toward
the present, until he reached the day on which he had first met her on his
in the wilderness. From that time, he no longer relied upon hearsay, but
drew from his own knowledge of her to fill out and so far to end all these
fond tapestries of his memory and imagination.
But as one who has traversed a long gallery of pictures, and, turning to
look back upon all that he has passed, sees a straight track narrowing away
into the dimming distance, and only the last few life scenes standing out
lustrous and clear, so the school-master, gazing down this long vista,
beheld at the far end of it a little girl, whom he did not know, playing on
the silvery ancestral lawns of the James; at the near end, watching by his
bedside on this rude border of the West, a woman who had become
indispensable to his friendship.
More days passed, and still she did not return. His eagerness for her rose
and followed, and sorrowfully set with every sun.
Meantime he read the book, beginning it with an effort through finding it
hard to withdraw his mind from his present. But soon he was clutching it
with a forgotten hand and lay on his bed for hours joined fast to it with
unreleasing eyes; draining its last words into his heart, with a thirst
newly begotten and growing always the more quenchless as it was always being
quenched. So that having finished it, he read it again, now seeing the high
end of it all from the low beginning. And then a third time, more
clingingly, more yearningly yet, thrice lighting the fire in his blood with
the same straw. Like a vital fire it was left in him at last, a red and
white of flame; the two flames forever hostile, and seeking each to burn the
other out. And while it stayed in him thus as a fire, it had also filled all
tissues of his being as water fills a sponge--not dead water a dead
sponge--but as a living sap runs through the living sponges of a young oak
on the edge of its summer. So that never should he be able to forget it;
never henceforth be the same in knowledge or heart or conscience; and
nevermore was the lone spiritual battle of his life, if haply waged at all,
to be fought out by him with the earlier, simpler weapons of his innocence
and his youth, but with all the might of a tempted man's high faith in the
beauty and the right and the divine supremacy of goodness.
One morning his wounds had begun to require attention. No one had yet come
to him: it was hardly the customary hour: and moreover, by rising in bed he
could see that something unusual had drawn the people into the streets. The
news of a massacre on the western frontier, perhaps; the arrival of the
post-rider with angry despatches from the East; or the torch of revolution
thrown far northward from New Orleans. His face had flushed with feverish
waiting and he lay with his eyes turned restlessly toward the door.
It was Mrs. Falconer who stepped forward to it with hesitation. But as soon
as she caught sight of him, she hurried to the bed.
"What is the trouble? Have you been worse?"
"Oh, nothing! It is nothing."
"Why do you say that--to me?"
"My shoulder. But it is hardly time for them to come yet."
She hesitated and her face showed how serious her struggle was.
"Let me," she said firmly.
He looked up quickly, confusedly, at her with a refusal on his lips; but she
had already turned away to get the needful things in readiness, and he
suffered her, if for no other reason than to avoid letting her see the
painful rush of blood to his face. As she moved about the room, she spoke
only to ask unavoidable questions; he, only to answer them; and neither
looked at the other.
Then he sat up in the bed and bared his neck and shoulder, one arm and half
his chest; and with his face crimson, turned his eyes away. She had been
among the women in the fort during that summer thirteen years before, when
the battle of the Blue Licks had been fought; and speaking in the quietest,
most natural of voices, she now began to describe how the wounded had
straggled in from the battle-field; one rifleman reeling on his horse and
held in his seat by the arm of a comrade, his bleeding, bandaged head on
that comrade's shoulder; another borne on a litter swung between two horses;
others --footmen--holding out just long enough to come into sight of the
fort, there to sink down; one, a mere youth, fallen a mile back in the hot
dusty buffalo trace with an unspoken message to some one in his brave,
beautiful, darkening eyes. But before this, she told him how the women had
watched all that night and the day previous inside the poor little
earth-mound of a defence against artillery, built by order of Jefferson and
costing $37.5O; the women taking as always the places of the men who were
gone away to the war; becoming as always the defenders of the land, of the
children, of those left behind sick or too old to fight. How from the black
edge of dawn they had strained their eyes in the direction of the battle
until at last a woman's cry of agony had rent the air as the first of the
wounded had ridden slowly into sight. How they had rushed forth through the
wooden gates and heard the tidings of it all and then had followed the
scenes and the things that could never be told for pity and grief and love
and sadness.
After a little pause she began to speak of Major Falconer as the
school-master had never known her to speak; tremulously of his part in that
battle, a Revolutionary officer serving as a common backwoods soldier;
eloquently of his perfect courage then and always, of his perfect manliness;
and she ended by saying that the worst thing that could ever befall a woman
was to marry an unmanly man.
"If any one single thing in life could ever have killed me," she said, "it
would have been that."
With her last words she finished the dressing of his wounds. Spots of the
deepest rose were on her cheeks; her eyes were lighted with proud fire.
Confusedly he thanked her and, lying back on his pillow, closed his eyes and
turned his face away.
When she had quickly gone he sat up in the bed again. He drew the book
guiltily from under his pillow, looked long and sorrowfully at it, and then
with a low cry of shame--the first that had ever burst from his lips--he
hurled it across the room and threw himself violently down again, with his
forehead against the logs, his eyes hidden, his face burning.
XIV
THE first day that John felt strong enough to walk as far as that end of the
town, he was pulling himself unsteadily past the shop when he saw Peter and
turned in to rest and chat.The young blacksmith refused to speak to him.
"Peter!" said John with a sad, shaky voice, holding out his hand, "have I
changed so much? Don't you know me?"
"Yes; I know you," said Peter. "I wish I didn't."
"I don't think I recognize you any more," replied John, after a moment of
silence. "What's the matter?"
"Oh, you get along," said Peter. "Clear out!"
John went inside and drank a gourd of water out of Peter's cool bucket, came
back with a stool and sat down squarely before him.
"Now look here," he said with the candour which was always the first law of
nature with him, "what have I done to you?"
Peter would neither look nor speak; but being powerless before kindness, he
was beginning to break down.
"Out with it," said John. "What have I done?""You know what you've said."
"What have I said about you?" asked John, now perceiving that some mischief
had been at work here. "Who told you I had said anything about you?"
"It's no use for you to deny it."
"Who told you?"
"O'Bannon!"
"O'Bannon!" exclaimed John with a frown. "I've never talked to O'Bannon
about you--about anything."
"You haven't abused me?" said Peter, wheeling on the schoolmaster, eyes and
face and voice full of the suffering of his wounded self-love and of his
wounded affection.
"I hope I've abused nobody!" said John proudly.
"Come in here!" cried Peter, springing up and hurrying into his shop.
Near the door stood a walnut tree with wide-spreading branches wearing the
fresh plumes of late May, plumes that hung down over the door and across the
windows, suffusing the interior with a soft twilight of green and brown
shadows. A shaft of sunbeams penetrating a crevice fell on the white neck of
a yellow collie that lay on the ground with his head on his paws, his eyes
fixed reproachfully on the heels of the horse outside, his ears turned back
toward his master. Beside him a box had been kicked over: tools and shoes
scattered. A faint line of blue smoke sagged from the dying coals of the
forge toward the door, creeping across the anvil bright as if tipped with
silver. And in one of the darkest corners of the shop, near a bucket of
water in which floated a huge brown gourd, Peter and John sat on a bench
while the story of O'Bannon's mischief-making was begun and finished. It was
told by Peter with much cordial rubbing of his elbows in the palms of his
hands and much light-hearted smoothing of his apron over his knees. At times
a cloud, passing beneath the sun, threw the shop into heavier shadow; and
then the school-master's dark figure faded into the tone of the sooty wall
behind him and only his face, with the contrast of its white linen collar
below and the bare discernible lights of his auburn hair above--his face,
proud, resolute, astounded, pallid, suffering--started out of the gloom like
a portrait from an old canvas.
"And this is why you never came to see me." He had sprung up like a man made
well, and was holding Peter's hand and looking reproachfully into his eyes.
"I'd have seen you dead first," cried Peter gaily, giving him a mighty slap
on the shoulder. "But wait! O'Bannon's not the only man who can play a
joke!"
John hurriedly left the shop with a gesture which Peter did not understand.
The web of deceptive circumstances that had been spun about him had been
brushed away at last: he saw the whole truth now--saw his own blindness,
blundering, folly, injustice.
He was on his way to Amy already.
When he had started out, he had thought he should walk around a little and
then lie down again. Now with his powerful stride come back to him, he had
soon passed the last house of the town and was nearing the edge of the
wilderness. He took the same straight short course of the afternoon on which
he had asked Mrs. Falconer's consent to his suit. As he hurried on, it
seemed to him a long time since then! What experiences he had undergone!
What had he not suffered! How he was changed!
"Yes," he said over and over to himself, putting away all other thoughts in
a resolve to think of this nearest duty only. "If I've been unkind to her,
if I've been wrong, have I not suffered?"
He had not gone far before his strength began to fail. He was forced to sit
down and rest. It was near sundown when he reached the clearing.
"At last!" he said gratefully, with his old triumphant habit of carrying out
whatever he undertook. He had put out all his strength to get there.
He passed the nearest field--the peach trees--the garden--and took the path
toward the house.
"Where shall I find her?" he thought. "Where can I see her alone?"
"Between him and the house stood a building of logs and plaster. It was a
single room used for the spinning and the weaving of which she had charge.
Many a time he had lain on the great oaken chest into which the homespun
cloth was stored while she sat by her spinning-wheel; many a talk they had
had there together, many a parting; and many a Saturday twilight he had put
his arms around her there and turned away for his lonely walk to town,
planning their future. "If she should only be in the weaving-room!"
He stepped softly to the door and looked in. She was there-- standing near
the middle of the room with her face turned from him. The work of the day
was done. On one side were the spinning-wheels, farther on a loom; before
her a table on which the cloth was piled ready to be folded away; on the
other the great open chest into which she was about to store it. She had
paused in revery, her hands clasped behind her head.
At the sight of her and with the remembrance of how he had misjudged and
mistreated her--most of all swept on by some lingering flood of the old
tenderness--he stepped forward put his arms softly around her, drew her
closely to him, and buried his check against hers:
"Amy!" he murmured, his voice quivering his whole body trembling, his heart
knocking against his ribs like a stone.
She struggled out of his arms with a cry and recognizing him, drew her
figure up to its full height. Her eyes filled with passion, cold and
resentful.
He made a gesture.
"Wait!" he cried. "Listen."
He laid bare everything--from his finding of the bundle to the evening of
the ball.
He was standing by the doorway. A small window in the opposite wall of the
low room opened toward the West. Through this a crimson light fell upon his
face revealing its pallor, its storm, its struggle for calmness.
She stood a few yards off with her face in shadow. As she had stepped
backward, one of her hands had struck against her spinning-wheel and now
rested on it; with the other she had caught the edge of the table. From the
spinning-wheel a thread of flax trailed to the ground; on the table lay a
pair of iron shears.
As he stood looking at her facing him thus in cold half-shadowy anger--at
the spinning wheel with its trailing flax--at, the table with its iron
shears--at her hands stretched forth as if about to grasp the one and to lay
hold on the other--he shudderingly thought of the ancient arbitress of Life
and Death--Fate the mighty, the relentless. The fancy passed and was
succeeded by the sense of her youth and loveliness. She wore a dress of
coarse snow-white homespun, narrow in the skirt and fitting close to her
arms and neck and to the outlines of her form. Her hair was parted simply
over her low beautiful brow. There was nowhere a ribbon or a trifle of
adornment: and in that primitive, simple, fearless revelation of itself her
figure had the frankness of a statue. While he spoke the anger died out of
her face. But in its stead came something worse--hardness; and something
that was worse still--an expression of revenge.
"If I was unfeeling with you," he implored, "only consider! You had broken
your engagement without giving any reason; I saw you at the party dancing
with Joseph; I believed myself trifled with, I said that if you could treat
in that way there was nothing you could say that I cared to hear. I was
blind to the truth; I was blinded by suffering.
"If you suffered, it was your own fault," she replied, calm as the Fate that
holds the shears and the thread. "I wanted to explain to you why I broke my
engagement and why I went with Joseph: you refused to allow me."
"But before that! Remember that I had gone to see you the night before. You
had a chance to explain then. But you did not explain. Still, I did not
doubt that your reason was good. I did not ask you to state it. But when I
saw you at the party with Joseph, was I not right, in thinking that the time
for an explanation had passed?"
"No," she replied. "As long as I did not give any reason, you ought not to
have asked for one; but when I wished to give it, you should have been ready
to hear it."
He drew himself up quickly.
"This is a poor pitiful misunderstanding. I say, forgive me! We will let it
pass. I had thought each of us was wrong--you first, I, afterward."
"I was not wrong either first or last!"
"Think so if you must! Only, try to understand me! Amy, you know I've loved
you. You could never have acted toward me as you have, if you had not
believed that. And that night--the night you would not see me alone--I went
to ask you to marry me. I meant to ask you the next night. I am here to ask
you now! . . ."
He told her of the necessity that had kept him from speaking sooner, of the
recent change which made it possible. He explained how he had waited and
planned and had shaped his whole life with the thought that she would share
it. She had listened with greater interest especially to what he had said
about the improvement in his fortunes. Her head had dropped slightly forward
as though she were thinking that after all perhaps she had made a mistake.
But she now lifted it with deliberateness:
"And what right had you to be so sure all this time that I would marry you
whenever you asked me? What right had you to take it for granted that
whenever you were ready, I would be?"
The hot flush of shame dyed his face that she could deal herself such a
wound and not even know it.
He drew himself up again, sparing her:
"I loved you. I could not love without hoping. I could not hope without
planning. Hoping, planning, striving,--everything!--it was all because I
loved you!" And then he waited, looking down on her in silence.
She began to grow nervous. She had stooped to pick up the thread of flax and
was passing it slowly between her fingers. When he spoke again, his voice
showed that he shook like a man with a chill:
"I have said all I can say. I have offered all I have to offer. I am
waiting."
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