Chapter IV: Part 4

As we rode away from the dairy we met Elsie coming down the wooded path, a smile on her pretty lips.

"That girl," said my Aunt, "is a fine creature, and do you know, Jack, if I know anything of breeding, she's got rare blood in her. It shows in a hundred ways. Now, watch her."

She was dressed in white, her hair hanging in two plaits down her back. "I am playing at being in Scotland," she said as we came up, "and I have gathered these Scotch wild flowers for Mr. Jack." She handed them up to me, and when my eyes met hers in thanks Aunt Lucretia saw the blush that flushed her face. She looked sharply at me a moment and then smiled. I walked to the barn gate, Elsie going with us, and telling me of the Scotch flowers and trees. "I would be quite happy here," she said, "if we only had the heather on these hills."

Aunt Lucretia turned at the gate. "You must come up to the house some night this week, and we'll have a Bobbie Burns evening," said she.

"Oh, thank you," Elsie answered, smiling at me instead of at Aunt Lucretia.

"Who was that you were talking to before we met you?" I asked. "The gentleman who rode off when he saw us coming?"

"That was Captain Braxton. He has asked my hand in marriage, but I dinna think I shall," she added, with a little sigh. "I dinna like him as I should, but I dinna say yet, for I shall think it over. He's noo like Mr. Jack." Her little Scotch words would slip in now and then.

I flushed and looked at Aunt Lucretia, who sat biting her lips as if in anger. Elsie was all frankness. She put her hand in mine trustingly, and instantly I knew why she had told me.

"No brother could love you more than I do," I said. "Tammas and Marget raised me, too, so I'm really your brother." I laughed to hide my anger at Braxton Bragg and the turn affairs had taken.

She had lifted my hand with a loyal little gesture and pressed it to her cheek before I could withdraw it. "You'll come to see me, often, won't you, Mr. Jack? I need you to help me."

"Jack," I said, smiling at her, "just Jack from now on."

"Oh, but that's not respectful, and I'd not be wanting in respect for you for the world."

"I'll not call you Elsie then, any more," I answered, "nor make the request of you I'm going to make."

"Jack, then," she said. "And your request--it is already granted."

"That you'll not see Braxton Bragg alone until--well, until I have talked with you," I said earnestly.

"O--h," and her eyes opened wide. "Jack, why, of course. If he writes to me again I'll send the letter to you before I answer it."

"Bring it," I said; "I want to see it right away."

We rode back to the house.

"Jack," said my aunt, "he is the most contemptible reversion to a scrub that ever came from a good pedigree! But if he tries that game on that child--he has played it recklessly since you left--I'll kill him myself--damn him!"

I soon forgot Elsie. I caught sight of Eloise entertaining Goff in our old bower, and I could see that as he sat there, smoking and watching her, he already thought she was the Countess of Carfax.

*CHAPTER XI*

*TWO WAYS OF LOVE*

I knew that Colonel Goff would not only stay the afternoon but the evening also. He had been doing it ever since the war, for he regarded his General's home as his also. The assurance of the man incensed me. The divine right of his old kings seemed to have been born in him; and now that he had won Eloise, she and The Home Stretch and all that it contained were his whenever he chose to have them.

Eloise would tease him in pure wantonness, and scorn him, and even ridicule him; for all of which he worshipped her, as is apt to be the way with men. Yet I very quickly noticed the little touch of sadness, which, despite her efforts, fell over her so suddenly. To her wit and repartee, her fun and humor, his only answer would be flashes of his fine teeth, and his favorite exclamation, "Fawncy now, but isn't that a blooming good one?" I was convinced that he loved Eloise and was proud of her; but I thought it was such a feeling as he might have for any beautiful animal, the same worship he might easily have bestowed upon an Arab mare of the desert.

It was not long before Colonel Goff and Aunt Lucretia were in their usual dispute about horses and he was scolding her for letting Eloise ride Satan: "Ah, that unregistered fool! Really, my dear madam, you should not let her go near him, he'll be the death of her yet. Now, there is my imported Irish hunter; he's got a head as well as legs; say now--suppose I just send him over for her," and he looked at Eloise to see what she would say.

Eloise threw up her fine head significantly.

"The idea, Colonel Goff! Why, I wouldn't be caught riding him! That big thing better than Satan! Why His Satanic Majesty can gallop rings all around him."

Colonel Goff laughed. "Fawncy!"

"Yes, fawncy!" said Eloise, mimicking him, which made him flush again and then look at her admiringly.

Aunt Lucretia broke in. "He can," she said very firmly. "I wonder, Colonel Goff, why you should send to England for a horse when you have better ones at home?"

Colonel Goff laughed loudly.

"Why you even think that bang-tailed son of Nestor can jump," went on Aunt Lucretia, laying her trap quietly for him.

This was the one strong point of the son of Nestor, and the one thing about him that his owner had published on his arrival.

"Madam," he said with great seriousness, a bit offended, "madam, I think I told you before that he held the championship for cross-country at Melton-Mowbry."

"Oh, so you did," said my Aunt Lucretia, ever so sweetly, "and yet I believe Satan can beat him both at the distance and over the hurdles."

Goff laughed, but not as though pleased. He was too well-bred to reply to Aunt Lucretia in her kind. So he only tapped his boot, and looked at Eloise, who smiled sweetly at him, as if urging him on.

"I was talking the other day to Secretary Roswick of our State Fair," went on Aunt Lucretia calmly, "and was entering some of my own things. Now, Roswick, you know, makes me put up about half of his programmes. He has asked me to get up some novelties on the side. We'll just have a hurdle race if you say so."

"Capital, capital!" said Goff, for the first time showing excitement. Then he quieted down suddenly. "What am I thinking about? What, in this unregistered country, could go against Nestor, champion hurdler of his class?"

"Satan," said Aunt Lucretia, smiling sweetly.

"Fawncy!" shouted the Colonel decisively.

"I'll lay you five hundred that he can," said my Aunt, "and I don't know a thing in the world about your game."

"Madam," said Goff, quietly, "I have never taken an unfair advantage of a woman."

"Colonel Goff," said my Aunt very seriously, "you know as well as you know anything, that if I know anything it is horses, that I am of age, and that I am good for all my obligations. I'll bet you five hundred dollars that Satan will beat your horse at his own game."

"Do you know, madam," said Goff, "that a jumping horse is born to jump? Not one in a thousand can go over a three-foot hurdle, and this brute of yours--"

"Brute?" said Eloise, icily. "Brute, Colonel Goff, he is an angel! He can do anything."

"And you will ride him?" he asked.

"Nobody else can," said my Aunt. "Yes, she'll ride him and beat you, too."

"I'll take your bet," said he. "I'd give five hundred dollars to ride once in a race with the only girl in America who is really English. How she ever got into this blooming country I can't see!"

I left my Aunt and the Colonel arranging their new game for the Cumberland meeting. I did not take much interest in Eloise riding against him!

I had ordered my horse, intending to ride over to Ned's; I wanted to see my pets there, Little Sister, and Captain Skipper and the new arrival. Eloise followed me through the wood lot. She came up and slipped her arm through mine, and its very touch carried a sadness, it seemed as if the quick electric pulse was gone. In her eyes there was a weariness, an indefinable longing. It touched me to see her so, my live, light-hearted, foster sister of old.

"Jack," she sighed, "I am--I am--" She stopped and looked up into my face.

"What?" I asked. "I should think you would be happy, so soon to marry an Earl."

"It is sooner than you suppose," she said seriously. "He does not wish it known yet because the proper notification has not come from his attorneys in England, but--but--Jack--Jack, his brother is already dead and he wants me to marry him. I have already promised to marry him next month."

I knew she saw me pale. I could have cursed myself for the weakness.

She went on. "When I promised him six months ago it was all so vague, so far off, and I was so miserable, Jack--so homeless and badgered, and dependent, it was all so far off, I thought--waiting for his brother to die, and now! You know how these English are, they take these things so seriously, their marriages and promises, they are so matter-of-fact about it, and so consistent: why, Jack, he looks on me already as his bride. He is just as busy planning for our future, arranging how the estate is to be remodeled, what home we are to have, I couldn't get out of it honorably even--Jack, even if--"

"Even if you should happen to love me?" I said, looking very earnestly into her eyes.

She nodded, her head dropped low. For the first time in her life I saw tears in her eyes.

"Oh, Jack, I am miserable! It was all so far off once,--now--only next month,--and you know I'd die before I'd deceive him--big boy that he is, and trusting and worshipping me, Jack. Yes, that is what hurts me--worshipping me as he does--I couldn't. I couldn't, Jack! If I have any one strong thing in me, you know it is--"

"Keeping your faith with your friends," said I. She nodded. "Do you think I am wicked to marry him this way? Won't you come, in after years, to despise me?"

For answer I stooped and kissed her. She put both her arms around my neck. "Please stay with me," she cried, "I do so need you. I just heard it to-day. It was why he came and stayed so long. Please stay and be with me till he leaves. Just stay with me, Little Brother, this time."

"Why," I said, "this time? Surely he will resent it. Any man would want this night of all others to be with you."

"Jack, you don't understand. I am miserable. That is why I rode Satan as I did. When I put him at that fence I hoped--it is wicked I know--but I hoped that he would kill me."

She was sobbing in my arms.

"Eloise, don't," I said; "let me go. Don't you know that it is harder on me than it is on you? Do you think I am made of stone--of wood--to come home expecting sweetness and find it all rue--my dreams about you--"

"Just to-night, Jack. You'll--you'll laugh at me when I say why, but, but, you know how punctilious these Englishmen are, and he thinks I must kiss him to-night when he goes."

I felt the hot blood rush to my heart. It was instinct, the reversion of a past ancestor who fought another man for kissing his wilderness bride.

"Eloise, you wouldn't?"

"If you'll kiss me again, Jack, as you did just now. I never felt so before--until--but it you'll kiss me again--that way, I'll never kiss him--never!"

I held her in my arms. I kissed her eyes, which were moist. I kissed her mouth, and it seemed as though my soul went into hers; for when, in desperation, in an exhilaration which was all but madness I broke away I heard her cry faintly, "_Jack, Jack!_" ...

I saw her arms around the great fatherly tree, her head against it.

*CHAPTER XII*

*WORK AND MINE ACRE*

There is but one balm for a heartache, and that is work.

Nothing in all my life had left me so stranded; had killed so utterly the sweetness of all my dreams as this giving up of Eloise. And with no dream there is no life.

I felt that she was lost to me now: if she were not engaged to Colonel Goff, there was nothing in me now, I thought bitterly, that could awaken in her the real love she had never felt for anyone. Yet with all her spirit, her apparent indifference, and even recklessness, I knew she had a throne in her heart of hearts for love on a higher plane than those who love easily. I knew that only one side of her had ever been revealed, either to herself or to the world; that beautiful as she was there was a yet more beautiful side to her; and that brave as she was there were yet deeper depths of bravery within her, a moral bravery which under the spur of her soul would take another leap, as far greater than that she took on Satan as the brave leap of Pegasus over the clouds. I had known her always. I knew what she did not know: that I was loving an Eloise that was yet, and forever would be, an unseen star in an unknown heaven, above the head of the man who had never yet learned to look up. Should I sit still and let him take her, let him do this irreparable wrong both to himself, and to her and to me? My heart cowered a moment at the thought of its hopelessness. Then--how wonderful is the word of the soul unto the soul, the passed soul to the passing soul, the absent soul to the present soul,--I thought of the words of Aunt Lucretia: "What would Andrew Jackson do, Jack?" Into my soul came the steel of Andrew Jackson. With the quickness of the thought came the change. "_Aye, my unseeing old grandsire," I said, "you shall see whether I am a fighter or not! ... For Eloise._"

From that moment I resolved to fight. God's blessings on the memory of Andrew Jackson!

But I would fight in my own way. For I knew that Eloise's idea of love was a love of life and death: she who would ride a mad horse over a five-foot fence for the conquering instinct of a mastering nature, what would she not do for love--_her love_--and she a woman? For let it be writ both of history and life, 'tis woman at last who loves. Man knows not love. Even as his own life came to him the babe of Love and Passion, so only can he give that unto another. But she who gave it being, _her name was Love_! Oh, to win such a love as I knew Eloise would bring to me; which she herself knew not was there.

I lost my bitterness of it all when it came clear to me. Before, I had been maddened to think she would barter this love of hers for title and wealth and the place it bought. But now I saw clearly, now I knew that she was blameless, because never having had that love, she knew not what she was giving away. Like an Indian princess, who owned an island of pearls, but did not know their value, she would give them to the first foreigner, coming down in ships, for the baubles of his forecastle.

But I would show my Princess what her pearls were worth. I would string them in globes of beauty around her neck, and brow, and belt, and I would put my crowning Great Pearl of Sacrifice into the diadem of her hair, and then I would lead her down to the sweet glassy sea of her own unbartered, unbought home, her own sweet kingdom of kindness and content, and by the still waters, in God's own groves, I would lead her until her feet dipped into the mirroring pools, and, kissing her, bid her look for the first time and behold Love crowned.

Would she barter herself for baubles then? Would she not know the difference between pearls and paste beads? I, yes, happy I, would show it to her; I would introduce Eloise to herself--Eloise loveless to Eloise in love.

I laughed now in the happiness of my little conceit. Very distinctly I could hear my Aunt Lucretia say: "_Sure, Jack, that is the way Andrew Jackson did--took her from the toad who had deceived her, right out of his arms, and then killed every other toad who croaked about it. Sure!_" ...

There was much for me to do, both of love and duty. My duty was work, and that came first. For I had faith both in God and myself, and if I did my duty and my work, God would give the rest to me.

Work--the glory and sweetness of it! And to find one's work in one's life--that One Work which fits the One Life: this to me has always been the greatest gift of the Giver.

There was so much for me to do. I was the pioneer of a great truth in the world's greatest country. In all great causes it is the pioneer who is the sacrifice, it is he who is held up to contempt and scorn. Strange that it should be so! That he who sees first the Great New Truth, the Blessing that has been withheld because of no one to see it, the Great Invention uplifting through one man all men into a new world, that it is he who must suffer....

The hurt does not matter from those who love us not. I was willing that the herd should think of me as it would, as its own little light permitted, but I had that pride of race which every honest man has, and I wanted the love of my fighting old grandsire. And he openly despised my profession, and he secretly despised me. "What's the use of worrying about making more on an acre of this rich soil?" he would say. "Ain't The Home Stretch rich enough? And fiddling about saving trees--why damn it, ain't there too many of them already? Didn't I have all the hard work of my life clearing some of the land, and my father before me, that it might make us a living!"

He would never understand me, of course. The discoverer is never understood, and the forester falls in the same class, more maligned than any of them. He would never understand that it was not a sentimental dream to save trees because they are trees, but to grow them and harvest them in the right way, even as wheat is harvested: that we did not want to see rich acres, the homes of unborn people, covered only with trees, when the land was needed for bread, but the unfertile hillside, and the heads of our water streams. There, we insisted, trees should remain because that was Nature's own way of protecting the land from droughts and floods. Nor could I hope to make him understand that rich as the land was--even as a man of genius--it should have a chance to bring forth all the fruit that was in it. That our waste was something appalling, our methods crude, and that our people, with all their plenty, were only half fed; that while we were rich and The Home Stretch was a garden, the poor farmers of the hills and less fertile places were living only half lives, they and their families, because there was no one to show them something better.

My Aunt I knew was sorry for me; but I could see she hoped and believed I would yet get over it. And in my own heart I felt that if I had chosen West Point, perhaps Eloise--

I flushed, ashamed. How prone our little weak Self always is to play Arnold with our Soul!

I began at once to work. It is what one does with one's own acre, not what one preaches should be done to the acres of others, that convinces his neighbors at last, and settles the standard of his life's text among them.

I started it on a gullied hillside of The Home Stretch. These gullies I filled. Young trees were easy to transplant from the over-crowded growth of the woodland. Nature is at last her own greatest doctor. I gave her the soil she had been begging for, and very quickly she studded it with little pioneers of the game black locust, to hold back that which she had, to shadow it with coolness and damp that grass might grow beneath, and mold form, and the blistered soil have yet another chance, and that later the trees might rear their great heads high, stealing from the clouds the moisture for the earth.

My neighbors knew me, had known me from a boy, and it was not difficult to get them to meet me at the little schoolhouse once a week and hear my talk. Now talks all depend upon one's honesty and earnestness, not on one's brightness; in a month they became interested and were one with me. They had always looked upon a forest as a necessary evil, as a great wood put there to be cut down, burnt, destroyed, that man might till the land. Indeed, from their pioneer fathers, whose greatest burden was clearing the land, there had come down to them the instinct of forest hatred, just as had come their instinct of Indian hatred, bear and wolf and panther hatred. But at the same time I knew that they had in the heart of their pedigrees another and sweeter instinct, and that it came from their forest-loving Briton and Saxon and even remote Aryan sires, whose ancestors before them, had long ago gone through the same fight with the primeval forest, but whose children after them for a thousand years, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, were forced to go back to tree-planting, to forest preservation, or die with their soil. It did not take much to make this forest preserving, land-preserving, life-preserving instinct outcrop again among their children here. It was a revelation to them when I explained that the true forester was he who assisted the farmer and the lumberman in rearing more trees and better trees where they should be, and destroying the worthless ones, even all of them if need were, where they should not be. In their prejudice they thought a forester was a dreamer, an impractical person, who preached forest preservation from sentiment, and would let the trees grow where children ought to grow. I won them all when I explained that a tree, when ripe, should be garnered, just as corn or wheat, or any other product of the soil. But during the years while it ripens for the saw, the young things beneath it, which should take its place, must be protected, and their life preserved in the harvesting of the ripe trees; or if the land was to be cleared for tilling, other places on the farm, especially the unproductive hillside, and the sources of the stream, should be given over to forestry. This would save the hillsides from washing and depositing their flinty soil over the rich valleys below, and guarding the water head, preserve the springs. But when the tree is ripe it should be harvested, unless it stood in some park or yard or town for a street ornament or shade. If it were in any of these places it should die in the ripeness of beautiful old age, a younger one taking its place. It was not long before I had a class of forestry, and there was much of the German methods I had learned in every branch of farming which I gave them for nothing, that helped me greatly. It is what one gives for nothing that brings in the greatest returns at last.

But my greatest help was in a flood early in May. The headwaters of the Cumberland lie in the Appalachian range, that great wooded mountain strip which mothers the headwaters of the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland, and so of all the states they water. That long ridge of wooded slope had been a sponge, the gauge that controlled the flow from half the tillable Union. On the Tennessee, the forest had been brutally butchered, and on the Cumberland as badly treated. The flood came. There was but little to hold, and check it, and we had a deluge such as was never known before. Even my grandsire, seeing it, admitted what I said. The seemingly wasted word had fallen as the drift of the elm tree's shaft had taken root in a corner of the old field.

*CHAPTER XIII*

*THE UNATTAINABLE*

My work took me daily to Tammas's cottage. There was nothing so restful to me as these two good people, and their sweetness and cheer, and Elsie held my interest. I had always been fond of her, and now that she had grown into this rare, delicate flower, so sensitively turned, so romantically original, I found the greatest pleasure in studying her, and, in humoring her, as everybody did who came into her sphere. She commanded obedience as readily as she gave it. Every day was a different mood, and always a romance with her. One day she had on a large white apron, and was helping Tammas with the churning.

"I am playing a new game, to-day, Jack," she said, pulling me to a corner of the dairy where the spring water whirled through the stone troughs. "You'll laugh when you hear it," she added, her eyes shining into mine.

"I'll not," I said, "I'll be more apt to play with you. What is the game to-day?"

She laughed merrily. "Well, to-day I am a duke's daughter, who was secretly exchanged in her cradle with the dairyman's baby. Now only three people know it; the dairyman, who is old, and about to die; and who is so sorry that he ever did it, but he did so want his own daughter to be a lady in the land; and me, whom he has told at the last minute, and the bad, bold knight, very dashing, who has bribed the dairyman to tell him, and who wishes very much to marry me. But I want to marry my own bonny prince, you see."

"I should think he'd be proud and loyally love his dairymaid bride," I laughed, pinching her cheek.

"But, Jack, you are so stupid," she said, pouting. "You don't catch on. I can't play a game by myself. I want you to play the prince."

Tammas stood looking on, his face in its favorite Scotch grin. "Weel, weel, did ye ever hear the like o' that, an' it's no' leap-year either!"

I could see that he was pleased and proud.

"And it is the prince I'll play from now on, my ane braw lassie," I said, dropping into her own dialect. "Isn't that what you call them in Scotch?" I asked.

"An' noo," said Tammas, "a' lasses get unco thrang when their lovers are aboot, to gar them think they are unco worthy."

Elsie laughed and went vigorously to work, molding butter pounds. I stood watching her while I talked to Tammas. She was not all a child. There was a certain queenliness, a quiet dignity about her that was very attractive. In her fine-cut face, deep down in her great blue eyes, in her very poise there was a quiet naturalness, a pretty aloofness which spoke of reserve forces, that seemed to soothe me. God only knew how I needed it!

After an hour with her and Tammas I felt, as I went down the wooded path, under the great trees of the dairy lot, as I had when I heard for the first time, in the deep hours of the night, the chimes of the bells of Munich. I had not cared for the service with all its symbols and, to me, its meaningless metaphors; but I had loved its music, the great bells which calmed my soul.

I wish to join a new church. I am tired of these which preach. I want to join one where there is no preaching, no talking, nothing but music, music which makes you feel God. Why all this preaching anyway? God and talk do not go together. Religion is not a science to be proven, not a thesis to be demonstrated, not a problem to be solved, but a silent Soul-Force to be felt.

Preachers and priests in their vanity to be heard, or their zeal to proselyte, or their over-humanness just to talk, talk, talk, have robbed the church of half its sweetness and power. Will they never learn that God's house was made for God's children and in it they should do as God does,--be silent and worship? And if there be a voice to break it, let it be the Voice of that which is nearest to God on earth--Music.... It was this feeling that Elsie gave me--of calmness, of restfulness, of devotion. There are those who irritate us, and they cannot help it; there are those who provoke us, anger us, madden us by their very presence. There are others who stir us up for trade and money-making; the sound of whose very voice makes us wish to own land, or buy stock or build houses; and there are those--God help them--whose talk, be it ever so brief, falls over us like an unwholesome thing.

Elsie read much of romance, and her small library was choice; but the love-poems of Burns she knew best of all, and she always read them to me when I was about to leave, as if she would hold me longer. Then I would remember them far into the night and the radiant-faced, spiritual girl with the deep eyes, reading them. I needed the restfulness which Elsie's friendship gave. I needed her sweetness that calmed me, her fresh friendship that was like a great rose at the window of my soul. In her utter unseekingness, her loyal trustfulness, I saw that she did not even suspect that I loved Eloise.

I stayed all day at the cottage and she flitted around with her great white apron on, now and then calling me her bonny prince, especially if Tammas and Marget were not around. I humored her, seeing how much pleasure she took in it.

"If I am your Prince," I said, when I had her alone in the butter room, "I am going to call you my Heart's-Ease."

She looked up quickly and a faint blush came into her face. She did not reply, but busied herself about the house, while Tammas and I talked of the new test of Lass o' Lowrie, one of his cows, which, from five gallons of milk daily was making three pounds of butter.

"Dae ye ken Mr. Jack, whit's daeing it?" said the old man. "It's nae ither than the auld Top Sawyer bluid!"

Elsie, daintily gowned in a pretty white frock and for the first time with her hair up in a comical little Scotch top-knot, walked with me down the wooded path to the parting of our ways. A tiny heart's-ease had just thrust out its fragrant leaves in the rich mold under the trees. She plucked the leaf, and there was the faintest trace of a twinkle in her blue eyes as she came up and pinned it on my lapel.

"Here is your heart's-ease, my Prince," she said slyly.

I felt a flush upon my cheek. She was silent, and then she said slowly, "Do you know Mr. Jack--Jack, that I believe every prince at times has need of a heart's-ease friend, and--and--well, maids need a prince to help them."

I looked at her quickly.

"I am your good Knight always if I can help you, Elsie."

She flushed and turned her face aside that I might not see it.

"And you won't misunderstand?" she asked.

"I don't think I could misunderstand you, Elsie. I don't think anybody could."

She came up closer.

"Well, it's this, Jack. Sit down here by me. I have no one I can confide in but you. You know how kind you have always been to me. Ever since I was a wee bairn in a strange land. I can't talk to Tammas about it, but I feel there is something strange between Colonel Goff and me. I feel that there is--"

I started. She was pale, but went on.

"Well, you know, I didn't come here with them. I didn't come here with them--with my grandparents; that was so long ago I don't remember what is back of it. Anyway, soon after I came I remember Colonel Goff. And do you know," she went on, "he has been so good to me that--that I cannot understand it at all--only I feel when I am with him that I am drawn to him so! Oh, I have seen so much in him that others don't see--and when I see him watching me so closely and saying nothing, it hurts me."

She did not finish, but looked down the path, up which Colonel Goff, himself, was riding towards us.

Elsie paled and then flushed quickly. He was smiling at us, his little eyes twinkling kindly. He gave us a quick military salute.

"My word, a _tete-a-tete_, and a bloomin' fool it is who'd break in on it. Hello, lassie--Jack!"

He got down from his horse, shaking hands with us gravely. I noticed that he was watching Elsie, and she, knowing it, was reddening.

"You are a good guesser, Colonel," I said, with feigned lightness, for I felt that he was taking it too seriously, "and pray tell me who would not like to be with so fine a lassie?"

He looked at me quickly. "If you mean that, Jack," he said, in his blunt, unseeing English way, "here is my hand."

Elsie broke into a little confused laugh. "The idea of pinning Mr. Jack down like that," she said, looking bravely into Goff's eyes. "What else could he say? Now give me that box of candy. I see it sticking out of your pocket."

Goff pulled out the box of candy, and catching her to him, kissed her on the cheek.

"She is my own lassie, Jack," he said, holding her an instant in his arms. "I have loved her since she was so high." He paused. "Well, perhaps it was because I was an exile in your country, and she is the Scotch flower I found blooming here. Eh, lassie?"

Elsie kissed his cheek.

"You have been mighty good to me, Colonel Goff. But go your way. Tammas said he wanted to see you if you came by and--well--Mr. Jack and I want some candy!"

For a moment he looked at us queerly, trying to smile. He glanced into my eyes, but I met his squarely and unflinchingly. He was not a man whose mental action was quick. He saw but one side of things at a time. I saw that he was embarrassed in his slow way. Very awkwardly he left us, going up to Tammas's cottage. Elsie walked on with me.

The wind blew her hair around her temples and the reflection of the blue hills of Scotland was in her eyes. "This is such an inconsistent world, Jack," she said after a while. "I can't ever learn it, and I get so lonely up here with only Tammas and Marget, I often wish that they would tell me more of myself. I should so love to know who my father is."

"Did it ever occur to you that it might not be at all pleasant for you to know? They love you and they want you to be happy."

She paled. "I had never thought of that. I had never thought of that--oh, why didn't I think of it!"

"Elsie," I said, taking her hand in mine, and drawing her to me as I had when she was a child, and I her big brother, "you have no better friend than I. Tell me what it is that is troubling you?"

"You would hate me, Jack," she said, looking up quickly into my face with great, earnest eyes.

"Hate you? Nonsense," and I laughed, pinching her ear. "Tell me," I pleaded, smiling.

"Nay, nay, bide a wee--bide a wee," she said abstractedly falling into her childhood's dialect as she so often did when she forgot. "And first," she went on, "why, first I'd have to kind of explain it, Jack; but it is like this now: suppose one was not satisfied with one's lot and had those feelings I have been telling you of."

I nodded.

"And suppose--now this is the worst of it--now suppose one really loved another--one found one's soul dream," she paused, blushing.

"Soul dreams, Elsie, ay, I think I understand," I said. "I too have them--they are the great, unattainable things of our life. Do you know I think that their being unattainable is what makes them great?"

She looked up. "If it is worth so much--this unattainable thing--why then does it hurt so?"

"Ay, ay, that's it. It is the things that hurt which count. 'Our sweetest love is always sweetest pain,'" I said, quoting the line of a poem.

"Oh," she said, clasping my arm. "You have said it, Jack."

I looked at her quickly.

"Elsie," I said, "you once told me--do you remember what you said to me and Aunt Lucretia--about your hand being sought in marriage? Is it the same person you now speak of?"

"It is Captain Rutherford," she said, her face drawn tensely.

I started, angry, flushed.

"Elsie, this will never do. Do you love him at all?"

"No, Jack, not as compared to the other--the unattainable. Well, I should say about as the difference between a--well--say a star and a little firefly."

A dry, fighting anger clinched my throat and I could scarcely speak. I could have throttled Braxton Bragg then!

"Tell me, Elsie," I said, controlling my anger and trying to speak calmly, "tell your big brother all."

But she was silent, her face turned from me; at last she said, "It is all so strange, Jack; those we love, love us not, and those we do not love want to marry us even if they are not fit to."

"Not fit to hold your shoe, let alone your heart," I added angrily.

She put her hand over my mouth.

"Have I done wrong? Have I said too much? Come, I must go. I see the Colonel waiting for me."

I took her by both hands, holding her before me, for I was strangely worried and I wished to know--I looked earnestly into her eyes.

"Do you love me, Elsie?"

She blushed crimson. In an instant her arms were around my neck.

Shamed and stricken with my own thoughtlessness I tore her arms from me.

"Elsie, forgive me, you don't understand!"

In reply she gave me one shamed, hurt look and fled up the path. I saw Goff waiting for her.

*CHAPTER XIV*

*GOD AND A BUTTERFLY*

I saw a race for life the other day. It occurred in mid-air in a kingdom not of earth--not of our own; but the air was sweet where the fight was on, and the fields were green, and the woods lay calm and soothing beneath, and the great, kind sun was above.

It was the pursuit of a golden-winged butterfly, one of those filmy creatures that is more of sky than of earth, made of rainbow and a rose, of light and a lily's blossom. It seemed strange to me that this beautiful thing, thrown off from the rim of a rainbow, living on the nectar of a flower, sleeping on the bosom of a nodding lily and floating on the breath of a zephyr, so spiritual it was, should fall under the cruel laws of life, and be forced to fight for its brief but beautiful existence.

Who were its enemies? Two glorious mocking birds that had sung like spirits from an heavenly choir around the house all spring and summer, that had been permitted to live and rear their young in contentment and happiness and should have held no grudge against any other creature.

Golden-Wings was in the garden, and he was content until that which sustained life gave out--food. Ay, there is the rub! We would all be angels if it were not for food, we would be saints but for our stomachs. He had sucked every flower in his pasture, he must go to pastures fresh or die. The distance was only a few hundred yards of air, but he knew that in that air was death. He thought of it a long time as he hovered from flower to flower; of life, of his mate, of death. Had he been all spirit he would have stayed forever among the flowers, but he was like all of us, half spirit and half flesh, and the flesh of him was rebelling and begging for food. He must go. He rose slowly, and with uncertain wing, frightened, straight up, every sense awake, every nerve keyed, his eyes on the lookout for his enemy. Up, up he rose, quivering, scared, frightened, then he winged his way across the ether in a flight which proved to be for his life.

The mocking bird is a flycatcher, but not an expert one. Compared with the swallow, the martin, the crested flycatcher or the bold king bird he is a poor imitation; but the mocking bird is also a poet and everything is grist that comes to the poet's mill, from the grasshopper on the ground to the butterfly in the air.

The male bird saw Golden-Wings and gave him the first heat for his life; up in the air he darted, circled and swooped. Golden-Wings, terrified, ducked, dived and escaped. The poet dropped to a twig in disgust and his mate took up the fight. Golden-Wings saw her coming and his heart swelled with fear; he stood quivering in the air, he knew not which way to turn. She darted straight and all but caught him; for a moment in mid-air they whirled, twisted and tumbled, Golden-Wings, panting and fluttering for a chance once more for home and love and life, and the poetess for a morsel to eat. It ended in the butterfly getting above the bird, which always seemed to be his tactics, and the latter dropped down in disgust to her mate.

Then, maddened, they both started after Golden-Wings, and it looked as if this flight was to be his last.

It was a terrible chase that the two poets gave him, the tumbling, darting, circling of the birds in maddened earnestness. Their wings were often so close that they fanned him about like a whiff of gold tissue paper in the wind. Twice they got above him, dropped and missed! Then he was lost altogether, and only by watching the circling of the birds could one guess where he was. When seen again he had got above his enemies, and was steadily pursuing his zigzag, frightened, graceless, paper-fluttering flight for the distant trees and life!

"Luck to you, O Golden-Wings!" I cried. "For already you have taught me a lesson for Life. Let us keep _above_ our enemies if we would be safe, not beneath them--for there we are a prey to their talons, besmirched with dirt; nor on their level, for there we are no better than they; but _above_ them where they cannot reach us, and where we may go on to our destiny with only the sunlight around us and the unseen stars above."

The birds dropped down, baffled, to rest in the top of a sugar-maple tree. Like all poets, in losing their game they had lost their temper, and now between panting and hard breathing they could be heard quarreling. "It was you," said the wife, "you conceited thing; it is all your fault! I had him once if you had let me alone." "Oh, you had him, did you," sneered the mate; "if your talents only equaled your tongue you would be better off!" They almost spat upon each other; they were beaten and angry and they took it out that way.

Golden-Wings was safe. He was high up in the air. His very flight was now the flight of victory. Twenty yards more and he would drop down into the great splotch of green below where his wife was waiting him on the blossom of a wild cherry.

I was about to cheer him with the silent approval of true applause when I saw a lightning bolt of red drop from the jagged bar of the dead limb of a great oak near by, in the midst of the forest and high above the weary, yet happy Golden-Wings. I paled at the sight, for I knew that no butterfly would ever escape this new-comer. Even Golden-Wings recognized his fate, and, paralyzed with fear, stopped his flight in mid-air in a few yards of his home, and lay quivering in hopeless fear. Well he might, for the red and white bolt was a red-headed woodpecker, a very king in the tribe of the flycatchers. Often I had seen him poise above an air-bound moth, then drop like a dead bird in the air and no moth would be there.

The hand of the world is against the marauder, be he bird or man. But they revere the man who robs by rule.

Straight at Golden-Wings he went. The race was up. He used the same old tactics: above the butterfly he soared, then, gauging the distance from his own great beak to butterfly beneath he folded his wings and dropped like a plummet of lead.

I was out that morning with the twelve gauge, smokeless shells and seven and a half chilled shot. It was thieving crow I had come after, thinking I might get a shot. To the marauder my thought was as lightning, for when I caught the first flash of his crimson head, this went distinctly through my mind: "_Nature is Nature even to tooth and claw, and yet there is that which says even when a butterfly shall fall. He makes our lives and marks out our destiny. Sometimes amid injustice, He calls himself Retribution. And then He has been known to raise up a man, and a gun, invent smokeless powder and deadly chilled shot, give accuracy of aim, and, most wonderful of all, the Voice of a Purpose to say that harm shall not happen to a Butterfly._"

There was no smoke from the report, and so I distinctly saw Golden-Wings drop joyfully among the green leaves. But a red marauder lies in the field where he fell.

*CHAPTER XV*

*HICKORIES AND OLD HICKORY*

June, and June as it breaks only over the Middle Basin.

There had been great rains, saturating the leaves and grasses until they were almost blackened in their deep greenness. There had followed, flushing the grass on all the hills around the Hermitage, the mauve tints of coming dandelions, followed by the red, white, and blue flags of the clovers, until across deep valleys and on distant slopes there was a pale light much like moonlight.

I had been very busy. There was much for me to do, and I sought it eagerly, for I wished to forget and not to see. It is what we fail to forget that hurts. And so I worked.

Colonel Goff, as was his race, had acted straight-forwardly in the matter of his marriage to Eloise. Over a month ago he had sought out Aunt Lucretia and told her frankly that he sought the hand of her ward in marriage, that he wished to marry her and take her at once to England. He said that his brother, the Earl of Carfax, had died without heirs, and that he inherited the estate. The family name, he told her, was Goff, and he had kept it while in America. In the early fall his attorneys would have every legal provision complete for his return, and for immediate occupation of his estate. And he told her with equal frankness why it could not be done sooner, that in his younger days he had married out of his class, and had been blacklisted by his family for it, especially by his elder brother; that they had had not only hot words but a stand-up fight in which he had all but killed, and had really maimed the older brother for life. "I had to get out," he said brusquely, "and get out quick. As it was they tried to disinherit me, but England's laws are greater than England's men. My wife was to follow, but she died."

My Aunt was a woman of great sense and said nothing. But I noticed that she thought much, because she was very silent, and that she grew suddenly very tender to me. When Eloise had gone to Washington my Aunt went with her. Two things happened before they left, which I remember quite distinctly.

My Aunt's admiration for the character and achievements of Andrew Jackson bordered on the idolatrous. As a boy she would take me often to the Hermitage, and tell me of the wilderness giant who lived there. She knew more about him than anyone I ever met. She understood the thousand sides of this man's great nature, from his horse-racing to his religion. In the spot where he had lived so long there was, of course, a world of tradition. It came down from lip to lip. Of these stories my Aunt remembered all. A few days after Goff had talked with her as my Aunt and I were going over the grounds she stopped before the log-cabin in the pasture near the great spring where Jackson lived before he built the present Hermitage.

"Jack," said she, "Andrew Jackson was the gamest thing God ever gave to humanity, and the gentlest. It is staggering to think what he had to overcome to do his life's work. The fights, the sicknesses, the suffering, the slander, the insults, the lies, the butcheries they called battles, starvation, mutinies of his own men, all met and overcome by one tall, slim, sallow, pain-wracked man, on one thoroughbred horse, with a gun in his hand, and two in his eyes. Talk of Indian fights--Mills, and Cooks and Custers--they were child's play to the great Creek Nation Jackson had to fight. And England behind them--selfish always and forever wanting that of others."

She looked at me quickly, and went on: "But he waited and then hit them hard. No one, from Hannibal to Caesar and Bonaparte, would ever have attacked Keane and his troops, just landed and in an open plain with New Orleans at their mercy before them, in the night-time as did Jackson and his ragged, half-armed militia. No one would ever have risked it but Jackson; he was greater than them all! For that seemingly foolhardy night attack saved him. He cut the very vitals out of them in the dark. He hacked them as a game cock does when he sticks his gaffs into the very heart of his foe. That was why on January eighth they could not go over his breastworks, even with the combined force of Packenham and Gibbs and the troops that afterwards won Waterloo. He had gaffed them in the ditch in the dark. He cut them into giblets. It was hell with the lid on. They say it was a useless battle, but they lie, Jack. If Jackson hadn't stopped them, they would never have given up the Louisiana Purchase until we drove them out with another war. There are two kinds of men, Jack--talkers and doers. The talkers are all orators--they are all liars. They began with Aaron, whom God made a mouthpiece to Moses. Moses was the doer, but he could not talk. Aaron, the orator, talked for him, but it is Moses who lives. Jackson was a Moses, Clay an Aaron, a dead one, Jack, as all Aarons are, and growing deader every year. All orators, being liars, fool people while they live. Dead, they do not even fool themselves.