Chapter IV: Part 4

Looking at his grandmother, who was still absorbed in the consultation with the cook, the young man suddenly felt how like her face his own was; feeling it with the curiously mingled uneasiness and satisfaction which come to most of us when we recognize ancestral traits in our own spirits, our own minds, or our own bodies. She was a large, tall old woman, still handsome and even shapely, despite her many years and her great weight. Her chin was square and her forehead broad, yet her grandson was somehow pleased to think that his own chin was more delicately rounded, and that his forehead was higher than hers while not less broad, and that his mouth was clearer cut. Still, the strong likeness was there, in every one of the features of their two faces and most of all in their eyes--long, large, deep, thick-lashed, heavy-browed, and as black as human eyes ever are; and now as old lady Gordon turned her head, the young man saw with a kind of shock that his grandmother's eyes were almost as young, too, as his own. For young eyes in an old face are not a pleasant sight to see. It seems better for the ageless, unwearied spirit, thus looking out, to have grown old with the wearied body, so that both together may be ready for the Rest.

Old lady Gordon noticed her grandson's gaze, as soon as Eunice had gone from the room, and recognized the admiration which partly occupied his thoughts. She accordingly smiled at him, settling comfortably back in her broad, low rocking-chair. She wore a loose flowing wrapper of fine white muslin, as she always did in warm weather. In the winter she always wore the same garment made of fine white wool, covering it with a long black cloak on the rare occasions upon which she left the house during cold weather. It was a most unusual dress and one of peculiar distinction, but old lady Gordon took neither of these facts into the slightest account. She wore the fine white muslin in the summer because it was cooler than anything else; and she wore the white wool in the winter for the reason that, while warm and soft, it would wash with less trouble than colored stuffs, when she dropped things on it at the table, as she did at almost every meal. It is, perhaps, often just as well that we cannot know the causes which bring about many pleasing and even poetic results. Old lady Gordon's servants, especially Dilsey the washerwoman, held opinions somewhat different from hers concerning the greater convenience of constantly wearing white in winter as well as in summer. But old lady Gordon never took that into account either; neither that nor anything whatsoever that ever touched her own comfort at all adversely.

"Come and hand me my bag, I want a cough-drop," she said to Lynn that day, yawning. "It's too far round on the back of the chair for me to reach it."

Lynn sprang to serve her and handed her the bag. It was the first time that he had seen it; that is to say, it was the first time that he had really observed the bag; he must, of course, have seen it, since no one ever saw old lady Gordon without it. During the day it always hung on the back of the chair in which she sat when not at the table; when she sat at the table it always hung on the knob of the dining-room chair. Through the night it always swung from the post of her bed close to her hand. When she drove out in her ancient coach the bag went with her. And a wonderful bag it was! There were many more things in it than mere cough-drops. There were various other sorts of drops--drops for the gouty pain which sometimes assailed old lady Gordon's toe, and drops of good old brandy for cramp after over-eating. And there were candles and matches, all ready for lighting if she should chance to grow wakeful through the night, and always plenty of novels; and numerous simple toilet articles, such as a hairbrush and comb, together with biscuits and hair-oil and tea-cakes and handkerchiefs and an occasional piece of pie. It would indeed be hard to think of anything that old lady Gordon could have needed or desired, during the day or the night; or even have fancied that she wanted, without finding it ready to her hand in that wonderful bag. There was a hand-bell in it, too, though the bell usually lay at the very bottom of the bag, under everything else, because there was hardly ever any occasion for ringing it. The bag was a very gradual evolution, like most complete inventions. Old lady Gordon herself had given a good deal of thought for a good many years to the bringing of it to its ultimate state of perfection; and Eunice the cook and Patsey the housemaid had both concentrated their attention upon it more and more as the mistress's wants and demands increased; until it had now become so comprehensive that Eunice rarely had to be summoned out of her cabin, at midnight, to give old lady Gordon a lunch; and Patsey was able, as a rule, to sleep the whole night through on her pallet in the passage outside the mistress's door; no matter whether that lady might suddenly crave refreshment, or whether several kinds of drops might be needed in consequence of a too hearty supper.

When old lady Gordon had taken the cough-drops out of the bag, and Lynn had replaced it on the back of her chair, within easier reach, she answered his question, which he had almost forgotten in his wondering observation of the bag.

"You were asking about little Beauchamp," she said. "Your grandfather found him somewhere and brought him home with him a long time ago. He has been here ever since. I don't remember how long ago that was. I don't know anything about him before he came. I hardly noticed him, in fact, until after your grandfather's death, when I found him useful in helping me manage the farm."

The grandson looked at the grandmother in silence, paying little heed to what she was saying of the Frenchman. He was wondering why she said "your grandfather" instead of saying "my husband." He had already noted that she invariably said "your father" instead of saying "my son." He knew little of women's ways, having lost his mother before he could remember, so that his life had been mostly among men, and he knew nothing whatever of his grandmother. Yet he felt, nevertheless, that a wife and mother who had loved her husband and her son would not speak of them to her grandson as "your grandfather" and "your father," as his grandmother did. He had also a curious, half-amused, half-indignant feeling that her doing so was intended to make him feel somehow responsible for something which she disliked, and did not wish to assume responsibility for herself.

"I never thought of asking your grandfather where he found him," old lady Gordon went on indifferently. "Most likely it was in New Orleans. The few foreigners in this country mostly came from there. Your grandfather used to go there pretty often with flatboat-loads of horses. But it doesn't matter where Beauchamp came from in the first place. He's mighty useful to me now, wherever it was. I really don't see how I could get along without him. He is a faithful, honest, industrious little soul. Of course that bat in his belfry flies out now and then--as you saw and heard. I try to remember it, but I forget sometimes. And how could a body guard against such an unheard-of thing as that was?" She laughed lazily, fanning herself with the turkey-wing, and rocking slowly and heavily. "He isn't a bit luny about anything else, and he is just as useful to me as if he didn't believe he was the son of Napoleon Bonaparte. I don't care if he thinks he's Julius Caesar himself. What's the odds--since it never interferes with his work? And his wife's a treasure too, in a different way. There's nothing French or flighty about her. She belongs around here--somewhere in the Pennyroyal Region. I don't know or remember where he picked her up. She is a great, slow-witted, homely, slab-sided drudge, almost twice his size. And such a worker! She never turns her head when he calls her the 'Empress Maria.' She just goes straight along, hoeing the garden and making butter. But--all the same--she thinks the sun rises and sets in him."

The young man laughed. "Fine! And he no doubt thinks she hung the moon."

His grandmother looked at him more attentively than she had done hitherto. She had never been thrown with men of quick mind, and was not accustomed to such ready response. She liked quickness of perception as she liked all bright and pleasant things; and she disliked slowness of understanding as she disliked everything tiresome--like the sybarite that she was.

"Certainly he does. That's always the way," she in turn responded, smilingly. "The worse mated the married seem to be--to outsiders, the better they appear to suit one another. Talk about 'careful, judicious selection!'" Old lady Gordon made an inarticulate but eloquent sound of scornful incredulity. "If you were to rush out there in the big road this minute--with your eyes shut--and seize the first passer-by, you would have just as much chance of knowing what you were doing--what you were getting--as you ever will have!"

Lynn wondered again what sort of a man his grandfather could have been. And his young mother, whom he had never known? Had this cynical old woman disapproved of her, had she been unkind to her? There is always something repellent to wholesome youth in the cynicism of the old. Feeling this, Lynn said rather coldly that he had thought little of such matters, he had been too much absorbed in other things, in laying life plans which must be quite apart from all thoughts of love and marriage for a good many years. The mere mention of these cherished plans brought a flush to his dark cheeks, and caused him to sit more proudly erect. They were seldom far absent from his mind, and the main thought lying nearest the heart is never long unspoken by frank young lips. It was less than a year since he had been graduated from the Harvard Law School, but his deep-laid plans lay far back of his graduation. He could hardly remember when he had not seen the path of his ambition straight and distinct before him. It was a steep one, to be sure, and hard and long, as the road to the heights must ever be. But he had faced all this wholly undaunted, knowing the power within himself, and the additional strength which fortune had given him. Yet he was a modest young fellow, and simple-hearted as well as single-minded. There was in him little vanity in his personal gifts, little pride in his inherited possessions. He simply recognized these as lucky accidents, for which he could claim no credit; holding them merely as the means whereby he might hope, more confidently than most young men, to reach the utmost limit of his ambition. The right to practise law was already his, and the rest of the way upward must open as he pressed earnestly and untiringly onward,--the bar, the bench, the supreme bench, those must be within the winning of any man having fair ability, unbounded capacity for hard work, and abundant means to wait for its fruition; and he knew himself to be possessed of all these. This seemed to him the highest ambition possible to an American, as perhaps it was, in those days when the ermine was still held unspotted, high above the mire of politics.

And yet, notwithstanding these lofty aims and matured plans, Lynn Gordon was very young, hardly more than a boy, after all, in many things, so that he soon began to talk with boyish openness of the herculean task which he thus had set himself in sober earnest. His grandmother listened with such intense interest, such thorough understanding, and such complete sympathy as surprised herself far more than it surprised her grandson. She was taken wholly unawares,--not dreaming of finding him anything like this,--having looked forward to his coming with but lukewarm enthusiasm.

The old who have been disappointed in almost everything that they have ever set their hearts upon, cease, after a while, to expect anything, and learn to shield themselves against further disappointment by real or assumed indifference. Old lady Gordon in her fierce pride had never owned, even to herself, how deep and bitter and lasting had been her disappointment in her own son. It counted for nothing with her that he had been what many would have considered a good man, though not an intellectual man in the estimation of any one. To his mother his goodness had seemed but the negative virtue of an undecided character and a mediocre mind. For the best love of a nature like hers cannot be born of mere toleration, even in a mother's heart. This mother--being what she was--might perhaps have come nearer to forgiving the things which were lacking, had this only child been a daughter. A woman like old lady Gordon never expects much of another woman, even though she be her own daughter. But she always expects everything of every man, especially when he belongs to her own family, and thus it was that old lady Gordon never could wholly forgive her only son. Least of all could she ever quite forgive him for being his father over again; an almost unpardonable offence which other poorly gifted children have committed in the eyes of other embittered mothers, who have illogically expected, as poor old lady Gordon had expected, to gather figs from thistles.

When she had first faced the truth in the prime of life, her fierce pride had raised the iron shield of pretended indifference, and she had upheld it so long that it had gradually grown into the rusty armor of age's insensibility. And yet, through all its steely coldness, the young man's warm words now struck fire. A deep glow came into the impassive, handsome old face, and a warm light into the hard, fine old eyes, as she looked at this spirited, strong, determined, capable young fellow, with his brilliant face aglow, and his intelligent eyes alight. She suddenly felt him to be much more her own spirit and flesh and blood than his father had ever been. It seemed for an instant as if her own strenuous youth, with its impassioned visions of conquest--so long forgotten--came rushing back through the eloquent lips of her grandson.

IX

A ROMANTIC REGION

But, alas, the habits of age are always fixed, and its enthusiasms are mostly fleeting. At breakfast, on the next morning, old lady Gordon was as stolidly absorbed in the food which she was eating as she usually was in her meals. Her cynicism, her indifference, too, had all come back.

Both came promptly into play, when Lynn chanced to remember his promise to play cards with the sick man, and mentioned it, which he had forgotten to do on the day before, in the intenser interest of the talk about his own future. The old lady smiled sardonically and chewed on deliberately, while the young man gave an account of what had taken place at the doctor's house.

"Anne won't allow it," she finally said. "If anything could have changed her or have taken the nonsense out of her, it would have been seeing Tom go to destruction, mainly because she went to meeting. A woman like Anne takes to religion just as immoderately as a man like Tom takes to gambling."

Lynn did not speak at once. He was feeling the uneasiness which comes over right-minded youth at any sign of irreligion in the old.

"I thought every man liked his wife to go to church, however seldom he might go himself," he finally advanced hesitatingly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That is a question which a good many people have been asking for a good many years, and nobody has ever had a satisfactory answer," old lady Gordon replied.

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

He was a Spaniard who had suddenly appeared in the vicinity of Oldfield, some twenty-five years before. No one had any knowledge of him previous to that time, and no one had ever known where he came from. Yet, for some reason never clearly understood, his coming had, nevertheless, been associated from the first with the scattering of the Gulf pirates which had followed the deposing of their last king. It is true that Lafitte was long since gone to render his awful account of the terrible deeds done in the body--with perhaps his desperate service at the battle of New Orleans as the largest item on the other side of the blotted ledger. But the death of Lafitte in 1826 did not immediately free the Gulf from its fearful scourge. The passing of piracy was gradual, very gradual indeed, and even long drawn out, as the traders of the Pennyroyal Region knew only too well, through their close and continual connection with New Orleans by route of the flatboat. There was, therefore, to the minds of the Oldfield people, nothing improbable in the continued existence of numbers of Lafitte's followers, who were younger than himself and consequently not yet really old men. Still, while there was no impossibility or even any improbability in Alvarado's being a comrade of Lafitte, there appeared no actual proof that he ever had been. According to old lady Gordon's account, the principal grounds of suspicion were these: his appearance, which was otherwise unaccounted for, just at the time that the pirates were being driven from the Gulf and out of the Gulf states; his frequent, long, and mysterious absences at sea after his coming to live in the vicinity of Oldfield; the fabulous sums of gold and silver fetched home by him from these voyages, when he was known not to have any visible means of making money; the many curious weapons of marine warfare scattered through his strange house, which was half a fort, half a farmhouse, and wholly barbaric in its rough richness of furnishing; the generally credited rumor that he habitually wore a coat of mail; the well-known fact--open for every passer-by to see--that he kept a horse standing continually at his gate, day and night, for years, saddled and bridled, with pistols in the holsters, apparently ready for instant flight.

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

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

"That's the man, but I wish you might have seen him in those days. He was just about as fiery as Alvarado, though in a slightly more civilized way, and he never wanted Alice to have anything to do with him. He never wanted the Spaniard around his house at all. No man like Colonel Fielding--English in every drop of blood--ever wants anything to do with any foreigner. But there's no use in trying to manage a girl like Alice Fielding,--a little, soft, say-nothing, characterless thing,--there's nothing in her strong enough to get a good firm hold on. She's blown like a feather this way and that way by the strongest influence--good or bad--that she falls under. You'll find the kind, and plenty of them, all over the world. The Fielding negroes used to say Alvarado threw a spell over Alice. I presume he did, but it was the spell which that sort of man always throws over that sort of girl. She was a flighty, vain little creature, and flattered of course by his being so madly in love. That was plain enough for anybody to see. Nobody ever doubted that he loved her. But she had never thought of marrying him until she was terrified into doing it. She was probably in love with John Stanley so far as she was capable of loving any man. It was said they were upon the verge of becoming engaged to be married. I don't know about that, but there was no doubt of John's loving her. It took him years to get over her marriage to Alvarado."

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

"Through sheer fright mixed with a kind of silly romance, as nearly as anybody ever could make out. It happened in this way. There was some kind of a party at Colonel Fielding's. There always was something going on while his girls were young and gay; and there is plenty of room in the jailer's residence for any kind of entertainment--and many's the ball and dinner they gave! That night Alvarado was one of the guests, as he often was. Nobody knows what led up to the outbreak, but he suddenly fell on the floor in convulsions, stiff and stark and black in the face, and actually foaming at the mouth--a sight, they said, to make the strongest shudder. The doctor was hurriedly called out of the supper room and at once shut the door of the room in which Alvarado was lying--at the point of death as everybody thought. As the guests huddled together whispering, it flew all over the house that he had taken poison and that he refused to take an antidote unless Alice would consent to marry him. Your father was there and saw her go into the room, and he said afterwards that she looked as much like a dead woman then, as she did a year later when she lay in her coffin. No one, except those who were in the room, ever knew what happened, but the colonel presently came to the door and sent for the preacher. It was a dancing party, or he would have been there already, as almost everybody else was. But it didn't take long to fetch him, and he married Alvarado to Alice Fielding then and there."

"And John Stanley?" inquired Lynn.

"He knew nothing of the marriage till he came to see Alice on the next Sunday as he always did. He didn't live in Oldfield at that time. He had gone away soon after another unlucky affair which most men wouldn't have worried about, but which seems to have had a lifelong effect upon him. He was always a sensitive, high-strung fellow and deeply religious--full of lofty ideals and all that sort of thing--even then, when he was hardly more than a lad. He had come here only a week or so before to take an assistant's place in the clerk's office. He was a cousin of Jack Mitchell, the county clerk--that's the way he happened to come. Well, Jack Mitchell was a politician and as high a talker and as low a doer as was to be found betwixt the Cumberland and Green River, which is saying a good deal. I reckon he couldn't be more than matched in these days. I haven't noticed much change in politicians during the last quarter of a century. Jack had been elected by a large majority, and was reelected, and had his hand fairly on a higher rung of the political ladder, when he made a false step and slipped. The trouble came from a foolish quarrel caused by drink. Jack Mitchell always was quarrelsome when in liquor, and on that day he happened to accuse another Kentuckian of cowardice. That, of course, was crossing the dead-line. It was just the same then that it is now and always will be, till our blood and training are different. And the fact that the man who had been branded as a coward was a worthless loafer, made no more difference then then it would make now. The wretch who had been 'insulted' rose up, as soon as he was sober enough, and borrowed a shot-gun and went to wipe out his dishonor, just as if he had been a real gentleman. Jack, with his usual luck, was not in the office when his enemy, who was still drinking heavily, suddenly appeared in the doorway, levelling the gun. He was not so drunk, though, that he didn't know that he was aiming at a boy whom he had never seen before, in place of the man whom he had come to kill. He knew it well enough, for he muttered something about killing the young one if he couldn't get the old one. But John Stanley was too quick for him. Jack's pistol lay handy, as it always did, as pistols always do, hereabouts. The boy hardly knew what was happening before he had shot dead a man whose name he didn't know--a man whom he had never seen or heard of before."

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

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

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

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

She yawned, and swayed her turkey-wing fan.

"It would all have blown over and have passed, as all such things pass in this country, if John Stanley hadn't been morbid about it, if he had been at all like other people. Of course he was acquitted at the examining trial. There were plenty of witnesses to the fact that he fired in self-defence. The family of the man who was killed never made a motion toward taking the matter up, and they would have been ready enough to do it if they could have found any pretext for blaming John. They were, in fact, rather looked down on for taking it so easy. But John has never forgiven himself; he has always thought he might have done something else than what he did. He has rarely mentioned it to any one, but I understand that he once told Miss Judy that, if it were to do over again, he would run the risk of being killed himself rather than take the life of any human being. As I have said, he was always very religious, even then, and this was, I suppose, the reason why he brooded so over the affair. To this day he's more like a praying monk shut up in a cell than he's like the famous judge of a large circuit."

"Of course he never married," said Lynn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was not a native of Oldfield. Her birth-place lay farther up in that country on the "Pigeon Roost Fork of the Muddy, which is a branch of Green River," on the very spot thus described by Washington Irving's Kentucky classic. But Irving had only heard of "Blue Bead Miller," the famous hunter and Indian fighter, whom he has immortalized in that charming tale under his real name; and old lady Gordon had known him in her childhood and early youth. Many a time she had seen him in her father's house, where he would often come, bringing his rifle, "Betsy," for her mother to "unwitch." And this, her mother--who was young and city-bred, and full of wondering interest in all these strange ways of the wilderness--would always do with girlish delight, gravely running her slim white fingers up and down the grimy barrel, as one who works a beneficent charm, while the grim old woodsman looked on with unquestioning faith.

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

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

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

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

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

All this was before old lady Gordon came as a young bride to live in Oldfield; but another band of robbers and assassins still terrorized that part of the Pennyroyal Region. The cavern in which the band made its den was on the other side of the Ohio River, but it was Kentucky that suffered most from its ravages. Many a richly laden flatboat was never heard of after it was known to have stopped at the entrance to Cave-in-Rock, as the place was called in the beginning of the last century, and as it is called at the present time. Many a gold-laden boatman, who had unknowingly passed down the river without stopping at the Cave-in-Rock, was beguiled into entering it on his way homeward--only to vanish forever off the face of the earth. The cavern would seem to have offered powerful temptations to the unwary traveller. The cave itself was then as it is now a most curious and interesting survival of prehistoric times. It is a single chamber in the solid rock, opening at the river's brink, two hundred feet long and eighty feet wide, its sides rising by regular stages after the manner of the seats in an amphitheatre. Its walls are covered with strange carvings cut deep in the stone; there are representations of several animals unknown to science, and there are also inscribed characters which have led those learned in such matters to believe the cavern to have been the council house of some ancient race. But nothing was known of these things while Cave-in-Rock remained the hiding-place of robbers and assassins. The terrified country round about Oldfield knew the place only by vague hearsay as a drinking, gambling resort, wherein boatmen and all unwary travellers going up or down the Ohio were lured to destruction. No one who entered the awful mystery of the cavern ever came out to tell what he had seen or what had befallen him. It seemed--so old lady Gordon said--as if the hand of the law would never be able to lay hold upon actual proof of the crimes committed at Cave-in-Rock, but when the band was ultimately run to earth, an upper and secret chamber was found to be filled with the bones of human beings.

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

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

"Very!" responded the old lady, who was growing hungry. "None more so. We've about all the different religions that anybody else ever had, and we've started one or two of our own."

X

RELIGION IN OLDFIELD

It is in the quiet village, remote, as this was, from the rushing change of city life, that the fervor of religion always appears warmest and seems to linger longest.

In Oldfield everybody went to church twice a day on Sunday, in winter and in summer, and through the rain as well as through the sunshine. That is to say, everybody except old lady Gordon and Miss Judy Bramwell, neither of whom ever went at all.

There was nothing strange or inconsistent in old lady Gordon's staying away. She was generally held by everybody to be as an out-and-out heathen, whereas in reality she was merely a good deal of a pagan. And she was not in the habit of accounting to anybody for what she did or did not do, being equally indifferent to private and public opinion.

But Miss Judy's never going was a much harder thing to understand. For the little lady was not only the model for the whole community in week-day matters, but she was also known to be a most devout Episcopalian, so that, taken altogether, the fact that she never went to church remained always an impenetrable mystery, notwithstanding that the Oldfield church-goers discussed it untiringly on almost every Sunday of their lives. Nor did Miss Judy, who was the soul of guileless frankness in everything else, ever offer any sort of an explanation for this unaccountable remissness. She could not make any untrue excuses, and she would not give the real reason; her gentle heart being much too tender of her neighbors' feelings to admit of her mentioning the truth, so long as she was able to hide what she was bound in conscience to feel.

"They are doing the best they can, you know, sister Sophia," she would say, almost in a whisper, as the neighbors passed on Sundays; and she would steal on tiptoe to close the door, so that Merica might not overhear. "They are not to blame, poor things; it is their misfortune and not their fault, that they don't know the difference between a meeting-house and the Church, and between a lecture and the Service."

"Just so, sister Judy," Miss Sophia would respond, more befogged if possible over consecration and apostolic succession than she was over most things. When, however, after a time, she came gradually to comprehend that this stand, taken privately by Miss Judy, would spare herself the exertion of walking to the meeting-houses, both of which were at the other end of town, she became so decided in her support of Miss Judy's position as to remove the last shade of doubt from that mild little lady's mind. Nothing of all this was ever suspected by any third person, but in the absence of any actual knowledge, it ultimately came to be taken for granted that Miss Judy stayed at home on Sundays and read the prayer-book to her sister because Miss Sophia was not equal to the long walk to church and back, especially in bad weather. Miss Judy of course said not a word either to confirm or to contradict this impression, which strengthened as the years went by. But she always gave the neighbors so sweet a smile when they passed on the way to meeting that everything seemed to everybody just as it should be.

One of the churches belonged to the Methodists and the other to the denomination known as The Disciples of Christ. The town was not large enough to supply two congregations or to support two preachers; and it was consequently necessary to hold services in each of the churches on alternate Sundays in order to insure a sizable congregation and a moderate support for the circuit rider and the Christian elder, when they came from their farms in another part of the county to preach on their appointed days; thus giving freedom to all and favor to none.

A single contribution box served for the two churches. This, which was in reality a contribution bag, was a sort of inverted liberty cap made of ecclesiastical black cloth, and lined with churchly purple satin. When not in use it usually stood on the end of its long staff in what was called the Amen corner of the Methodist church. The office of taking it down from its accustomed resting-place, and of carrying it over to the Christian church when needed there, had belonged from time immemorial to Uncle Watty. It is not certain to which of the two denominations Uncle Watty himself belonged. It was, indeed, never a very clearly established fact that he was a member of any denomination, but this uncertainty had nothing whatever to do with the lifelong holding of his office. It seemed to everybody to be the right and proper thing for Uncle Watty to take up the collection, mainly for the reason that he always had done it, which is accepted as a good and sufficient reason for many rather singular things in that region. Miss Judy, who knew about it, as she knew about everything, although she never saw him do it,--since she never went to meeting,--always considered it a particularly kind and delicate arrangement, devised by some thoughtful, feeling person expressly to save Uncle Watty the embarrassment of having nothing to put in the bag himself. But Uncle Watty apparently took another view of it; and, like a good many people who do little themselves and exact much from others, he was extremely rigorous and almost relentless in his handing of the contribution bag. Its tough, hickory handle was equal to the full length of the benches, and no man, woman, or child might hope to evade its deliberate presentation under the very nose, and its being steadily held there, too, until Uncle Watty thought everybody's duty was fully done.