Part 9

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.

It was Clay and Crawford who let the British make that treaty of December twenty-fourth in which they said that they would not be bound by Bonaparte's constructions. At that time Lord Castlereagh had every reason to believe that Packenham, sent out November twenty-fourth, with the best army and navy that ever left Portsmouth for a foreign shore, had taken the 'crown colony of Louisiana,' as they called it. And under that treaty they would have held it. It was Jackson who stopped them, just one day before that treaty was signed.

"Yes, Clay is dead," she said laconically; "he ought to be.

"They wanted New Orleans, and they wanted it bad. 'Booty and Beauty' was the word they passed down the line when they landed and started across the Chalmette plain, to take the fair Creole City. They were going to take her and then rape her as they did the cities of Spain, and they would if Jackson had not gaffed their very vitals out in that night attack of December twenty-third."

She turned suddenly on me, her eyes ablaze. "Do you think, Jack, if he had loved a girl and an Englishman wanted her bad enough to take her right out of his arms that he would have given her up?"

I looked up quickly and her face flushed with fighting fire.

"And he was the tenderest, Jack," she went on calmly. "Old Parton tells a pretty story about him. One bitter, sleeting March day, an early lamb had all but died in the field here, and his little adopted grandchild, a tot of four, found the lamb and cried for it; and so Jackson brought them both to the house, and by the fire; and to comfort the child he took them both into his arms and so sat here, before this great hearth, holding them both in his arms.

"He, who had killed bad men as he had dogs, who had cut to death the pick of the army that later won Waterloo, he sat coddling a lamb and a child and thinking of his dead wife, and she,--oh, Jack, I all but shed tears when I think of it! The night she died, and he would not have it so, but lay all night beside her, holding her in his arms, and trying to get her warm again, with the great love of his own great heart."

There were tears in Aunt Lucretia's eyes. Oh, the depths of her stern heart! It is like the mountain capped with snow. But when the snow melts and the flowers come up among the crannied rocks there are no flowers in the valleys below that equal them.

The other recollection was of Eloise. It was the night before she left for Washington. Colonel Goff, who had spent the evening with her, had ridden off. I, pretending to work, was really listening for her footstep, as she came back to her room up the great steps.

"Jack," she said, standing just outside the window, "come." And she beckoned to me.

We sat down under the wisteria vine, which grew over the porch.

"Jack," she said, "I want you to do me one favor. No one loves Satan here but you and me. Won't you take care of him while I am gone? Ride him whenever you can, the harder the better, for he is made of iron and needs it."

"He and I are good friends," I said. "I have ridden him daily. We understand each other," I added softly; "we both love you."

"And Jack," her hand was instantly in mine in the old way, "in after years you won't think evil of me for selling myself this way, will you?"

"Why, no," I said seriously. "I have been thinking of it, and all life is just a barter and trade."

I saw her face in the starlight.

"I've no right to make you wretched like this, Jack," she said, rising. "I am going in; and when I return do you be gone Jack, somewhere--anywhere." Her voice trembled. She stood quiet, and I by her, dazed and helpless.

"There is one thing I am going to take to England with me, Jack," and she pulled out from beneath her gown yoke, a little token I had forgotten. I recognized the locket and the chain I had given her years ago. "And this little picture in it is you, Jack. You gave them both to me the day I helped you lick Braxton Bragg."

Then she turned quickly and left me.

"Jack," said my Aunt, as we parted the next day at the station, "I am afraid things are all against us. Father, I see, is going to will The Home Stretch to Braxton Bragg. If I were you--"

"I have already done it," I said. "I am going to move to-day to Dr. Gottlieb's; there I shall work out my plans."

My Aunt smiled grimly. "I want you to remember one thing when I am gone. Don't give up--remember Old Hickory."

I looked up at her quickly. I saw something in her eye that gave me heart again. I bade her good-by. I dared not say it to Eloise. I slipped away, but I watched the train of cars die away behind the trail of smoke in the distance as I rode back home, and it seemed as if my whole afterlife lay clouded in that path of smoke. It was hard to give up my home, the old home, every tree I knew, and with them Eloise and my life-dream....

One's dream and one's home--what else is there which grips so the very tendrils of one's soul. To give up one cuts deeply into the roots of the heart, but when the blow is doubled, there is only one thing that can make one stand upright and not fall, and that is the Spirit Within. People have different ideas of God as their souls reveal. It runs all the way from the pitiable, crude, faint conception which comes to the savage in cloud, a sun, or star or image of stone, to the higher mind which perceives Him in the Great Spirit of the Universe. None of these is my idea of God. I have never been able to dissociate God from my own self. I have never been able to conceive of Him as apart from me.... And not always the same, but always there.... In my meaner self so little of Him is there, so tiny a spot of the divine light ... so faint, so seemingly nothing. And this is the greatest of it--this is the test--the very divinest evidence. _He is always there_; and when a blow comes, humbling the material, the meaner of me, then He claims His own--my nobler self--taking it unto His care, flooding it with His presence. It is then, searching yourself and your own heart that you find Him--that you know that you are a part of God because He is there!

Riding home it all swept over me so. In my innermost soul I knew it: like a flash came the inspiration of it, the old Prophet of Deuteronomy: "_As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings._" Did God mean in this, the wrecking of my nest, that I should fly--even as a young eagle?

"And remember Satan, Jack, to keep him fit," I heard Eloise's voice say.

*CHAPTER XVI*

*HEART'S-EASE*

Never was there a quieter, better place to work than at Dr. Gottlieb's, whither I had gone after Aunt Lucretia and Eloise had left. In a short while I had become reconciled, in my hard work, to my lot; for to live with Dr. Gottlieb meant to work, to classify, to probe into things, and this meant to put aside all else, even for awhile one's heart's trouble for the hard mental strain of it. I remember those study nights well and with such pleasure. I can recall the little quiet man with his books, his abstraction, his quaint comments, the learned deductions that fell now and then from his lips as if he were unconscious that he was speaking. From studying the pollen of a flower he would look up abstractedly and drawl, "_Ah, Jack; and Miss Lucretia--that most beautiful and charming of women! Did I ever tell you that each of us has our prototype in a plant? And how much to my mind--ah, Jack, and to my heart, how much she resembles the beautiful red wood lily!_"

He would put down his book, and look longingly out over the hills. It was the only foolish thing he ever did, I thought, and so I forgave him, knowing that each of us has at least one foolish thought within us.

He always had a smile for me; often he would walk around all the evening thinking abstractedly, or puttering among his books and plants and geographical specimens, and then start into real work at midnight. And I would work with him; for, besides studying my forestry, I was carrying on some experiments, testing the various effects of fertilizers on the soil of The Home Stretch. Dr. Gottlieb would say: "It is not the time, it is the inspiration, Jack; catch it when it comes."

Exercising Satan daily as I did, I became as attached to the great game fellow as did he to me. He was a singular horse, of a type entirely his own. The harder the ride, the more difficult the feat, the stubborner, gamer he grew. Not every horse is an individual, in fact few are; they are horses merely. But Satan was one, almost human in his idiosyncrasies. If he had been a man he would have been one of the world's leaders. There was nothing he would not do for me after he learned to love me.

Even in my heartache, in my despair at giving up Eloise, I thought often of Elsie; for, having known her since she was a tot of three years, when she came to live with Tammas and Marget, riding her, a wee girl in front of me on my pony, going with her, a little maid, over the hills to hunt for some Scotch flowers, I had that attachment for her that one has for a little sister. She had developed far more beautifully than I had dreamed of, both spiritually and in body; for the connection between them at last is the same. I had never thought before that there was any mystery about Elsie. Tammas and Marget, with all their apparent frankness, had the greatest inherited trait of their race, a shrewd secretiveness when it was best. Heretofore I had thought of Elsie only as their orphaned grandchild. I supposed her father was some sturdy Scotchman of their own class, who, perhaps, died after his wife, or, if alive, had given her to her grandparents. But now I saw differently; perhaps her beauty, and the romantic turn events had taken; the Juliet outpouring of her own exquisite nature had touched in me some subtle instinct.

It was this affair of Braxton Bragg which worried me most of all. I had not seen him since I returned. I did not want to. There are those born into our lives who seem always to oppose, thwart, counteract what we do. Braxton Bragg had played this part in my life. I could not escape him, try as I would. Even when I was in Germany, with an ocean between us, had he not cheated me of my own birthright? He was with his company in the city of Nashville, where the Tennessee troops were mobilized for the war. They expected orders to sail for the Philippines any day. All his life Braxton Bragg, weak as he was in character and mind, with that conceit which often goes with weakness, had really believed that, after he had acquired The Home Stretch, or a greater military reputation in the army, he would marry Eloise. All his life he had openly proclaimed it. His mentality was not great, and he had not yet learned that in real love monies, farms, reputation, fame, are the least that count.

Goff had won her. Braxton Bragg now knew that. Goff had always befriended him, and bore with him more than anyone else. Goff had confided in him and trusted him. Braxton Bragg was as immoral as he was weak. Therefore I reasoned this matter lay in one of two ways. Either he was recklessly scheming to deceive and ruin Elsie, or else he had found out something that none of us knew and was scheming to marry her on account of it. Besides deceiving my grandsire, as he had all his life, I now learned that he had further deceived him:--that, graduating from West Point, he had been appointed to the army, but even before he went on duty, he had been caught in an act unbecoming a soldier and gentleman, and to escape courtmartial had resigned. My grandfather's influence had saved him and got him elected captain of a company which my grandsire had himself raised and equipped for the war.

Absorbed in my own affairs, numbed by the wreckage which had come to my soul's dream, I had neglected Elsie of late. When I realized it, and what it meant to a sensitive nature such as hers, I went over at once, fearing that, since our last meeting she might have misunderstood my absence, and brooded over imaginary wrongs to her own hurt. I found it was high time when I learned the real situation.

Tammas met me, his face weary; for the first time in all our greetings with no broad smile.

"Tammas," I said, "where is Elsie? I want to see her."

"Come, Mr. Jack," said he, taking off his big butter apron; "we'll gang ben into Marget's room, for we baith want to talk to you."

I found Marget quite as troubled as Tammas.

"I feel that I've been neglecting you," I said, trying to talk cheerfully, "but--I have--there have been great changes in my life--I have gone to live with--"

"Ay, we ken aboot it," said Marget, "and though we didna understand, we thocht ye'd come ower in your ain guid time to tell us."

"If we can help you, Mr. Jack," began Tammas quietly, "we will be glad to do it."

"Thank you, good friends," I said, taking his hand. "I can't explain it all now; only this," I went on, forcing a smile that I did not feel, "there has been scheming against me all around, everywhere, since I left home, and--well," I smiled, "I've been turned out of home, and--and--everything."

Marget's eyes flashed: "They'll no' turn ye oot o' onything," she cried hotly, "no' as long as we're here, Tammas an' me. Ye'll jist come ower and bide wi' us. Here's your room, Mr. Jack. An' Tammas an' me--we love ye as much as we dae oor ain bairn. I ken fine wha it is. Tammas, didna I tell ye? It's juist that Braxton Bragg! He's been plotting against ye ever since he was a wee bairn, an' ye're no' the only one that he's mistreating; an' it breaks ma heart to think that ony man in this country whaur we and oor lassie hae lived so correctly, should be sae bold as to write this, an' it's been wanting to see ye we have, an' to show it to ye. Ye are a' we hae to protect her, Jack; we are truthful folks, an' oor lassie is a sweet and pure lass, that has been a' her life here in this valley, like as to ony lily in it, an' we dinna think she should be insulted by the like o' that."

She had taken a note from her bosom and handed it to me.

"Haud on a wee, afore ye read it," said Tammas. "Afore ye cam' hame," he went on, "I didna like his attention to oor lassie, an' the untoward way he had o' trying to meet her secretly gin she but gaed oot o' oor sicht, an' ye ken Mr. Jack, hoo fond she was since a bairn, to hunt flo'ers an' birds on the hills aroun'. Sae very frankly I gaed to him, as I thocht it my duty to do, an I tell't him we had oor ain plans for the lassie, an that he was in anither class frae her, an' any attention he showed her wad be to the hurt o' the lassie, an' it wad be maist unbecoming in him as a gentleman to persist. Eh, but it maddened me to hear him explain and pass it a' aff as a joke, an' the flattery o' him fair scunnert me, it did. But for a' I said till him he didna stop it, but kept dogging the steps o' the lassie an' writing her love notes. Sae I gaed till him again an' maist pintedly I made him understaun', that I wad appeal to his grandfaither for protection. I am a man of peace, but this maitter has reached its leemit, an' noo we're gaun to turn it ower to you. Marget an' masel' hae thocht it a' oot, because if ever Elsie had a brither it's oor Jack," he added. "There's only ae thing mair I'll be asking ye afore ye act, an' it's jist this, that seeing the matter's sae delicate an' talking aboot it micht injure oor lassie, I'll jist ask ye to consult wi' Colonel Goff in the maitter."

"Ay, an' ae day ye'll ken the reason," said Marget very quietly, nodding approval to Tammas's remarks.

I never was so angry as when I read the letter. I was fighting mad, no other word will do.

"Where is Elsie?" I asked, controlling myself. "I must talk with our little lassie."

"Weel, ye see," said Marget, "Jack, I dinna ken. The puir bairn is a' but crushed--she's just like a lily that has grown a' simmer in the valley, an' opens for the first time ae morning to find there's such a thing in God's worl' as rain an' hail."

Tammas came up to me whispering quietly. "We maun tell ye this, Mr. Jack, it's only fair that ye should ken. We hae keepit' oor ain counsel a' these years about oor lassie, an' that which we wad like ye to ken aboot her Colonel Goff will tell ye. But this ye maun ken, there is behind her on her faither's side that verra intensity of nature so highly keyed for joy or sorrow, that it has sent mony o' her forbears amang the gentle leddies o' her hoose to early deaths, even to taking their ain lives. Ay, Elsie is jist sae like her faither's sister, the bonnie ane that suicided for love. Eh, but oor hearts are wae aboot oor bairn. She's shut hersel' in her room a' day, but jist afore ye cam' she gaed off to the wood ower yonder."

"Ay, ay, if there's ony ane in this worl' that can help us it's you, as I said to Tammas afore ye cam'. The Lord be thankit for your coming!"

"Ay, but the lassie;--Mr. Jack, would you let them that raised you be plain to your face as becomes honest folks with those they love?"

I nodded. "Then Elsie cares na' a bawbee for this bold rascallion--it's you she loves, Mr. Jack, an' wi' a' respect and deference for so delicate a thing, you'll sune ken that ye hae the love o' a lassie wham the highest in England and Scotland wad be prood to mate wi'."

At first I could not find her. She was hidden in her favorite place, a natural arbor of low dogwoods overgrown with a beautiful root of tangled wild-grape.

I was never before more calm, for the seriousness of it all was on me. Not only was her own reputation, her future happiness and life at stake, but that of others also. The hint given me by Marget made things clear. If I ever needed tact I needed it now. I was ready for any concession to save her from the position she was in, even to forget Eloise, if I could.