Chapter 2
On the wide hearth of this great chimney a fire was always burning. No matter what the season or the weather might be, there was always a solemn ceremony around the hearth when the fire was renewed, at the beginning and the close of every day all the year round. In winter it was a glorious bonfire consuming great logs. In summer it was the merest glimmer that could hold a flickering spark. Between winter and summer, as on this mild October evening, a bright flame sometimes danced gayly behind the big brass andirons, while all the windows and doors were wide open. But through cold and heat, and burning high or low, the fire was never entirely forgotten, never quite permitted to go out. Thus ever alight it burned like a sacred flame on the altar of home.
Streaming from the doors and windows that night, it gave the youth and the maiden a cheerful welcome as they came up the darkening hillside. Lamplight also began to glimmer, and candles flitted here and there before the windows and door, borne by the dark shapes of the servants who were laying the table for supper. The main room of Cedar House opened directly upon the river front; and when brightly lighted, it could be distinctly seen from without. Ruth and David paused on the threshold, still unconsciously holding one another's hands, and looked in.
There were five persons in the room, three men and two women, and they were all members of the household with the exception of Philip Alston, the white-haired gentleman, whose appearance bore no other mark of age. And he also might have been considered as one of the family, since he had been coming to the house daily for many years. He came usually to see Ruth, but of late he had found it necessary to see William Pressley more often; and they were talking eagerly and in a low tone, rather apart, when the boy and girl paused to see and hear what was taking place within the great room. William Pressley sat in the easiest chair in the warmest corner, close to the hearth. There are some men--and a few women--who always take the softest seat in the best place, and they do it so naturally that no one ever thinks of their doing anything else or expects them to sit elsewhere. William Pressley was one of these persons. In the next easiest chair, on the other side of the hearth, was his aunt, the widow Broadnax, whose short, broad, shapeless, inert figure was lying rather than sitting almost buried in a heap of cushions. This lady was the sister of the judge and the half-sister of the other lady, Miss Penelope Knox,--the thin, nervous, restless little old woman,--who was fidgeting back and forth between the hearth and the doorway leading to the distant kitchen. The relationship of these two ladies to one another, and the difference in their relationship to the head of Cedar House, caused much dissension in the household, and gave rise to certain domestic complications which always rose when least expected.
The fire had been freshly kindled with small twigs of the sugar maple, that priceless tree often standing fifty to an acre in the wilderness, and giving the pioneers their best fire-wood, their coolest shade, and their sweetest food. Vivid blue sparks were still flashing among the little white stars of the gray moss on the big backlog. From the blazing ends of the log there came the soft, airy music and the faint, sweet scent of bubbling sap. This main room of Cedar House was very large, almost vast, taking up the whole lower floor. It was the dining room as well as the sitting room; and when some grand occasion arose, it served even as a drawing-room, and did it handsomely, too. This great room of Cedar House always reminded David of the ancient halls in "The Famous History of Montilion," a romance of chivalry from which most of his ideas of life were taken, and upon which most of his ideals of living were formed. Surely, he thought, the castle of the "Knight of the Oracle" could not be grander than this great room of Cedar House.
The rich dark wood of its walls and floor--all rudely smoothed with the broadaxe and the whipsaw--hung overhead in massive beams. From these low, blackened timbers there swung many antique lamps, splendid enough for a palace and strangely out of place in a log house of the wilderness. On the rough walls there were also large sconces of burnished silver but poorly filled with tallow candles. In the bare spaces between these silver sconces were the heads of wild animals mingled with many rifles, both old and new, and other arms of the hunter. Over the tall mantelpiece there were crossed two untarnished swords which had been worn by the judge's father in the Revolution. On the red cedar of the floor, polished by wear and rubbing, there lay the skins of wild beasts, together with costly foreign rugs. The same strange mixture of rudeness and refinement was to be seen everywhere throughout the room. The table standing in the centre of the floor, ready for the evening meal, was made of unplaned boards, rudely put together by the unskilled hands of the backwoods. Yet it was set with the finest china, the rarest glass, and the richest silver that the greatest skill of the old world could supply. The chairs placed around the table were made of unpainted wood from the forest, with seats woven out of the coarse rushes from the river. And there, between the front windows, stood Ruth's piano, the first in that part of the wilderness, and as fine as the finest of its day anywhere.
It is true that something like the same confusion of luxury and wildness was becoming more or less common throughout the country. The wain trains which had lately followed the packhorse trains over the Alleghanies--with the widening of the Wilderness Road--were already bringing many comforts and even luxuries to the cabins of the well-to-do settlers. But nothing like those which were fetched constantly to Cedar House ever came to any other household; and it was not the family who caused them to be brought there. For while the judge was a man of wealth for his time and place, and able to give his family greater comfort than his poorer neighbors could afford, he was far from having the means, much less the taste and culture, to gather such costly, beautiful, and rare things as were gathered together in Cedar House. It was through Philip Alston that everything of this kind had come. It was he who had chosen everything and paid for it, and ordered it fetched over the mountains from Virginia or up the river from France or Spain--all as gifts from him to Ruth. It was natural enough that he should give her whatever he wished her to have, and there was no reason why she should not accept any and everything that he gave. She was held by him and by every one as his adopted daughter. He had no children of his own, no relations of any degree so far as any one knew, and he was known to be generous and believed to be very rich. Indeed no one thought much about his gifts to Ruth; they had long since become a matter of course, a part of the everyday life of Cedar House. They had begun with Ruth's coming more than seventeen years before. As a baby she had been rocked in a cradle such as never before had been seen in the wilderness,--a very gem of wonderful carving and inlaid work from Spain. As a little child she had been dressed--as no little one of the wild wood ever had been before--in the finest fabrics and the daintiest needlework from the looms and convents of France. Very strange things may become familiar through use. The simple people of Cedar House and their rude neighbors were well used to all this. They had seen the beautiful blue-eyed baby grow to be a more beautiful child, and the child to a most beautiful maiden, and always surrounded by the greatest refinement and luxury that love and means could bring into the wilderness. Naturally enough they now found nothing to wonder at, in the daily presence of this radiant young figure among them.
It was only for an instant that the girl and boy stood thus unseen on the threshold of Cedar House, looking into the great room. Philip Alston saw them almost at once. He had been watching and waiting for Ruth, as he always was when she was out of his sight even for a moment. He sprang up, quickly and alertly, like a strong young man, and went to meet her with his gallant air. She held up her cheek smilingly; he bent and kissed it, and taking her hand with his grand bow, led her across the room. The judge and his nephew also arose, as they always did when she came in or went out. The judge did this unconsciously, without thinking, and scarcely knowing that he did do it; for he was a plain man, rather awkward and very absent-minded, and deeply absorbed in the study of his profession. William Pressley did it with deliberate intention and self-consciousness, as he did everything that he deemed fitting. It was his nature to give grave thought to the least thing that he said or did. It was his sincere conviction that the smallest matter affecting himself was of infinitely greater importance than the greatest that could possibly concern any one else. There are plenty of people who believe this as sincerely as he believed it, but there are few who show the belief with his candor. When he now stood up to place a chair for Ruth beside his own, he did the simple service as if the critical eyes of the world had been upon him. And his manner was so consciously correct that no one observed that the chair which he gave her was not so comfortable as his own. He was uncommonly good-looking, also, and tall and shapely, yet there was something about his full figure--that vague, indescribable something--which unmistakably marks the lack of virility in mind or body, no matter how large or handsome a man may be. He stood for a moment after Ruth was seated, and then, seeing that Philip Alston was about to lift a candle-stand which was heaped with parcels, he went to aid him, and the two men together set the little table before her. She looked at it with soft, excited cries of surprise and delight, instantly divining that the unopened parcels and sealed boxes contained more of the gifts which her foster-father was constantly lavishing upon her. He smiled down at her beaming face and dancing eyes, and then taking out his pocket-knife he cut the cords and removed the covers of the boxes. As the wrappings fell away, there was a shimmer of dazzling tissues, silver and gold.
"Oh! oh!" she cried.
"Just a few pretty trifles, my dear," he said. "You like them?"
"Like them!"
Repeating his words she sprang up, and running round the candle-stand, stood on the very tips of her toes so that she might throw her arms about his neck. He bent his head to meet her upturned face, and if ever tenderness shone in a man's pale, grave face, it shone then in his. If ever love--pure and unselfish--beamed from a man's eyes, it was beaming now from those looking down in the girl's face. His tender gaze followed her fondly as she went back to the candle-stand and began to examine each article again more than once and with lingering and growing delight. She found new beauties every moment, and pointed them out to the three men and the boy who were now gathered around her. She called the ladies also, over and over, but they did not come, although they cast many glances at the candle-stand.
Miss Penelope was engaged in making the coffee for supper; and while she did not consider the making of the coffee for supper quite so vital a matter as the making of the coffee for breakfast, she still could not think of leaving the hearth under any inducement so long as the coffee-pot sat on its trivet above the glowing coals. The widow Broadnax stirred among her cushions once or twice, as if almost on the point of trying to get out of her chair. She was fonder of finery than her half-sister was, and she would have liked very much to see these beautiful things nearer. But she was still fonder of her own ease than of finery, and it was really a great deal of trouble to get out of her deep, broad low chair. And then she never moved or took her eyes off her half-sister while that energetic lady was engaged in making the coffee.
Knowing the ladies' ways, Ruth did not expect them to come. She was quite satisfied to have the men share her pleasure in the presents. They were looking at her and not at the gifts lying heaped on the candle-stand, but she did not notice that. She gave the judge a priceless piece of lace to hold. He took it with the awkward, helpless embarrassment of a manly man handling a woman's delicate belongings,--the awkwardness that goes straight to a woman's heart, because she sees and feels its true reverence--a reverence just as plain and just as sweet to the simplest country girl as to the wisest woman of the world. The perception of it is a matter of intuition, not one of experience. The least experienced woman instantly distrusts the man who can touch her garments with ease or composure. Ruth's gay young voice broke into a sweet chime of delighted laughter when the judge seized the airy bit of lace as if it had been the heaviest and hottest of crowbars. She laughed again when she looked at his face. He had an odd trick of lifting one of his eyebrows very high and at an acute angle when perplexed or ill at ease. This eccentric left eyebrow--now quite wedge-shaped--had gone up almost to the edge of his tousled gray hair. Ruth patted his great clumsy hands with her little deft ones.
"Well, I'll have to take to the woods, if there's no other way of escape," said the judge, making his greatest threat.
"You dear!" she said, running her arm through his and giving it a little squeeze. "That's right. Hold it tight--be careful, or it will break. Here, William," piling the young man's arms full of delicately tinted gauze, "this is a sunset cloud. And these," casting lengths of exquisite tissue over the boy's shoulder, "these are the mists of the dawn, David,--all silvery white and golden rose and jewelled blue. But--oh! oh!--these are the loveliest of all! A pair of slippers in orange-blossom kid, spangled with silver! Look at them! Just look, everybody!"
Holding them in her hand she ran round the table again to throw her arms about Philip Alston's neck the second time, like a happy, excited child. The little white slippers went up with her arms and touched his cheek. And then he drew them down, and clasping her slender wrists, held her out before him and looked at her with fond, smiling eyes.
"I don't believe that the Empress Josephine has any prettier slippers than those," he said. "I ordered the prettiest and the finest in Paris."
"Who fetched all these things?" the judge broke in, with something like a sudden realization of the number and the value of the gifts.
"Oh, a friend of mine," responded Philip Alston, carelessly, and without turning his head,--"a friend who has many ships constantly going and coming between New Orleans and France. He orders anything I wish; and when it comes to him, he sends it on to me by the first flatboat cordelled up the river."
"What is his name?" asked the judge, with a persistence very uncommon in him.
Philip Alston turned now and glanced at him with an easy, almost bantering smile.
"I don't like to tell you his name, because you--with a good many other honestly mistaken people--are most unjustly prejudiced against him. And then you know well enough that I am speaking of my respected and trusted friend, Monsieur Jean Lafitte."
The judge dropped the lace as if it had burnt his hand. He went back to his seat by the window in silence. He sat down heavily and looked at Philip Alston in perplexity, rubbing his great shock of rough grizzled hair the wrong way as he always did when worried. His thoughts were plainly to be read on his open, rugged face. This liking of Philip Alston's for a man under a national ban was an old subject of worry and perplexity. Yet Alston was always as frank and as firm about it as he had been just now, and the judge's confidence in him was absolute. Robert Knox's own character must have changed greatly before he could have doubted the sincerity of any one whom he had known as long, as intimately, and as favorably as he had known Philip Alston. We all judge others by ourselves,--whether we do it consciously or not,--since we have no other way of judging. And the judge himself was so simple, so sincere, so essentially honest, that he could not doubt one who was in a way a member of his own family. And then he was absent-minded, unobservant, easy-going, indolent, and the slave of habit, as such a nature is apt to be. Moreover, he was not always master of the slight power of observation which had been given him. That very day, while on his way home from the court-house, he had stopped at a cabin where liquor was sold. As a consequence, this sudden touch of uneasiness which aroused him for an instant was forgotten nearly as suddenly as it came. So that after looking bewilderedly at Philip Alston once or twice, he now began to nod and doze.
III
"PHILIP ALSTON, GENTLEMAN"
Philip Alston still stood before the candle-stand. His gaze rested on the girl's radiant face with wistful tenderness. It was plain that he thought nothing of all these rich, rare gifts which he had given her, save only as they gave her pleasure and might win from her another loving look, another butterfly kiss on his cheek.
As he stood there that night in the great room of Cedar House, before the firelight and under the beams of the swinging lamps, he scarcely appeared to need the help of any gift in winning a woman's love. His was a presence to hold the gaze. He was very tall and straight and slender, yet most finely proportioned. The heavy hair, falling back from his handsome face and tied in a queue, must once have been as black as Ruth's own; surely, no paler shade could have become so silvery white. His eyes, also, were as blue as hers, and none could have been bluer. His skin was almost as fair and smooth as hers, his manner as gentle and kind, his voice as soft and his smile as sweet. He was elegantly dressed, as he always was, his fine long coat of forest green broadcloth had a wide velvet collar and large gold buttons. His velvet knee-breeches and the wide riband which tied his queue were of the same rich shade of dark green. The most delicate ruffles filled the front of his swan's-down vest and fell over his hands, which were remarkably white and small and taper-fingered, like a fine lady's. His white silk stockings and his low shoes were held by silver buckles. So looked Philip Alston, Gentleman,--and so he was called,--as he stood in the great room of Cedar House on that night of October, nearly a hundred years ago. And thus he is described in the few rare old histories which touch the romance of this region when he ruled it like a king, by the power of his intelligence and the might of his will.
He was foremost in the politics of the time as in everything else, and he and William Pressley had been discussing this subject at the moment of Ruth's appearance, which had interrupted their conversation. Philip Alston had forgotten the unfinished topic, but William Pressley had not. He, also, had been pleased to look on for a while at the girl's radiant delight; and he, also, had enjoyed the charming scene. But there was a lull now, and he at once turned back to the matter in which he was most deeply interested. Ambition for political preferment was the theme which most absorbed his mind, and ambition was the one thing which could always light a spark of fire in his cold, hard, shallow hazel eyes. This was not for the reason that he cared especially for politics in itself, which he did not. But he turned to it in preference to warfare, since the choice of the ambitious young men of the wilderness lay between the two. Politics seemed to him to open the surest and shortest road to the prominence which he craved above everything else. He was one of those unfortunates who can never be happy on a level--even with the highest--and who must look down in order to be at all content with life. Yet with this overweening and insatiable craving for distinction and prominence, he had been given no talent by which distinction may be won; had been granted no quality, mental, moral, or physical, by which he might rise above the mass of his fellows. It was a cruel trick for Nature to play, and one that she plays far too often. The sufferers from it are certainly far more to be pitied than blamed, and it is harmful only to the afflicted themselves, so long as it meets, or still expects, a measure of gratification. When they are permitted to reach any height from which to look down, the terrible craving appears to be temporarily appeased; and they become kind, and even generous, to all who look up with willing, unwandering gaze. It is only when the sufferers fail to reach any height, or when they lose what little they may have attained, or when the gaze of the world wanders, that they become hard, sour, bitter, and merciless toward all who have succeeded where they have failed. The only mercy that Nature has shown them in their affliction, is to make most of them slow to realize that they can never gain the one thing they crave. And this miserable awakening had not yet come to William Pressley. On that evening he had every reason to be content and well pleased with himself. The future promised all that he most earnestly wished for. He was already moderately successful in the practice of his profession. This was mainly owing to his uncle's influence, but he was far from suspecting the fact. His domestic life, also, was admirably settled; he was fond of Ruth and proud of her, as he was of everything belonging to himself. But the thing which made him happiest was a suggestion of Philip Alston's, first offered on the previous day; and it was to this that he now recurred at the first opportunity.
He spoke with an eagerness curiously apart from his words:
"There seems to be no doubt that the Shawnees are really gone. Men, women, and children, they have all disappeared from their town on the other side of the river. A hunter who has been over there told me so yesterday. It appears reasonably certain that the warriors are gathering under the Prophet at Tippecanoe."
"Yes, it is undoubtedly true that the Indians are rising," replied Philip Alston, still looking at Ruth. "Well, it was bound to come,--this last decisive struggle between the white and the red race,--and the sooner the better, perhaps. I hear, too, that the troops are already moving upon the Shawnee encampment."
"Have you heard anything more about the attorney-general's offering his services? Is it decided that he will go?" asked William Pressley.
He spoke more quickly and with more spirit than was common with him. And he sank back with an involuntary movement of disappointment when Philip Alston shook his head.
"However, there is little doubt that he will go. He is almost sure to," Philip Alston went on. "It is his way to put his own shoulder to the wheel. You remember, judge--"
"What's that!" cried the judge, starting up from his doze.
"We are talking about Joseph Hamilton Daviess," said Philip Alston.
"A great man. A great lawyer--the first lawyer west of the Alleghanies to go to Washington and plead a case before the Supreme Court," said the judge.