Chapter 3
The diplomatic reason, however, that Richard Mivane was wont to shove off his grandchildren from the arm of that stately chair was that here they got on his blind side,--his simple, grandfatherly, affectionate predilection. The touch of them, their scrambling, floundering, little bodies, their soft pink cheeks laid against his, their golden hair in his clever eyes, their bright glances at close range,--he was then like other men and could deny them nothing! His selfishness, his vanity, his idleness, his frippery were annulled in the instant. He was resolved into the simple constituent elements of a grandfather, one part doting folly, one part loving pride, and the rest leniency, and he was as wax in their hands.
None of them had so definitely realized this, accurately discriminating cause and effect, as Peninnah Penelope Anne. She felt safe the moment that she was perched on the arm of her grandfather's chair, her soft clasp about his stiff old neck, her tears flowing over her cheeks, all pink anew, escaping upon his wrinkled, bloodless, pale visage and taking all the starch out of his old-fashioned steinkirk. He struggled futilely once or twice, but she only hugged him the closer.
"Oh, don't let him go! Oh, don't let him go!" she cried.
"The wolf that we were talking about? By no means! Lovely creature that he is! We'll preserve, if you like, wolves instead of pheasants! I remember a gentleman's estate in Northumberland--a little beyond the river"--
"Oh, grandfather, don't let him go!" she sobbingly interrupted. "It was he who shot the wolf and stampeded the herds, and the cow-drivers will quarrel with him when they would not have angry words with another ambassador. They will kill him! They will kill him!"
"What for? Poaching?--shooting their wolf?"
"Any one else would be safe, grandfather--except poor Ralph!"
"Go yourself then. May-day!"
"I would, grandfather! I would not be afraid!" She put her soft little hand on his cheek to turn his head to look into her confident eyes.
"An able and worshipful ambassador!" he said banteringly.
"Oh, grandfather, this is no time to risk quarrels among the settlers, and bloodshed. Oh, the herders would kill him! And the Injuns all so unfriendly--they might take the chance to get on the war-path again when the settlers are busy killing each other--and oh, the cow-drivers will kill Ralph Emsden!"
All this persuasion was of necessity in a distinct loud voice; unnoticed, however, for a crisis had supervened in the play of the children by the chimney-place settle, and the sanguinary struggles and scalping in the storming of the fort were blood-curdling to behold to any one with enough imagination to discern a full-armed and fierce savage in a kernel of corn, and a stanch and patriotic Carolinian in a pebble. But when Peninnah Penelope Anne, all attuned to this high key, burst out weeping with commensurate resonance, all the vocations of the household came to a standstill, and her mother appeared, surprised and reproving, in the doorway.
"Peninnah Penelope Anne," she said with her peculiar exact deliberation and gift of circumlocution, "it is better to go and sew your sampler than to tease your grandfather."
"She does not tease me--I have not shed a tear! That was not the sound of my weeping!" he declared facetiously, one arm protectingly about the little sobbing figure.
"He does not like his grandchildren to climb about him like squirrels and wild cattle," the lady continued. Then irrelevantly, "Long stitches were always avoided in our family. The work you last did in your sampler has been taken out, child, and you can sew it again and to better advantage."
"And earn your name of Penelope," said Richard Mivane.
But he was putting on his hat and evidently had some effort in prospect, for how could he resist,--she looked so childish and appealing as she sat before the fire, weeping those large tears, and absently preparing to sew her sampler anew.
While Richard Mivane, by virtue of his early culture, the scanty remains of his property, his fine-gentleman habits and traditions, and the anomaly of his situation, was the figure of most mark at the station, its ruling spirit was of far alien character. This was John Ronackstone, a stanch Indian fighter; a far-seeing frontier politician; a man of excellent native faculties, all sharpened by active use and frequent emergencies; skilled and experienced in devious pioneer craft; and withal infinitely stubborn, glorying in the fact of the unchangeableness of his opinions and his immutable abiding by his first statements. After one glance at his square countenance, his steady noncommittal black eyes, the upward bulldog cant of a somewhat massive nose, the firm compression of his long thin lips, one would no more expect him to depart from the conditions of a conclusion than that a signpost would enter into argument and in view of the fatigue of a traveler mitigate and recant its announcement.
Nevertheless Richard Mivane expected "some sense," as he phrased it, from this adamantine pioneer. Such a man naturally arrogated and obtained great weight among his fellows, and perhaps his lack of vacillation furthered this preëminence. He was a good man in the main as well as forceful, but an early and a very apt expression of the demagogue. And as he tolerated amongst his mental furniture no illusions and fostered no follies, his home life harbored no fripperies. His domicile was a contrast to the better ordered homes of the station, but here one might have meat and shelter, and what more should mortal ask of a house! He often boasted that not an atom of iron entered into its structure more than into an Indian's wigwam. Even the clapboards were fastened on to the rafters with wooden pegs in lieu of nails, although nails were not difficult to procure. He had that antagonism to the mere conventions of civilization often manifested by those who have been irked by such fetters before finally casting them off. It was a wholesome life and a free, and if the inmates of the house did not mind the scent of the drying deerskins hanging from the beams, which made the nose of Richard Mivane very coy, the visitor saw no reason why they should not please themselves. The stone-flagged hearth extended half across the room, and sprawling upon it in frowsy disorder was a bevy of children of all ages, as fat as pigs and as happy-go-lucky. He had hardly seated himself, having stepped about carefully among their chubby fingers and toes lest a crushing disaster supervene, than he regretted his choice of a confidant. He had his own, unsuspected sensitiveness, which was suddenly jarred when the wife in the corner, rocking the cradle with one foot while she turned a hoe-cake baking on the hearth with a dextrous flip of a knife, and feeling secure in his deafness, cast a witty fling at his fastidious apparel. With that frequent yet unexplained phenomenon of acoustics, her voice was so strung that its vibrations reached his numb perceptions as duly as if intended for his ears. He made no sign, in his pride and politeness, both indigenous. But he said to himself, "I don't laugh at her gown,--it is what she likes and what she is accustomed to wear. And why can't she let me dress in peace as I was early trained to do? God knows I feel myself better than nobody."
And he was sensible of his age, his infirmity, his isolation, and his jauntiness was eclipsed.
Thus he entered the race with a handicap, and John Ronackstone would hear none of his reasons with grace. He could not and he would not consent to the nomination of an ambassador in the stead of Emsden, who had volunteered for the service, which was the more appropriate since it was he who had shot the wolf and brought the stampede and its attendant difficulties upon the herders of the Keowee River, and this threat of retaliation upon the Blue Lick Stationers. If there were danger at hand, let a volunteer encounter it! In vain Mivane argued that there was danger to no one else. John Ronackstone, who found an added liberty of disputation in the emphasis imposed by the necessity of roaring out his immutable opinions in an exceeding loud voice, retorted that so far as he was informed the "cow-drivers" on the Keowee were not certain who it was that had committed this atrocity, unless perhaps their messenger during his sojourn at Blue Lick Station had learned the name from "X." But this uncertainty, Mivane argued, was the very point of difficulty. It was the maddest folly to dispatch to angry men, smarting under a grievous injury, messages of taunt and defiance by the one person who in their opinion, perhaps, had carelessly or willfully wrought this wrong. His life would pay the forfeit of the folly of his fellow-stationers.
Mivane noted suddenly that the woman rocking the cradle was laughing with an ostentatious affectation of covert slyness, and a responsive twinkle gleamed in the eyes of John Ronackstone. As he caught the grave and surprised glance of his visitor he made a point of dropping the air of a comment aside, which he, as well as she, had insistently brought to notice, and Mivane was aware that here was something which sought an opportunity of being revealed as if by necessity.
"Well, sir," Ronackstone began in a tone of a quasi-apology, "we were just saying--that is, I sez to X, who was in here a while ago,--I sez, 'I'll tell you what is goin' to happen,'--I sez, 'old Gentleman Rick,'--excuse the freedom, sir,--'he'll be wantin' to send somebody else in Ralph Emsden's place.' X, he see the p'int, just as you see it. He sez, 'Somebody that won't be missed--somebody not genteel enough to play loo with him after supper,' sez X. 'Or too religious,' sez I. 'Or can't sing a good song or tell a rousing tale,' sez X. 'Or listen an' laugh in the right places at the gentleman's old cracks about the great world,' sez I. 'He'll never let Ralph Emsden go,' sez X. 'Jus' some poor body will do,' sez I. 'Jus' man enough to be scalped by the Injuns if the red sticks take after him,' sez X. 'Or have his throat cut if the cow-drivers feel rough yet,' sez I. 'Jus' such a one ez me,' sez X. 'Or me,' sez I."
"Sir," said old Mivane, rising, and the impressive dignity of his port was such that the cradle stopped rocking as if a spell were upon it, and every child paused in its play, sprawling where it lay, "I am obliged to you for your polite expression of opinion of me, which I have never done aught to justify. I have nothing more to urge upon the question of the details which brought me hither, but of one thing be certain,--if Emsden does not go upon this mission _I_ shall be the ambassador. I apprehend no danger whatever to myself, and I wish you a very good day."
And he stepped forth with his wonted jaunty alacrity, leaving the man and his wife staring at each other with as much surprise as if the roof had fallen in.
A greater surprise awaited Mivane without. The rain was falling anew. In vast transparent tissues it swept with the gusty wind over the nearest mountains of the Great Smoky Range, whose farther reaches were lost in fog. The slanting lines, vaguely discerned in the downpour, almost obliterated the presence of the encompassing forests about the stockade. He noted how wildly the great trees were yet swaying, and he realized, for he could not have heard the blast, that a sudden severe wind-storm had passed over the settlement while he was within doors. The blockhouse, the tallest of the buildings, loomed up darkly amidst the gathering gray vapor, and through the great gates of the stockade, which opened on the blank cloud, were coming at the moment several men bearing a rude litter, evidently hastily constructed. On this was stretched the insensible form of Ralph Emsden, who had been stricken down in the woods with a dislocated shoulder and a broken arm by the falling of a branch of a great tree uprooted by the violence of the gusts. He had almost miraculously escaped being crushed, and was not fatally hurt, but examination disclosed that he was absolutely and hopelessly disabled for the time being, and Richard Mivane realized that he himself was the duly accredited ambassador to the herders on the Keowee River.
He went home in a pettish fume. No sooner was he within and the door fast shut, that none might behold save only those of his own household, who were accustomed to the aberrations of his temper and who regarded them with blended awe and respect, than he reft his cocked hat from his head and flung it upon the floor. Peninnah Penelope Anne sprang up so precipitately at the dread sight that she overturned her stool and drew a stitch awry in her sampler, longer than the women of her family were accustomed to take. The children gazed spellbound. The weavers at the loom were petrified; even the creak of the treadle and the noisy thumping of the batten--those perennial sounds of a pioneer home--sunk into silence. The two negroes at the end of the vista beyond the shed-room, with the ox-yoke and plough-gear which they were mending between them, opened wide mouths and became immovable save for the whites of astonished rolling eyes. Then, and this exceeded all precedent, Richard Mivane clutched his valued peruke and, with an inward plaintive deprecation of the extremity of this act of desperation, he cast it upon the hat, and looked around, bald, despairing, furious, and piteous.
It was, however, past the fortitude of woman to behold without protest this desecration of decoration. Peninnah Penelope Anne sprang forward, snatched the glossy locks from the puncheons, and with a tender hand righted the structure, while the powder flew about in light puffs at her touch, readjusting a curl here and a cleverly wrought wave there. The valet's pious aspiration from the doorway, "Bress de Lord!" betokened the acuteness of the danger over-past.
"Why, grandfather!" the girl admonished Mivane; "your beautiful peruke!--sure, sir, the loveliest curls in the world! And sets you like your own hair,--only that nobody _could really_ have such very genteel curls to grow--Oh--oh--grandfather!"
She did not offer to return it, but stood with it poised on one hand, well out of harm's way, while she surveyed Mivane reproachfully yet with expectant sympathy.
Perhaps he himself was glad that he could wreak no further damage which he would later regret, and contented himself with furiously pounding his cane upon the puncheon floor, a sturdy structure and well calculated to bear the brunt of such expressions of pettish rage.
"Dolt, ass, fool, that I am!" he cried. "That I should so far forget myself as to offer to go as an ambassador to the herders on the Keowee!" And once more he banged the floor after a fashion that discounted the thumping of the batten, and the room resounded with the thwacks.
An old dog, a favorite of yore, lying asleep on the hearth, only opened his eyes and wrinkled his brows to make sure, it would seem, who had the stick; then closing his lids peacefully snoozed away again, presently snoring in the fullness of his sense of security. But a late acquisition, a gaunt deerhound, after an earnest observation of his comrade's attitude, as if referring the crisis to his longer experience, scrutinized severally the faces of the members of the family, and, wincing at each resounding whack, finally gathered himself together apprehensively, as doubtful whose turn might come next, and discreetly slunk out unobserved by the back door.
Peninnah Penelope Anne rushed to the rescue.
"And why should you not be an ambassador, sir?" she demanded.
"Why--why--because, girl, I am deafer than the devil's dam! I cannot fetch and carry messages of import. I could only give occasion for ridicule and scorn in even offering to assume such an office."
Peninnah Penelope Anne had flushed with the keen sensitiveness of her pride. She instantly appreciated the irking of the dilemma into which he had thrust himself forgetting his infirmity, and she could have smitten with hearty enmity and a heavy stick any lips which had dared to smile. She responded, however, with something of her mother's indirection.
"Under your favor, sir, you don't know how deaf the devil's dam may be--and it is not your wont to speak in that strain. I'm sure it reminds me of that man they call 'X,'--a sort of churl person,--who talks of the devil and blue blazes and brimstone and hell as if--as if he were a native."
This was a turning of the sword of the pious "X" upon himself with a vengeance, for he was prone in his spiritual disquisitions to detail much of the discomfort of the future state that awaited his careless friends.
The allusion so far pleased old Mivane, who resented a suspected relegation of himself to a warm station in the schemes of "X," that, although his head was still bald and shining like a billiard ball, he suffered himself to drop into his chair, his stick resting motionless on the long-suffering puncheon floor.
"If I could only hear for a day I'd forgive twenty soundless years!" he declared piteously, for he so deprecated the enforced withdrawal from the enterprise that he had heedlessly undertaken, and felt so keenly the reflections upon his sentiments and sincerity surreptitiously canvassed between Ronackstone and "X," and then cavalierly rehearsed in his presence.
"You are only deaf to certain whanging voices in queer keys," his granddaughter declared.
"And how do I know in what sort of key the herders on the Keowee talk? They may 'moo' like the cow, or 'mew' like the cat! I should be in danger of losing half that was said. And that is what these varlets here in the station know right well. It must seem but a mere bit of bombast on my part. It could never be seriously countenanced--unless I had an interpreter. Stop me! but if you were a grandson instead of a granddaughter, I would not mind taking you with me to interpret for me, though, Gadzooks, I'd be like a heathen red Injun with a linguister!"
"And why am I not as good as any grandson?" demanded Peninnah Penelope Anne, with a spirited flash of her bright hazel eyes and great temerity of speculation; for be it remembered the days of the theories of woman's equality with man had not yet dawned. "Sure, sir, I can speak when I am spoken to. I understand the English language; and"--her voice rising into a liquid crescendo of delight--"I can wear my gray sergedusoy sack made over my carnation taffeta bodice and cashmere petticoat, all pranked out with bows of black velvet, most genteel, and my hat of quilled primrose sarcenet, grandfather. I'd take them in a bundle, for if we should have rain I would rather be in my old red hood and blue serge riding-coat on the way, grandfather."
And thus it was settled before she had fairly readjusted the peruke on his head as he sat in his great chair and she clambered on its arm.
She had not heard of the disaster that had befallen Ralph Emsden, and she turned rather pale and wistful when the news was communicated to her. Then realizing how opportune was the accident, how slight was its ultimate danger in comparison with the jeopardy of the mission from which he was rescued, she fairly gloated upon the chance which had conferred it upon her grandfather, and made her an instrument in its execution.
It was a queerly assorted embassy that rode out of the gates of the stockade, the ambassador and his linguister. Richard Mivane was mounted upon a strong, sprightly horse, with Peninnah Penelope Anne behind him upon a pillion. Following them at a little distance came his body-servant, Cæsar, more fitted by temperament than either to enjoy the change, the spirit of adventure, and reveling in a sense of importance which was scarcely diminished by the fact that it was vicarious. He rode a sturdy nag and had charge of a led horse, that bore a pack-saddle with a store of changes of raiment, of edible provisions, and tents to fend off the chances of inclement weather. They were to travel under the protection of a trader's pack-train, from a reëstablished trading-house in the Overhill Towns of the Cherokees on the Tennessee River; and so accurately did they time their departure and the stages of their journey that they met this caravan just at the hour and place designated, and risked naught from the unsettled state of the country or an encounter with some ignorant or inimical savage, prone to wreak upon inoffensive units vengeance for wrongs, real or fancied, wrought by a nation.
The trader, being a man habituated by frequent sojourns in Charlestown to metropolitan customs and a worldly trend of thought, instantly recognized the quality of Mivane and his granddaughter, despite the old red hood and blue serge riding-coat and their residence here so far from all the graces that appertain to civilization; though, to be sure, Richard Mivane, in his trim "Joseph," his head cowled in an appropriate "trotcozy," and his jaunty self-possession quite restored by the cutting of the Gordian knot of his dilemma, demonstrating his capacity to duly perform all his undertakings, bore himself in a manner calculated to enhance even the high estimation of his fellow-traveler. After the custom of a gentleman, however, he was most augustly free from unwarrantable self-assertion, but he could not have failed to be flattered by the phrase of the trader, could he have heard it, in delivering over his charge to the herders on the Keowee River. "Gadzooks, neighbors, but I shouldn't be a whit surprised if that old party is a duke in disguise!"
But the cow-drivers heard him not! They hardly heeded the coming and the going of the pack-train and their gossips the packmen! They cared naught for the news the caravan brought of the country-side far above, nor the commissions they were wont to give for the various settlements and the metropolis far below! For so featly came riding in to the humble prosaic precincts of the cow-pens and into their hearts the vernal beauty of Spring herself, the living Bloom of charm and love, all arrayed in delicate gray sergedusoy opening upon carnation taffeta, and crowned with sheer quillings of primrose sarcenet, with a cheek that repeated these roseate tints and a glint of golden brown tresses curling softly against a nape of pearl, that the ranchmen were bewitched and dazed, and knew no more of good common-sense. Their equilibrium thus shaken, some busied themselves in what might be called "housewifely cares," that the dainty visitant might be acceptably lodged and fed, and afterward they cursed their industry and hospitality that thus left her conversation and charming aspect to the shirks and drones, who languished about her, and affected to seek her comfort and minister to her entertainment. For the cow-drivers, like the other pioneer settlers of that region and day, represented various states of society and degrees of refinement, and to those to whom she was not as a blissful reminiscence of long ago, she appeared as a revelation, new and straight from heaven, a fancy, a dream! It seemed meet to them that she arrived in the illusory sunset of a sweet spring day, like some lovely forecast of the visions of the night.