Lewis Rand Part 14

"Bah! it's nature's truth!" said Uncle Edward. "Jacqueline, my dear, our hearts are set on this match. Mr. Ludwell Cary asked your uncle's permission to speak to you, and your uncle gave it gladly, and neither he nor I ever dreamed--"

"Of course we didn't," broke in the other. "We didn't dream that Jacqueline could be unreasonable or ungrateful, and we don't dream it now! Nor blind. Ludwell Cary's a man and a gentleman, and the woman who gets him is lucky!"

"We approved his suit, Jacqueline, and we hoped to be happy to-day in your happiness--"

"And in he comes at midnight last night, with his father's own look on his face, and what does he say to Edward and me, sitting here, waiting, with a thousand fancies in our heads? 'Miss Churchill will not have me,'

says he, 'and you who have been so good to me, are to be good still, and not by word or look reproach her or distress her. The heart goes its own way, and loves where it must. She is an angel, and to-night I am a poor beaten and weary mortal. I thank you again, both of you, and wish you good-night.' And off he goes before a man could say Jack Robinson! Those were his very words, weren't they, Edward?"

"Yes," answered Edward. "He is a brave and gallant gentleman, Jacqueline. I love you, child, more than my old tongue can say. My Castle in Spain is Greenwood with you and Ludwell Cary and the children of you both."

"Oh, cruel!" cried Jacqueline. "He is brave and good--He is all that you say. But I shall never live at Greenwood!"

"It was your father's dearest wish," said the Major. "It is ours--Richard's and mine. We are not men who give up easily. G.o.d forbid, child, that I should hint to you, who are the darling of us all, of obligation--and yet I put it to you if obedience is not owed--"

"Yes, yes," answered Jacqueline. "It is owed. I am not ungrateful--I am mad--perhaps I am wicked! I wish that I were dead!"

"The Churchills," said Uncle Edward, "have never in their marriages set vulgar store by money. Blood we ask, of course, and honourable position, and the right way of thinking. Individually I am a stickler for mind. To his wealth and to his name and his great personal advantages Ludwell Cary adds intellect. He may become a power in his country and his time.

You would so aid him, child! I am called a woman-hater, but once, Jacqueline, I loved too well. For all that I am a sorry old bachelor, I know whereof I speak. With a man, a woman to fight for is not half the battle--it is all the battle."

"He is all that you say," answered Jacqueline. "But I do not love him."

"You like him. You admire him."

"Yes, yes. That is not love."

"It is mighty near kin," said Uncle d.i.c.k. "No end of happy folk begin with esteem and go on like turtle doves. My little Jack, you shall have the prettiest wedding gown! It's all a mistake and a misunderstanding, and the good Lord knows there's too much of both in this old world!

You'll think better of it all, and you'll find that you didn't know your own mind,--and there'll be a smile for poor Cary when he comes riding back to-night?"

"No, no," cried Jacqueline. "There is no mistake and no misunderstanding. Love cannot be forced, and I'll not marry where I do not love!"

"You don't," said Colonel Churchill slowly, "you don't by any chance love some one else? What does that colour mean, Jacqueline? Don't stammer! Speak out!"

But Jacqueline, standing by the old leather chair, bowed her head upon its high green back, and neither could nor would "speak out." The two men, grey and withered, obstinate and imperious in a day and generation that subordinated youth to the councils of the old, gazed at their niece with perplexity and anger. With the simpler of the two the perplexity was the greater, with the other anger. A fear was knocking at Major Churchill's heart. He would not admit it, strove not to listen to it, or to listen with contemptuous incredulity. "It's not possible," he said to himself. "Not a thousand summers at Jane Selden's would make her so forget herself! Jacqueline in love with that d.a.m.ned Jacobin demagogue upstairs! Pshaw!" But the fear knocked on.

Jacqueline lifted her head. "Be good to me, Uncle d.i.c.k! If I could love, if I could marry Mr. Cary, I would--I would indeed! But I cannot. Please let me go!"

"Not till I know more than I know now," said Colonel Churchill. "If it's George Lee, Jacqueline, I'll not say a word, sorry as I am for Cary. But if it's Will Allen, I'll see you dead before I give my consent! He's a spendthrift and a Republican!"

"I care neither for Mr. Lee nor Mr. Allen," said Jacqueline, with a burning cheek. "Oh, Uncle Edward, make Uncle d.i.c.k let me go!"

"It is not wise," Major Churchill considered within himself, "to push a woman too far. I'm a suspicious fool to think this thing of Jacqueline.

It's all some girl's fancy or other, and if we go easily Cary will yet win--by G.o.d, he shall win! This d.a.m.ned Yahoo upstairs is neither here nor there!"

He spoke aloud to his brother. "Best let the child go think it over, d.i.c.k. She knows her duty--and that we expect her compliance. She doesn't want to wound us cruelly, to make us unhappy, to prove herself blind and ingrate. Give her a kiss and let her go."

"You come down and sing to us to-night, my little Jack, in your blue gown," quoth Uncle d.i.c.k. "Don't you ever let a time come when your singing won't be the sweetest sound in the world to me! Now go, and think of what we have said, and of poor Cary, ridden off to Greenwood!"

Jacqueline gazed at the two for a moment, and made as if to speak, but the words died in her throat. She uttered a broken cry, turned, groped a little for the door, found and opened it, and was gone. They heard the click of her slippers upon the stairs, and presently the closing of a blind in the room that was hers.

The brothers sat heavily on in the sunshine-flooded library, the elder red and fuming, the younger silent and saturnine. At last Colonel d.i.c.k broke out, "What the devil ails her, Edward? Every decent young fellow in the county comes to Fontenoy straight as a bee to the honey-pot! I've heard them sighing for her and Unity, but I never could see that she favoured one man more than another,--and she's no coquette like Unity!

Except for that fine blush of hers, I'd never have thought. What do you think, Edward?"

"The ways of women are past my finding out," said Edward. "Let it rest for a while, d.i.c.k." He rose from his chair stiffly, like an old man.

"Let Cary go home to-morrow as he intends. 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder,' they say. She may find that she misses him, and may look for him when he comes riding over. Never fear but he'll ride over often! He mustn't guess, of course, that you have spoken to her. And that's all we can do, d.i.c.k, except--" Major Edward walked stiffly across the floor and paused before the portrait of his brother Henry, dead and gone these many years. The face looked imperiously down upon him. Henry had stood for something before he died,--for grace and manly beauty, pride and fire. The Major's eyes suddenly smarted. "Poor white trash," he said between his teeth, "and Henry's daughter!" He turned and came back to the table. "d.i.c.k! just as soon as you can, you clear the house of old Gideon Rand's son!"

"What's he got to do with it?" asked Colonel d.i.c.k.

"I don't know," said the other. "But I want him out of the blue room, and out of Fontenoy! and now, d.i.c.k, I've got a piece to write this morning on the designs of Aaron Burr."

At five in the afternoon Cary returned, quiet and handsome, ready with his account of matters at Greenwood, from the stable, upon which Major Churchill must p.r.o.nounce, to the drawing-room paper, which awaited Miss Dandridge's sentence. His behaviour was perfection, but "He's hard hit,"

said his brother to himself. "What, pray, would Miss Churchill have?"

And Unity, "The shepherds and shepherdesses don't match. How can she have the heart?" And Major Churchill, "Are women blind? This is Hyperion to a satyr." And Jacqueline, "Oh, miserable me! Is he writing or reading, or is he lying thinking, there in the blue room?"

CHAPTER X

TO ALTHEA

Adam Gaudylock came, when his leisure served him, to Fontenoy as he went everywhere, by virtue of his quality of free lance and golden-tongued narrator of western news. The stress of thought at the moment was to the West and the empire that had been purchased there; and a man from beyond Kentucky, with tales to tell of the Mississippi Territory, brought his own welcome to town, tavern, and plantation. If this were true of all, it was trebly true of Adam, who had been born open-eyed. As the magnet draws the filings, so he drew all manner of tidings. News came to him as by a thousand carrier pigeons. He took toll of the solitary in the brown and pathless woods, of the boatmen upon fifty rivers, of the Indian braves about the council-fire, of hunters, trappers, traders, and long lines of Conestoga wagons, of soldiers on frontier posts, Jesuit missionaries upon the Ohio, camp-meeting orators by the Kentucky and the upper James, martial emissaries of three governments, village lawyers, gamblers, dealers in lotteries, and militia colonels, Spanish intendants, French agents, American settlers, wild Irish, thrifty Germans, Creoles, Indians, Mestizos, Quadroons, Congo blacks,--from the hunter in the forest to the slave in the fields, and from the Governor of the vast new territory to the boatman upon a Mississippi ark, not a type of the restless time but imparted to Adam something of its view of life and of the winds that vexed its sea. He was a skilful compounder, and when, forever wandering, he wandered back by wood and stream to the sunny, settled lands east of the Blue Ridge, he gave to the thirsty in plantation and town bright globules of hard fact in a heady elixir of fancy. While he talked all men were adventurers, and all women admired him. Adam liked this life and this world; asked nothing better than to journey through a hundred such.

Now, sitting at his ease in the blue room, a fortnight after Rand's accident, he delivered a score of messages from the Republicans of the county, gentle and simple, whom he had chanced to encounter since the accident to their representative.

"Colonel Randolph says the President has bad luck with the horses he gives--young Mr. Carr was thrown by a bay mare from Shadwell. Old Jowett swears that a trooper of Tarleton's broke his neck at that identical place--says you can hear him any dark night swearing like the Hessian he was. They drank your health at the Eagle, the night they heard of the accident, with b.u.mpers--drank it just after Mr. Jefferson's and before the memory of Washington. 'Congress next!' they said. 'Hurrah! He'll scatter the Black c.o.c.kades--he'll make the Well-born cry King's Cruse!

Hip, hip, hurrah! What's he doing at Fontenoy? They'll put poison in his cup! Hurrah!'"

"Fontenoy will not put poison in my cup," said Rand. "I hope some one was there to say as much."

"I said it," answered Adam. "They are a noisy lot. Tom Mocket made a speech and compared you to Moses. He wept when he made it, and they had to hold him steady on his feet. When they broke up, I took him home to the Partridge. I'll tell you one speech that he never made by himself, and that's the speech that's going to hang Fitch."

"No," said Rand. "I wrote it. You were at the trial?"

"Ay. It would have hung Abel, so poor Cain had no chance. Mr. Eppes says Mr. Jefferson counts upon your becoming a power in the state. I don't know--but it seems to me there's power enough in these regions! It's getting crowded. First thing you know, you'll be jealous of Mr.

Jefferson, or he'll be jealous of you. If I were you, I'd look to the West."

"The old song!" exclaimed Rand. "What should I do in the West?"

"Rule it," said Adam.

Rand shot a glance at the hunter where he lounged against the window, a figure straight and lithe as an Indian, not tall, but gifted with a pantherish grace, and breathing a certain tawny brightness as of sunshine through pine needles. "You're daft!" he said; then after a moment, "Are you serious?"

"Why should I not be serious?" asked Adam. "My faith! it's a restless land, the West, and it's a far cry from the Mississippi to the Potomac.

The West doesn't like the East anyhow. But it wants a picked man from the East. It will get one too! The wind's blowing hard from the full to the empty, from the parcelled-out to the virgin land!"

"Yes," said Rand.