Read Ebook: Round Anvil Rock: A Romance by Banks Nancy Huston

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Ebook has 896 lines and 89445 words, and 18 pages

"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.

"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.

"He has certainly been untiring and fearless in the discharge of his duty as the United States Attorney," Philip Alston said warmly. "I was just going to remind you of the journey that he made across the wilderness from Kentucky to St. Louis to find out, if he could, at first hand, what treason Aaron Burr was plotting over there with the commandant of the military post as a tool. He didn't find out a great deal. That old fox knows how to cover his tracks. But the attorney-general did more than any one else could have done. He hauled Burr to trial, almost single-handed, and against the greatest public clamor. He leaves nothing undone in the pursuit of his duty. I understand that he is to be here soon. He thinks that something should be done to put down the lawlessness of this country as Andrew Jackson has subdued it in his territory."

"But he must, of course, resign the office, if he intends going to Tippecanoe," said William Pressley.

He was so intent upon this one point of interest to himself that he had scarcely heard what had been said. He now turned with dignified impatience when his aunt broke in, speaking from the hearth. Miss Penelope always spoke with a greater or less degree of suddenness and irrelevance. She commonly said what she had to say at the instant that the thought occurred to her, regardless of what others might be talking or thinking about. The tenor of nearly everything that she said was singularly gloomy. Her mind was full of superstition of a homely, domestic kind. She was a great believer in signs, and the signs with which she was most familiar were usually forewarnings of some great and mysterious public or private calamity. Her voice was remarkably soft, low, and sweet, so that to hear these alarming threats and these appalling prophecies uttered in the tones of a cooing dove, was very singular indeed.

"'Pon my word!" she now exclaimed, facing the room, but still keeping close to the coffee-pot. "How you all can expect anything but terrible troubles and awful misfortunes is more than I can understand. The warning of that comet sent a-flying wild across the heavens is enough for me."

No one noticed what she said--which certainly seemed to require no notice; but it never made any difference to Miss Penelope whether her remarks were warmly or coolly received. After stooping to turn the coffee-pot round on its trivet she faced the room again.

"Yes, the warning is plenty plain enough for me!" she cooed. "And just look at the dreadful things that have happened already! Just look at what came to pass between the time we first heard of that comet early in the summer, and the time we first saw it early in September. Didn't all the wasps and flies go blind and die sooner than common, right in the middle of the hottest weather? Who ever heard of such a thing before? And look at the fruit crop,--the apple trees, the peach trees, all kind of fruit trees--and the grape-vines a-bending and a-breaking clear down to the ground because they can't bear the weight."

"It is probable that the early dying of the wasps and flies may have had something to do with the fineness of the fruit," said William Pressley, quite seriously, with formal politeness and a touch of impatience at the interruption.

Miss Penelope took him up tartly in her softest tone: "Then, William, may I ask why the people all over the country are calling this year's vintage 'comet wines'? For that's the way they are marking it, and everybody is putting it to itself--as something very uncommon. But never mind! I am used to having what I say mocked at in this house. It's nothing new to me to have my words passed over as if they hadn't been spoken. I can bear it and it don't alter my duty. I am bound to go on a-doing what I believe to be right just the same, however I am treated. I can't sit by and say nothing when I know that I ought to lift up my voice in warning. So I say again--you can mark my word or not as you think best--that we are all a-going to see some mighty wild sights before we see the last of that comet's tail."

"Pooh! Pooh! Pooh!" cried the widow Broadnax, roughly and hoarsely, as she nearly always spoke, and sitting up suddenly among her cushions. "Who's afraid of a comet with only one tail? I'll have you to know, sister Penelope, that my grandmother--my own grandmother and Robert's own grandmother, not yours--could remember the famous comet of seventeen hundred and forty-four, and that had six tails."

Miss Penelope was daunted and silenced for the moment. She did not mind the greater number of the rival comet's tails. It was not that which made her feel herself at a disadvantage. It was the slur at her lesser relationship to the master of the house. Any reference to that was a blow which never failed to make her flinch; and one which the widow never lost a chance to deal. But Miss Penelope had not yielded an inch through the ceaseless contention of years, and held her ground now; since there was nothing to say in reply, she ignored the taunt as she had done all that had gone before. She turned upon William Pressley, however, as we are prone to turn upon those whom we do not fear, when we dare not attack those with whom we are really offended.

"Well, William, maybe you think that the early dying and the going blind of the wasps and the flies caused the breaking out of the 'Jerks,' too. You and the rest all think you know better than I do. I don't complain--maybe you all do know better. But some day, when I am dead and gone, some day, and it mayn't be very long, when my hands are stone cold and crossed under the coffin-lid, you will think differently about a good many matters," she cooed, as if saying the mildest, pleasantest things in the world. "The Jerks have brought many a proud head low. Others besides myself will see a warning in the Jerks before they are gone. And now here are the Shawnees a-coming to welter us in our blood. And the Cold Plague already come to shake the life out of the few that are left. But it is their own fault. There's nobody but themselves to blame. It's easy enough to keep from having the plague," Miss Penelope added confidently. "Anybody can keep from having it, if they will only take the trouble to blow real hard three times on a blue yarn string before breakfast."

William Pressley turned gravely and was about to protest against such absurd superstition, but Philip Alston interfered tactfully, to assure the lady that she was quite right, that it could not fail to benefit almost any one to breathe on anything, especially if the breathing were very deep and very early in the morning.

"And then the new doctor knows how to cure the plague, aunt Penelope, dear," said Ruth, suddenly looking up from the things on the candle-stand. She was always the peacemaker of the family. "The Sisters told me. They are not afraid now that he has come. They were never afraid for themselves; it was for the children--the orphans. They said that little ones were dying all over the wilderness like frozen lambs."

"This new doctor is a most presumptuous person," said William Pressley, with the chilly deliberation which invariably marked his irritation. "He refuses to bleed his patients or to allow them to be bled. These unheard-of objections of his are levelled at the fundamental principles of the established practice and calculated to undermine it. Every physician of reputable standing will tell you that bleeding is the only efficacious treatment for the Cold Plague, and that it is entirely safe if no more than eight ounces of blood be taken at a time, and not oftener than once in two or three hours."

No one said anything for a moment. When William Pressley spoke in that tone, which he frequently did, there seemed to be nothing left for any one else to say. The subject appeared to have been done up hard and fast in a bundle and laid away for good and all. The judge was dozing again, Philip Alston was still gazing at Ruth, Miss Penelope was busy over the coffee-pot, and the widow Broadnax was watching every movement that she made. It was Ruth who replied after a momentary pause. She never lacked courage to stand by her own opinions, timid and gentle as they were; and she spoke now firmly though gently:

"But, William, just think! These were little bits of babies. Such poor, weak, bloodless little mites anyway. And it is said that the greatest pain and danger from the plague is from weakness and cold. The strongest men shiver and shiver till they freeze out of the world."

William Pressley bent his head in the courtesy that stings more than rudeness. He never argued. He had spoken; there was no need to say anything more. So that with this bow to Ruth he turned to Philip Alston and again took up the topic which he was so anxious to resume. It had already been interrupted, he thought, by far too much unimportant talk. Ruth looked at him expectantly when he started to speak, but he was looking at Philip Alston and spoke to him.

"You have, I suppose, sir, mentioned to my uncle what you so kindly suggested to me, in the event that the attorney-general should resign on going to Tippecanoe."

The deepest feeling that Ruth had ever heard in his voice thrilled it now. She involuntarily bent forward. Her eager lips were apart, her radiant eyes were upon him. Was he going with the attorney-general to Tippecanoe? She was afraid, glad, frightened, proud, all in a breath. She had forgotten the beautiful gifts that lay before her. The mere mention, the merest thought of the noble and the great, stirred her heart like the throb of mighty drums.

"No, but I will speak to him about it now," replied Philip Alston. "Judge, Judge Knox!" raising his voice.

The judge, aroused, sat up, looking round. But William Pressley spoke again before Philip Alston could explain.

"If the attorney-general really intends to go, he must resign. There will, of course, be many applicants for the place, and we can hardly be too prompt in applying for it, if I am to succeed him."

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