Oldfield Part 1

Oldfield.

by Nancy Huston Banks.

I

THE LITTLE SISTERS

The old white curtain was slightly too short. Its quaint border of little cotton s...o...b..a.l.l.s swung clear of the window ledge, letting in the sunbeams. The flood of light streaming far across the faded carpet reached the high bed, and awakened Miss Judy earlier than usual on that bright March morning, in the Pennyroyal Region of Kentucky, a half century ago.

Miss Judy was always awake early, and usually arose while her sister lay still fast asleep on the other side of the big bed. She had learned, however, to creep so softly from beneath the covers, and to climb so quietly down the bed's steep incline, that Miss Sophia was hardly ever in the least disturbed. Moreover, Miss Judy always kept a split-bottomed chair standing near her pillow at night. This served not only as a stand for the candlestick and matches,--so that the candle need not be blown out before Miss Sophia was comfortably cuddled down and Miss Judy was in bed,--but it also furnished a dignified and comparatively easy means of ascending the bed's heights. On descending, Miss Judy had but to step decorously from the mound of feathers to the chair and to drop delicately from the chair to the floor.

To have seen Miss Judy doing this must have been a sight well worth seeing. She was so very pretty, so small, so slight, so exquisite altogether. Old as she was, she had still the movements of a bird. Her sweet old face was as fair as any girl's, and as ready with its delicate blushes. Her soft hair, white as falling snowflakes and as curly as a child's, was burnished by a silver gloss lovelier than the sheen of youth. And her beautiful eyes were still the blue of the flax flowers.

Lifting her s.h.i.+ning, curly head on that sunny morning, Miss Judy cast a glance of dismay at the ruthless sunbeams lying on the carpet, and she could not help a slight start. Then she held her breath for a moment, turning her blue eyes on the back of Miss Sophia's nightcap, in a look of anxious love. It always gave Miss Sophia a headache to be aroused suddenly. Miss Judy was afraid that the involuntary movement might have startled her. They were very tender of each other, these two poor little sisters. And they were very, very polite to one another; more polite to one another than they were to others, if that were possible. Miss Sophia, who could not always remember the smaller matters of fine breeding where other people were concerned, never forgot the smallest courtesy toward her sister. Miss Judy, who was ever the pink--the sweetest, old-fas.h.i.+oned clovepink--of politeness to everybody, always treated Miss Sophia with such distinguished consideration as was a lesson in manners to see. And no one ever smiled: it was too lovely to be laughed at--too sincere to be absurd. Lying down side by side every night of their long and blameless lives, they formally wished each other pleasant dreams, and bade one another a ceremonious good night. Rising every morning--separately, with delicate regard for the simple mysteries of one another's toilet--they greeted each other at breakfast as two high-bred strangers might meet in some grand drawing-room.

Leaning upon her elbow, Miss Judy now listened for a s.p.a.ce to her sister's breathing. She could always tell when all was well with Miss Sophia's slumbers, by a mild little puffing sound, which did no harm, but which nothing would ever have induced Miss Judy to mention to Miss Sophia or to any one. The puffs continuing peacefully, Miss Judy smiled lovingly and, laying the cover back with no more noise than a mouse makes, she flitted birdlike from the mound of feathers to the chair and thence to the home-made rug. She was always careful to stand on the rug while dressing, in order to save the carpet. Miss Sophia also always meant to stand on it, but she sometimes forgot that as she did many other things. The carpet was long past saving, as it was long past further fading; but neither Miss Judy nor Miss Sophia had begun to suspect the fact. To them it was still the elegant all-wool three-ply which their mother had spun and woven and sewed with her own hands.

Accordingly, Miss Judy now hastened to spread a strip of rag carpet in the sun's path, before commencing to dress. The big, bare room was cold, the handful of chips, which had made a cheerful blaze at bedtime, having died out during the night. But Miss Judy did not know that she was s.h.i.+vering. She was not in the habit of thinking of her own comfort, and it did not occur to her to kindle a fire with the chips which were in the basket beside the hearth, until such time as Miss Sophia should need the warmth. She merely dressed as fast as she could, lingering only over the last look in the mirror lying along the top of the tall chest of drawers. Such a queer old mirror! Long and narrow in its frame of tarnished gilt, with a faded landscape painted on each dim end, which was divided from the rest of the gla.s.s by a solemn little column. The chest stood so high and Miss Judy was so small that it was not easy for her to get a good look at her straight little back. But there was no other way of making sure that the point of her white muslin kerchief was precisely on a line with the bow of her black silk ap.r.o.n strings. And any irregularity in this matter would have shocked Miss Judy as being positively immodest. She managed, however, by standing on the very tips of her toes, to see that all was as it should be. Settling her cap, she bent down, and noiselessly taking the basket of chips, kindled a fire in one corner of the wide, empty fireplace, thinking with a loving glance at the bed that the room would be comfortably warm when Miss Sophia got up. Finally, she went into the pa.s.sage to open the front door.

All the Oldfield front doors were set open in the morning and left open all day, whenever the weather was reasonably mild; except during the summer, when very few of them were closed at any time, either night or day. Miss Judy alone, of the whole village, always closed hers at bedtime all the year round. And she did not do it because she was afraid, though everybody knew how timid she was. It never occurred to her, during the whole of her gentle, innocent life, that there could be in the world a living creature who would wish to do her any harm. There was really nothing for the most timid to fear in that quiet, peaceful, pastoral country. To be sure, Alvarado, The Terrible, sometimes dashed into the village--unexpected, dazzling, fascinating, bewildering--and out again like a lightning flash. Then most of the men did indeed disappear as suddenly as though the earth had opened and swallowed them up. But Alvarado never noticed the women, and he never came at night.

That is, no one ever claimed to have _seen_ him galloping by after nightfall. Late watchers with the sick, who were the only late watchers in Oldfield, sometimes told fearsome tales of thunderous hoofs at midnight and of sparks that flew blue through the darkness. But Miss Judy had never seen or heard anything of the kind. She had never seen Alvarado at all, except in the distance and surrounded as he always was by a cloud of dust and mystery. She was ever slow to believe evil of any one and she rather leaned to Alvarado's side. It was unchristian, she thought, to ascribe all sorts of wickedness to a man about whom no one actually knew anything beyond the fact that he was a stranger and a foreigner and had been most unfortunate. Moreover, he had been and was still very unhappy, and the unfortunate and the unhappy had always a friend in Miss Judy. Then the romance of his marriage appealed strongly to her imagination. It was, of course, very wrong, and even very wicked, for him to have tricked and frightened poor Alice Fielding into marrying him, but he could hardly have known that she loved another man. n.o.body seemed to have known it until too late,--not even John Stanley whom she loved,--and Alvarado also had loved her. There was never any doubt of that. He had not been quite in his right mind since her death, many years before. In Miss Judy's tender judgment he was much more to be pitied than to be feared. No, Alvarado had nothing to do with Miss Judy's closing her door at bedtime. She had closed it long before he had ever been heard of in that country. She closed it simply and solely because she considered it the _proper_ thing to do, on account of there being no men-folks about the house. The other lone women of Oldfield closed theirs too--when they remembered to do it--without a murmur, no matter how hot the nights were, simply and solely because Miss Judy closed hers; for no right-minded member of the whole community ever needed a better reason for doing, or not doing anything, than to know that Miss Judy deemed it proper or improper.

This quality of leaders.h.i.+p is always interesting, wherever found, and it is nearly always hard to explain. In Miss Judy's case it was even harder to make out than it commonly is. The singularity of her supremacy had nothing to do with her poverty. Neither poverty nor riches would appear ever to have anything to do with the quality of leaders.h.i.+p in any part of the earth, and none of Miss Judy's neighbors could be considered either very poor or more than well-to-do. The most utterly incomprehensible feature of Miss Judy's long and absolute reign was, perhaps, her total lack of every personal characteristic of the autocrat. It is certainly not the usual qualification for autocracy to be as gentle and shy as Miss Judy was--or as distrustful of self and as trustful of others--or as self-forgetful and as thoughtful of every one else. The little lady was far too timid and soft of spirit knowingly to lay down laws for any one: she was only strong and firm enough to cling timidly to her own gentle convictions through a hard life of privation, as a dove clings to its nest through the fiercest storms.

She never dreamt that she _was_ an autocrat. When she noticed the universal and marked deference with which she was always treated, she thought it was because her father had been greatly respected, and her mother much beloved. It was quite natural that they should have been, Miss Judy thought in justification of her own s.h.i.+ning by a reflected light. They had been justly prominent among the earliest settlers of the Pennyroyal Region, coming with their two infant daughters when Virginia--like a rich and generous queen--first began giving away the county of Kentucky, to the sons who had served her in the Revolution.

Those were glorious days! To tell about them now sounds like a fairy tale. And yet they were sad days as well. For, great though the honor was and dazzling as was the reward, the officers so honored and rewarded must have known that the claiming of these lands meant lifelong exile for their families and for themselves. It would appear so, at all events, since few came who could stay nearer to civilization. The more fortunate ones stayed on in the old Virginia homes, content with holding cloudy t.i.tles to vast estates lying in this unknown wilderness of Kentucky; and with rearing there splendid castles in the air. So very cloudy, indeed, were many of these t.i.tles sent to Virginia by irresponsible agents, that litigation over them has only recently ceased in the local courts. Other officers were too poor to employ agents either good or bad, and these were consequently compelled to go in person, or to lose the grant of land. Among those reduced to this sore strait was Major John Bramwell, Miss Judy's father, who had won distinction as a captain of horse in the War for Independence. The home-coming found him utterly stranded. His small patrimony was long since spent, and his wife's ample fortune had shrunk to a mere pittance.

He knew no means of earning a livelihood, knowing even less of the business of peace than most soldiers know. Hopelessly in debt, he knew not where to turn for relief; he knew not how to find bare bread for his family. The new home and the fresh start in the far-off county of Kentucky offered the only refuge. The young wife consented to go, as she would have consented to anything he wished or thought best; for she was the gentlest of women, and her faith in her husband was absolute. Thus it was that they gathered up the few fragments of the old happy life, and, taking their two little ones, rode sadly away into exile.

Sad indeed and heavy-hearted must have been all those first gentle-people who thus rode away from their old homes in Virginia over the Alleghanies into the wilderness of Kentucky, bearing tender little children in their arms. Miss Judy was much too young to remember that terrible journey, and Miss Sophia was only a baby, but they both knew all about it as soon as they were old enough to understand. They always wept when they heard how tired the delicate little mother was before the awful mountains were crossed--no matter how often they heard the story.

They always smiled when they heard how glad all the weary pilgrims were to find a broad-horn waiting to bear the little band down the Ohio--though they heard the story over and over again. And they always followed the broad-horn with ever new interest, on and on down that long, long river through the primeval forest growing to the water's edge. Forest, forest, forest everywhere for hundreds of miles, till they came--with the travellers--almost to the vast mouth of the mighty river near which the Pennyroyal Region lies.

Miss Judy was not sure that it was called so when she entered it, an infant in her father's arms. She always thought it more likely that the whole of Kentucky may still have been known as The Dark and b.l.o.o.d.y Ground, so great were still the sufferings of the brave men and braver women who were still giving their lives to redeem it from darkness and blood. But there never was the slightest doubt in Miss Judy's mind that these gentle-people coming now were braver than any who had come before--the bravest because they were the gentlest. It always made her own gentle heart beat, as if to strains of martial music, to be told in the little mother's soft voice of the leaving of the broad-horn's frail protection, and of the undaunted plunge into the depths of the wilderness. Yet there were dangers there to be met which courage itself must flee from. These fearless Virginians who did not shrink from facing savages, nor from encountering wild beasts, shrank and fled appalled before the more frightful dangers then lurking all along the banks of the lower Ohio. There, hidden under the beauty of the almost tropical vegetation, was the hideous rack of the fever and ague, waiting ready to torture the strength out of the men, the heart out of the women, and the very lives out of the children. There, beneath the n.o.ble trees and above the wide open s.p.a.ces, rolling like gentle prairies--sunlit, flower filled, so richly covered with wild strawberries that the horses' hoofs were dyed rosy-red--there the deadly mystery of "the milk-sickness" was already spreading its invisible shroud over the whole beautiful land.

Fleeing from these perils more to be feared than the cruelest savages, and more to be dreaded than the fiercest wild beasts, the travellers went further into the heart of the wilderness, seeking the safety of higher ground; on and on, following the buffalo tracks which still traversed the country from end to end like broad, hard-beaten highways.

One of these led them along a range of hills and into a fertile little valley, and it was here that the Virginians finally found a resting-place. It was here in this vale of rest, folded between these quiet hills, that the village of Oldfield grew out of that settlement, and here that it stands to-day scarcely altered from its beginning. Over the hills--there on the east where tender green of the crowning trees melts into the tenderer blue of the arching clouds--there still lies the untouched strip of broad brown earth, which the people of to-day call the Wilderness Road, just as those wandering Virginians called it when they first found it.

The forest crowded close to the valley, but the sun shone bright where the giant trees stood farther apart. Then the skies of Kentucky were as blue as the skies of Italy, just as they are now, so that the suns.h.i.+ne and the peace of the spot, and the pure air of the wooded hills, gave the wayfarers heart to believe themselves safe from the terrors of the Ohio. The homes which they built were all humble enough, the merest cabins of rough logs, since they had nothing else wherewith to build.

Major Bramwell's house was no better than the rest. Like most of the settlers' cabins it had two low, large rooms with a closed pa.s.sage between and a loft above. But it is the mistress who makes the real home,--wherever reared; the mere building of it has little to do with its making. And the softest little woman, who is neither very brilliant nor very wise, can work miracles for her husband and her children, no matter where her wings may rest upon the earth. This one, softer and less wise than many, not only made a real home of perfect refinement out of that log hut in the wilderness, but she reared her daughters--amongst white men rougher than the wild beasts, and near red men infinitely fiercer--as gently as any royal princesses were ever trained in any old palace for the gracing of courts.

It was easy enough to train Miss Judy, whose nature responded to exquisiteness as an aeolian harp responds to the breeze. Miss Sophia was different, but the little mother did not live long enough to find it out. Perhaps no true mother ever lives long enough to find anything lacking in her child. Miss Sophia was standing on the threshold of womanhood, and Miss Judy had barely crossed it, when the little mother died, worn out by hards.h.i.+p and broken-hearted by exile, but cheerful and uncomplaining to the last, as such mothers always are.

Is it not amazing that a small, soft woman can leave such a large, hard void in the world? Is it not bewildering to learn, as most of us do, sooner or later, that those whom we have always believed we were taking care of, were really stronger than ourselves, and that we have always leaned on them. The very foundations of life seem falling away, when the truth first comes home to the heart. No one knew what Major Bramwell felt or thought when the gentle wife who had yielded in everything first left him to stand alone. He was naturally a silent, reserved man, and misfortune had embittered him. Within the year following her death he returned to Virginia for a visit, apparently unable to endure the exile without her. His daughters were lonely too, but they were glad to have him go. That is, Miss Judy was glad, and Miss Sophia was always pleased with anything that pleased Miss Judy. They were still content, believing him to be happier, when the visit went on into the second year, and even into the third. But as the fourth and the fifth pa.s.sed, they grew anxious, and the neighbors wondered, and gradually began to shake their heads. News travelled slowly over the Alleghanies even yet, but it was whispered at last that the major would never come back,--that he could not,--because he had been arrested for old debts left unpaid when he came to Kentucky, and that he was thus held "within prison bounds."

The Oldfield people could never tell whether the sisters were aware of the truth. The neighbors noticed that as the years went by Miss Judy said less and less about his coming back, though she spoke of him as often and as proudly as ever, and that Miss Sophia, who never had much to say about anything, now rarely mentioned her father at all. They heard from him, however, at long intervals. The neighbors were sure of so much concerning the major, by reason of Miss Judy's being sometimes compelled to borrow the two bits to pay the postage on the letter.

Nothing else ever forced her to borrow, though she had not a penny to call her own for weeks together, and Miss Sophia--poor soul--never had one. Everybody in Oldfield knew when anybody got a letter. The stage carrying the mail came twice a week. The postmaster, who was also a tailor, always locked the door of his little shop as soon as he had taken the mail-bag inside. He could not read writing very readily, and he did not wish to be hurried. The villagers fumed outside as they looked through the one smoky, broken window, and saw him deliberately spelling out his own letters, sitting down with his feet on the stove.

In the winter when the days were short, and it began to grow dark early, they used to stuff something into the stovepipe which came out of a broken pane, so that the smoke soon compelled him to open the door. In the summer the heat prevented the postmaster's keeping the door closed for any great length of time; but no matter what the season most of the Oldfield people were waiting when the mail came; consequently, everybody knew what everybody else received. And then Miss Judy used to give out kind messages to the neighbors from her father's letters; messages which did not sound at all like the major. But Miss Judy was wholly unconscious that her own sweetness colored whatever it may have been that her father had really written. She was as unconscious of this as of any reason that she herself might have had for growing sour, as her lovely youth faded, neglected like the wild flowers blooming unseen in the shadowy woods.

The quiet lives of the little sisters thus went on uneventfully from youth to maturity. They were as utterly alone, so far as a.s.sociation with their own cla.s.s was concerned, as if they had lived on a desert island. Only the occasional letter from their father marked the pa.s.sing of the years. They were sheltered by the old log house, and they subsisted somehow on what grew from its bit of ground. It was the same now that it had always been; it was still the same, except that the little sisters had pa.s.sed unawares into middle age, when they heard that their father was dead.

No one ever knew whether the daughters were told the whole sad truth: that this gallant old soldier of the Revolution, who had done much for the winning of Independence, had died in prison bounds for debts which he was never able to pay. Miss Judy's beautiful eyes were dim with weeping for a long time. Miss Sophia was sad for many months through sympathy with her sister's grief. Miss Judy took the purple bow off Miss Sophia's cap and a blue one off her own and dyed them black. Their Sunday coats, as they called two thread-bare bombazines, were black already, and their everyday coats had also been black before turning brown. So that those two poor little bits of lutestring ribbon were the only outward signs of new bereavement.

II

THE OLDFIELD PEOPLE

Living was leisurely down in the Pennyroyal Region of those old days.

About the middle of the last century, some twenty years after the major's death, the weeks and months and years went by so quietly that his daughters grew old without knowing it.

No one indeed ever thought of Miss Judy as old. Charm so purely spiritual as hers has never any age. And then it would seem as if an element of perpetual youth often lingers to the last around a lovable unmarried woman as it rarely does around the married. The rose keeps its beauty and sweetness longest when left to fade ungathered.

Possibly Miss Judy may have been a shade slighter than she had been twenty years before, although she was never much stouter than a willow twig. Her hair can hardly have been whiter than it had been ever since anybody could remember, and it was just as curly, too, notwithstanding that she tried harder every day to brush it till it was prim and smooth, as she thought white hair should be.

Miss Sophia had never seemed very young, and she now appeared little if at all older. Her dark hair never whitened, and if the gray streaks over her placid temples had broadened slightly, it was no more trouble than it used to be to reach up the chimney and get a bit of soot on the tip of her finger--while Miss Judy was out of the room or looking the other way. It was an innocent artifice, but it remained always the darkest secret between the sisters. And this was probably not quite so dark a secret as Miss Sophia supposed it to be, since she, being so very plump, could not stand on tiptoe to look in the mirror, as Miss Judy did.

Consequently, it was perhaps inevitable that the touching up intended for the gray streaks over Miss Sophia's placid temples, sometimes fell unawares on her honest little cheeks, or her guileless little ears.

Almost unaltered as the sisters were, their environment was, if possible, even less changed by the quiet pa.s.sing of the uneventful years. For all outward changes, this March morning on which Miss Judy looked out over the sleeping village might have been the first morning after the first settlers had made their homes in this vale of peace. The folding hills were yet covered by the primeval forest. The log houses built by the Virginians still straggled beside a single thoroughfare.

The highway, too, was the same buffalo track which they had followed through the wilderness--just as crooked in its direction, just as irregular in its width, just as muddy in winter and dusty in summer, and it was called the "big road" now, just as it had been in the beginning.

And the sleepers in the still darkened houses were, with scarcely an exception, the descendants of the sounder sleepers in the graveyard on the furthest, highest hilltop. For the people of that far-off Pennyroyal Region came and went in those old days only with the coming and the going of the generations.

The night's shadows still lingered among the great, black tree-trunks draping the leafless boughs, but the sun's radiant lances were already lifting the white mists from the lowlands. Soft sounds coming up from the silent fields echoed the gentle awakening of flocks and herds, deepening, as the light brightened, into the eternal matin appeal of the dumb creature to human brotherhood. The birds alone were all wide awake and vividly astir. Flocks of plovers wheeled white-winged across the low-hung sky. A lonely sparrow-hawk swung high on seemingly motionless pinions. There were redbirds, too, and bluebirds and blackbirds--pewees, thrushes, vireos, kingfishers--all flocking in with the red and gold of the sunrise, making the dun meadows bright and melodious with their plumage and song. Miss Judy saw and heard them in pleased surprise. She could not recall having seen any of them that season, save two or three melancholy robins, drooping in the cold rain of the previous day. But here they all were, and singing as if _they_ had no doubt that spring had come, however doubtful mere mortals might be.

It was light enough now to see the tavern which stood on the edge of the village. The sign of the tavern, a big rusty bell hung in a rough, rickety wooden frame, stood clear against the gray horizon, dangling its rotting rope, which few travellers ever came to pull.

The court-house and the jail faced the tavern from the other side of the big road. The court-house, with its stately little pillars and its queer little cupola, looked like some small and shabby old gentleman in a very high, very tight stock. There were two terms of circuit court, lasting about a month, one in the spring and one in the fall. The quarterly and the county courts convened at stated periods. The magistrate's court, which was also in the court-house, was held usually and almost exclusively as the peace of the colored population might require.

Fortunately, the magistrate was regarded with a good deal of wholesome awe, and it was fortunate that he lived in the village, inasmuch as his pacific services were likely to be needed at irregular and unexpected times. The county judge, however, found it entirely convenient to live in the country, on a farm near Oldfield, though he rode into the village and spent an hour or so in his office nearly every day. Judge John Stanley of the higher court lived a long way off, quite on the other side of the district, coming and going twice a year with the convening and adjournment of the spring and fall terms. He had lived in Oldfield when a young man, and up to the time that a terrible thing had happened.

He was not to blame, yet it had blighted his whole life; it had driven him in horror away from the place which he had loved. It was a great loss to him to be separated from Miss Judy, the only mother he had known. But he used to return to Oldfield now and then until another misfortune made the place forever unendurable to him. After this only the drag of his duty and his fondness for Miss Judy ever brought him back, and he went away again as soon as he could. He always called upon her when he came, and always went to bid her good-by before going away; but he visited no one else and knew nothing of the village outside the strict line of his official duties.

Adjoining the court-house was the county jail, a tumble-down pile of mossy brick. Only the bars across the window indicated the character of the building. A prisoner was occasionally enterprising enough to pull out the bars, but they were always put in again sooner or later. There were two rooms, one above and one below, with a movable ladder between.

When, at long and rare intervals a stranger was brought to the jail as a prisoner, he was put in the upper room and--as an extreme measure of precaution--the ladder was taken away during the night. Both the rooms were apt to be chilly in cold weather on account of the broken window-panes, yet the jail was on the whole more comfortable than many of the cabins in which the negroes lived, and any one--no matter what the color of his skin--can endure a good deal of cold without great discomfort, when abundantly and richly fed. The jailer, Colonel Fielding, and his family never thought of taking so much trouble or of being so mean and selfish as to make any difference in the food sent to the jail and that which was served on their own table. Now and then in the winter the turkey and the pudding would, it is true, get rather cold in transit, the jail and the jailer's residence being some distance apart; but the prisoners did not mind that. They used to stand at the windows good-humoredly hailing the pa.s.sers-by to kill time; and waiting with such patience as they could muster for the coming of the good dinner, especially when they knew that there was more "quality" company than usual in the jailer's house. The colonel, a beautiful old man--tall, stately, clear-eyed, clean and upright in heart and mind and body--was a gentleman of the old school who had never earned a penny in all the days of his blameless life. Such a picture as he was to look at, with his long silver hair curling on his shoulders and his tall erect form draped in the long cloak which he wore like a Roman toga!

"By the o'wars!" he used to declare, "the older I am the faster and thicker my hair grows. As for my cloak--it's the only suitable thing, sir, for a gentleman's wear."

His house had always been the social centre of Oldfield. When his friends elected him to the office of jailer, deeming that the best and easiest way of providing for him, since it was the nearest to a sinecure afforded by county politics, his family became still more active leaders of society. In those good old days of the Pennyroyal Region, a gentleman of birth and breeding might engage in any honest avocation, without the slightest injury to his social position. The only difference that the colonel's election to the office of jailer made to his family and his neighbors was, that the salary enabled him to indulge his hospitable and generous inclinations more fully. The salary was small, to be sure, but it was more than he had ever had before. About this time, too, the colonel's five beautiful daughters--all famous beauties--were in the perfection of bloom, and none of them had yet married, thus beginning the breaking up of the happy home. Such dinners, such suppers, such dances as there were in that plain old house! The colonel's handsome, indolent, sweet-tempered wife used to say that they were always ready for company, because they had the best they could get every day. Usually there was not the slightest conflict between the colonel's large social obligations and his small official duties. On the contrary, the more fine dinners and suppers he gave the higher the prisoners lived, and the happier everybody was. In fact, the colored vagrant who managed to get into the jail when winter was near--when there were no vegetables in anybody's garden, no fruit in anybody's orchard, no green corn in anybody's field--was regarded by his fellows as very fortunate indeed.

It chanced, however, that a wandering stranger was one day locked in among the prisoners who were otherwise all home-folks. On that very evening the Fielding girls were giving a grand ball and supper, to which the whole fas.h.i.+on of the county was invited. The prisoners, with the exception of the stranger, were as deeply interested in what they saw and heard of the great stir of preparation as the guests could possibly have been. The stranger probably knew nothing of his companions' glowing and confident expectation of a generous share of the feast. If they told him anything of the feasting which the next day was sure to bring, he either did not believe it, naturally enough--having had most likely some experience with jails and jailers--or he preferred liberty to luxury. At all events on that eventful evening the colonel, whose mind was full of the ball, incidentally forgot to lock the door of the jail. The strange prisoner had, therefore, nothing to do but to open the door as soon as the jailer's back was turned; and this he did at once, disappearing in the darkness, never to be seen or heard of again. The other prisoners had tried to prevent his going, and they now did their utmost to give the alarm. They hallooed long and loud at the top of their strong lungs.

But the wind was blowing hard in the wrong direction, the jail was too far from the house, and they could not make themselves heard above the music and dancing and laughter and drinking of toasts. Finally one of them, who was a sort of leader because he wintered regularly in the jail, offered to go to the colonel's house in order to let him know what had occurred. And he did go--willingly too--although the night was very cold and very dark, and the mud so deep that the very bottom seemed to have dropped out of the big road. The colonel himself with his youngest daughter was leading the Virginia reel, and just going down the middle to the tune of _Old Dan Tucker_; so that the bearer of the evil tidings had to wait a few moments looking in on the ball before he found a chance to tell his story. It was a cruel blow to come at such a time, and the colonel felt it sorely. The prisoner reported to his companions, after his return alone to the jail, that he thought "Ma.r.s.e Joe was about to swear" then and there. It was in vain that the colonel's guests hastened to rea.s.sure him; to tell him that it would be a great saving to the county--so all the gentlemen said--if every one of the lazy black rascals could be induced to run away. But the colonel felt the wound to his pride. It was a matter touching his honor. And finally, finding him inflexible in his determination to do his duty under the circ.u.mstances, the men present offered--almost to a man--to go with him when he went to search for the fugitive; and they kept their word on the following day about noon when the sun was warmest, just to please the colonel, although they knew beforehand how futile the pursuit would be with vast canebrakes near by and the Cypress Swamp just beyond the hills.

That memorable night of the ball was long, long past when this March morning dawned. The colonel was very old now and very feeble, with dimmed memories and utterly alone. He had lost his wife years before.

His five beautiful daughters were married and gone. Alice, the most beautiful of all, the youngest, the brightest, the highest spirited, was dead after the wrecking of her young life. The old man had aged and failed rapidly since Alice's death. He, who used to be so cheerful, sat brooding at first, turning his aching memories this way and that way, trying to see whether he might not have done something to prevent the soft-hearted child from being frightened into marrying a man whom she feared almost as much as she disliked. He was always thinking about it in those early days after her death in the bloom of youth and beauty, but he rarely spoke of it even then, and after a time he was allowed to forget. Mercifully memory faded as weakness increased. The gentle, unhappy old man became ere long again a gentle, happy child, and yet--even to the last--when aroused to glimmering consciousness the gallant manner of the courtly gentleman of the old school came back.

Miss Judy thought she had never seen so polished a bearing as the colonel's had been and would be--in a way--as long as he lived. She wondered uneasily that morning, as she looked toward his house, whether the servants took good care of him; and she made up her mind to be more watchful of him herself. She was much afraid that the rain might make his rheumatism worse.

Next to the colonel's, coming down the big road, was the Gordon place, the largest and best kept in the village. The house was a low rambling structure of logs, whitewashed inside and out. The rooms had been added at random as suited the comfort and convenience of the family. It was not the habit of the Oldfield people to consider appearances. It was not the habit of the widow Gordon to consider anything but her own wishes.

It may have been on account of this imperiousness, this open and scornful disregard of everything and everybody except herself and her own comfort, that she was always called "old lady Gordon" behind her back. She lived alone with a large retinue of servants in the comfortable old house, spending her days in a state of mental and physical semi-coma from over-eating and over-sleeping, using both like lethean drugs. Miss Judy alone sometimes thought that old lady Gordon so used them and pitied her. Old lady Gordon, who had a strong keen sense of humor, almost masculine in its robustness, would have laughed at the idea of Miss Judy's pity. She was the richest member of that community in which all living was simple, and in which the extremes of riches and poverty were not known as they are known to the greater world. Most of the Oldfield people dwelt contentedly in the middle estate which the wisest of men prayed for. None was poorer than Miss Judy, who had only a pittance of a pension, the old house, and the sc.r.a.p of earth; none, that is, except Sidney Wendall, who, although she owned the log cabin which sheltered her family and the bit of garden lying by its side, had not a penny of income for the support of her three children, her husband's brother, and herself. Yet Miss Judy managed to provide for Miss Sophia--and herself also as an afterthought; and Sidney provided for her family without difficulty, though in both cases a steady, strenuous effort was required.