When our grandfathers were snub-nosed little boys, quaintly dressed in the toggery of near a century ago, every town in the South boasted of its college. It was long before the coming of the state universities and the heavily endowed Church institutions. They were usually the property of some pompous individual whose pedantry and assumption, among the simple folk about him, went by the name of culture and learning. He was usually looked upon as being something sacred. His authority upon matters generally, and letters specifically, was indisputable. That being a day when, though there were no poor, there were also no rich, ancestry and one's mind counted for something. Therefore these old scholars, whose charlatanry waswhat they deemed an honest part of pedagogy, were honored with the very highest esteem. These schools soon acquired an atmosphere very dear to the Southern heart: a quiet air of good breeding. This was frequently abused by the institutions themselves inasmuch as it was made an inducement to secure attendance. To-day our very same grandparents are not so proud of the education attained, for that was usually very meager, but of the aristocratic name left to the now tottering buildings.
One of the most popular of all of these in its day was Oldmeadow College. Even to this time its legends are passed by careful and reverent tongues to those born in so unfortunate a period as not to have been able to attend it. In the narrow vision of many of our cracker-barrel philosophers there never existed men so erudite, so acceptably great as many of the old professors. Now and then, with modifications, this was true. Our village had no doubt whatever that she was the moral and culture center of Kentucky. It might please you to knowthat from Lexington, with Transylvania University, down to the least hamlet possessed of her college, every town in the State thought the same thing ... feel reasonably sure each one of them was right!
There was but one part of Oldmeadow which might boast of being anything like a hill. On the western edge of the town beside the river this knoll, many feet higher than the surrounding country, was entirely within the college campus. At its apex was the college itself. A brick building consisting of a basement with three stories and a half above it—these stories were higher than the average—made a rather imposing structure which sat like a monitor upon a stool overlooking the conduct of the village spread before it. On the first floor were an assembly and two recitation rooms. In the five apartments on the second lived the President and his family. The third was devoted to music and class rooms. On the pilot-house-like tower, which crowned the building, there rested a huge bell once the property of a boastfulsteamboat, theGeneral Litell, which had blown up at a point just below town, in a vain attempt to run faster than a rival. I used to believe the bell, rope and all, had been neatly blown over upon the roof, but I am now inclined to believe that friends must have rescued it from the sand-bar for its present position. It is still a mystery to me how it was ever mounted to where it is to-day.
Now all of this was very long ago, before you knew anything about Oldmeadow and my river beside it. When we first knew the village, you will remember, all that was left of the college was the building, the bell, and the wonderful view of the most beautiful stream in the world, from its windows, or its top. Standing beside the relic of theGeneral Litell, you may see the great Ohio wandering idly, vagabondishly, through the valley, until it looks like a silver thread losing itself in the misty distance. Just think of being able to see, on a clear sunny morning, twenty miles or more of the river you love. By your side it drifts, broad, full of strength, in pleasing sinuosity,covered by a thousand hurrying little ripples. Beyond it becomes smoother, the yellow of the water turning a clearer green, and motionless it winds in and out among the farms and woodland until it may be followed only by the line of blue vapor between the hills. Here and there hangs the smoke of a steamboat; a forest shuts it momentarily from sight only that you may catch a glimpse of silver sheen, lake-like, smiling in the happy sunshine; a farmhouse, as a silent, contemplative fisherman, sits here and there on the bank; and over it all, as if with satisfaction the master builder were viewing his work, there broods the great mystery.
Though all of these things remained, when we came into our inheritance the college was no longer a "college," but had fallen into the vulgar times of being used as the public school building. Here some erstwhile student held forth for six months in the year, teaching on the first floor, living on the second, his children making a playhouse out of the third.
I will not presume to say how long I had been attending the "college" when, upona certain cheerful September morning, I saw old Doctor Longstreet come walking up the campus with the timid fingers of our Nance held protectingly in his own. She seemed very much scared, a trifle knock-kneed, and just a bit too starched up to be as pretty as I acknowledged her in my heart. She passed us—a group of boys at play—with scarcely a look of recognition. I watched them climb the steps into the building, her two huge red plaits seeming to be about all there was of her. These same plaits looked quite lonely and as if they wanted to turn and run for it. I do not think I have ever seen her so humble, so unassuming as she was that day. To be sure it did not last long. Before another week she had figuratively made a crack in the fence and slipped through to victory.
During these early years in school, to prove my prowess, when I believed her looking, I never lost an opportunity to stand on my head. I did not realize at the time how ungallant was the undue advantage I took of her. Long, long since I have learned that she secretlypractised it at home. As a consequence, that which at first so won her admiration soon was the cause of contempt. Though I could never know, she was sure that she could do it with better grace than her one-time hero. I am now told that I only maintained my prestige by my ability to suddenly seize upon and throw down the boy nearest by. This was something of which she might only make a dream.
All of this showing off and the confidence in my own powers fully convinced me how much superior was man to woman. All she could do was to look on—at least so far as I knew—with an occasional attempt at being something, by a sudden and unexpected getting of my tag. This I frequently treated with contempt. Once in a while I risked my reputation for being manly by running pell-mell after her until the tag was successfully recovered.... And yet I was to be humiliated by this red-headed jade.
Jean François had caused consternation by announcing that within a few dayshe must be off for the white highways. Already he had remained too long in one place. However much he might love us, he could not afford to let his liver atrophy. Besides, were they not waiting for their happy pedler in another far-off gracious land?... "They await my pack," said he restlessly, "for fine knacks for ladies—pins, points, laces, gloves, and the thousand flimsy, silky things they adore!" And he bowed with a smile full of splendid mockery.... Our hearts were sad. Did we not want him forever?
The story of my humiliation comes here.... You will remember how we used to have to memorize long verses and recite them from the platform on Friday afternoons before visitors and the high and mighty school committee? It was upon such an auspicious occasion. Your speech—I am sure of the terminology—was, "I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying." Mine, with swimming gestures and trembling voice, was "Bingen, Fair Bingen on the Rhine." Who, dear friends, could think of greater recitationsthan these? Were they not time-honored? Were they not a part of the tradition of Oldmeadow? Certainly, I answer.
Now Jean François had been prevailed upon to enter for at least one hour beneath a roof. The pedler had serious objections to hats, which he never wore, and houses, which he rarely entered. Yet, out of compassion because of his leaving us, he had come to hear our speech-making. He sat with uneasy grace upon a front bench by Doctor Longstreet, who found much to amuse him in the umbrella man's discomfort.... It was when Nance stood before us, scared white, with tears beneath just the surface of her restless eyes, that Jean François lost his self-consciousness. Mr. Finus Appleblossom, proprietor of the store, chairman of the board, prominent in lodge and church circles, cleared his august throat ostentatiously and swelled with importance. Something seemed to be in the atmosphere.... Then in a very pretty little voice, which at once gained confidence, Nance began a song. Didn't Iknow it? Certainly, I assert. Had I not heard Jean François sing it a hundred times, but who, save the jade, would have ever thought of toppling custom, tradition, and the school board by singing a song—a very short one at that—Friday afternoon? And such a song!
This was the song of the jade:
"Lawn as white as driven snow;Cypress black as e'er was crow;Gloves as sweet as damask roses;Masks for faces, and for noses;Bugle-bracelets, necklace amber;Perfume for a lady's chamber;Golden quoifs and stomachers,For my lads to give their dears;Pins and poking-sticks of steel,What maids lack from head to heel:Come, buy of me, come; come, buy, come, buy;Buy, lads, or else your lasses cry:Come, buy."
"Lawn as white as driven snow;Cypress black as e'er was crow;Gloves as sweet as damask roses;Masks for faces, and for noses;Bugle-bracelets, necklace amber;Perfume for a lady's chamber;Golden quoifs and stomachers,For my lads to give their dears;Pins and poking-sticks of steel,What maids lack from head to heel:Come, buy of me, come; come, buy, come, buy;Buy, lads, or else your lasses cry:Come, buy."
For a moment after she had concluded she stood as if dumb, half-frightened, heart-sick, and then, bursting into tears, with a stifled little cry of despair, she rushed and fell all in a heap at the knees of Jean François. Forgetting all of us, he picked her up in his big, strong arms—she who was but a fragile child—and,smoothing the rumpled hair from her eyes, kissed her brow.
"Dear little jade," said he quite tenderly, "I didn't know that it made all of this difference."
"You won't go, Jean François?" she smiled through her tears.
"I must," said he regretfully. "I cannot help it.... But next June I'll come again. And every June that follows, as long as I shall live, the happy caravan shall be yours."
A few moments later, as we hurried into the open, I noticed that Nance was actually growing. It had never occurred to me that she would ever be any larger than the day she first thrust herself through my crack in the fence. As she passed with her grandfather, Jean François, and Mr. Appleblossom, she nodded to me quite as if she were an equal. In my humiliation I quite forgot to walk on my hands, a feat I was holding in reserve. Instead, off I skipped down to the river and "went-in" by myself. I felt that the world was very unappreciative and unsympathetic.
"Jean François," Nance was pleased to say very earnestly, "the river and the hills have belonged to us for so very long—I wonder when we will own the old-fashioned home of the many pillars?"... Because of his talking so frequently about it, we had grown to accept as a settled thing the possibility of our one day possessing the house of our heart's desire.
Columbine stood securely packed, the pedler was shod with newly soled boots, the road lay wistfully before him. It was the last beautiful night of our summer. In the early morning, Jean François, mender of umbrellas, would be off, and, for us, the winter. Yet it was not an unhappy gathering beside the September camp-fire. No one might be unhappy with the master of the caravan.
We had cooked a genuine greenwoodsupper and eaten it in the twilight. There was bacon held over the embers on a sharpened stick, bread baked in the ashes on heated stones, eggs boiled in Jean François' great kettle, and coffee, black and strong. What else, pray you, could one have wished? Afterward, with the smoke of Pierrett curling about his head and filling the air with the aroma of burning tobacco, he sang for us. He told old tales of men-at-arms in France until our blood grew warm and with him we fought great battles. Sometimes he would speak of fairies, elves, and the people of the woods; or of ghostly visitors to winter firesides; of far-off roads in far-away lands where the fields were always in bloom and the sun always mellow, warm, and soft.... He then told us how houses had souls the same as men and hungered to be loved. It was at this time Nance asked her question about our possessions.
As I have said before, he had frequently talked of our one day possessing the old home, but never with the seriousness with which he now spoke. It was evidentthat this time he considered the matter with sincerity.
"So you would really like to grow up and live in the Abbé's house?" said he, answering his questioner by a question.
"It would be the most beautiful thing in the world," was her reply. After a moment's hesitation, as if doubtful of what she should say, she added:
"That is, if—if you would come and live with us, Jean François."
"Thank you, my dear," he replied, with a singular note of tenderness in his voice. "Thank you very much indeed, but that would be impossible. Quite as impossible as your becoming a gipsy. And what would become of Columbine, Rogue, and Pierrett without the dingle andle long trimard? No, that would never do!... But, as for the other, why not?
"Why not, my girl?" was his comment, this time addressed to Pierrett. His rather queer custom of consulting the little briar-root pipe as if it were a conscious being was something to which we had long become accustomed. It washis way of talking things over with himself. In the same manner he held one-sided discussions with Columbine and Rogue. He was not partial in his family, though I feel sure the shaggy, sure-footed little mare was valued most highly.
"Why not?" he continued. "Monsieur l'Abbé, whom I know full well, illy deserves the home.... He is doing nothing worthy of enjoying such a charming house, is he? Eh?... Monsieur Jacques, where are your poor? Your shabby little brothers of the Parisian street? Where are the pinched hungry mouths with whom you once shared your crusts?... Ah, those were the days of crusts!... Where is the little attic in la Rue St. Jacques?... Let me see, children, is this not what He said to him each night:
"'For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.'
"Now, Monsieur Picot, the voices arefar away. You live in an alien land. Your pleasures, instead of boldly as of old, you take surreptitiously.... One day, you poor renegade, you will die and pass to the only heaven I know of—the long roads and sunlit fields of Picardy.... You haven't an heir by blood in the world. Why not an heir by love? Eh, Pierrett? I knew that you would say, 'Yes.'... I'll suggest it to the old curmudgeon."
"My dears," said he, addressing us, "I know this Monsieur l'Abbé very well. Some day I shall pay him a call and suggest how generous a thing it would be if he were to make his will in your favor. Then, quietly, with exceeding propriety, so as not to offend any member of your family, pass unto his fathers.... I will say, 'Monsieur, He says that "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my—"'"
"Dear Jean François," interrupted Nance, a bit horrified, "how disrespectfully you can talk!... I, too, know Monsieur l'Abbé—"
"But I know him much better thanyou, Nance." And he held his hand for her to be silent.
"I think to-night," said he a moment later, "I shall conclude by telling you the story of Monsieur l'Abbé Jacques Picot, of the little Rue St. Jacques, Paris."
Monsieur l'Abbé Picot, in whose heart there dwelt a queer mixture out of which to make a priest, was talking with a letter, written in a strange foreign hand, as it lay upon his knee. The entire morning had been spent at the beloved task of writing a sonnet. The afternoon, in the most miserable part of Paris, he might have been found visiting the homes of his sick and his poor, to whose ills, of body and of spirit, he deemed himself physician. In the evening for an hour he saw that happy laughing première danseuse, Mademoiselle Andree, at the gay little theater near the corner, pirouetting care from the heavy souls of men. In the early night he had but recently ceased to read the book which still lay open on the floor at his side, and for uncounted joyous momentshad fancied himself strutting the streets in the company of the brave D'Artagnan, their swords clanking in their scabbards, their eyes fierce for adventure.
It was thus, upon a day, that his warm love of life would come calling him for the army. At the very thought of men-at-arms his slender nostrils would widen and his imagination sniff the pungent odor of burning powder. There was no doubt in his mind that among his ancestors there had been some great warrior whose passion for fighting was but tempered by his patriotism. And his heroes, were they not Porthos, La Fayette, D'Artagnan, Washington, and Napoleon? Could he have been born to please his own choice of time, other than to have been the captain of the Guards during the reign of Louis XIV—the Louis of his own Dumas, the magnificent—he would have chosen to have fought under the Emperor. Then those escapades of student life at Harcourt! He scarcely dared to dream of such old brave days, now the well-beloved secrets hiddenbeneath a cassock and a cowl. They were stored in a memory made all the more sacred by the thought that such adventurous hours dare never be lived again. Then he feared for his impulsive nature. His mind, cooled and brought to the level of every day's simple duty, knew what was his actual and true work in the world. But O, the mischief of his wandering fingers, of his heart when the virile passion of life played riot in his veins. So it was, at times he seemed to know that to lead the battle, to cry for France, to spill one's blood for kings, that, indeed, was to be a man.
Yet when the wild airs of the early springtime came caressing the winter's fields and forcing from their barren and frosty breasts the first of the gladsome flowers, the passion in his veins turned merciful. The snows he did not love; for beneath the beauty and the softness of the drifting flakes he saw the treachery of the cold—the cold that brought but misery to his poor and made them almost forget that ever again God wouldbring the summer-time days. But when the earth lived again and became a mother with a thousand wombs, giving birth each beautiful moment to every green and blossoming thing; when he turned his eyes, made world-weary by looking on the suffering his people needs must bear, unto the blue of the warm skies, where it seemed that the very heavens were renewing, with some mysterious pigments, their blue and the white clouds afloat therein; and women went about with a strange new faith on their brows, while their men grew strong again with hope and courage, it was then that the thoughts of the Abbé Picot wandered to the gentler play of happy children, while his fingers, made kind through a mood quickened by nature, wrought new dreams into song. A poet! Ah, he told himself, was there anything better than to be a maker of dreams? Was the good God ever more gracious than when he gave to one's mind to see and appreciate everything beautiful in a world within which there was so much of ugliness? Aye, on occasions even to find the very hideousnessof things containing some inner, secret loveliness for the souls of men? Then, withal, to bless the hand with the art of expressing the things seen of his heart so others, reading in passing, might know His wonders too, was of a surety to be markedly favored of destiny. Thus it was that our good Abbé made sonnets and madrigals with his master Pierre Ronsard, ballades after the manner of that charming rogue François Villon, and songs quite as exquisite as those of the amorous troubadour, Bernard de Ventadour, whom he admired more for the structure of his verses than the sentiment expressed therein.
Probably most of all the Abbé Picot loved the earlier night hours, when, in fancy, his priestly robes laid aside, he seemed to forget his chivalry, his strength of arm, and the tenderness of his hands and live merely to absorb himself in the superficial lives of the men and women passing in the streets. The garish lights of theaters, cafés, and the great salons, the thoroughfares congested with carriages, and bewildered people hastened byfear and the threatening gendarme; the hurried, half-confused movements of belated shoppers, the roaming groups of pleasure-seekers, all found him thinking himself as Pierrot with his Pierrett, the gayest of the revelers. Frequently he would take his stand within an unused doorway and look with curious kindly interest into every face that passed. The pretty chattering grisettes; the swaggering soldier with his impudent leer; the wealthy, from quarters distinguished for their aristocratic dwellers, out to dabble in questionable joys; the vagabond stopping, meanwhile munching his miserable crust, to gaze into the richness of a shop-window at the clothing he might never hope to wear; the gamin, happy, ignorant, old at ten years, and appallingly wise in the ways of crime and despairing poverty; a thief with furtive look, shifting eyes, and hands whose searching fingers curved like the claws of a bird of prey; a courtesan irresponsibly, artificially gay in her rented finery; a priest hurrying to shrive some woful dying player on the boards of existence; a palsied old man totteringon the very edge of his finished days; a gladsome pink-cheeked youth, buoyed by the hope and courage born of inexperience, with his years all unfulfilled; a sick child crying in its mother's impotent arms; birth, death, and all that passes between found a very human interest in the mind, with a prayer in the heart of Monsieur l'Abbé, who now deemed it his particular business in life to be a maker of joys. He knew that none of them were all bad. The most of them were peculiarly generous and often good. His heart told him that a knowledge of life was a far, far better equipment for the soul's physician than a course in theology. To help his men and women, he argued, he must know them, not only in their more potent wrongs and uglier misdeeds, but in their pleasing sins, their follies, the gaiety belonging to the idle, lighter part of their being. And because there was in his own nature a subdued impulse which, uncontrolled, would have led him into many of their venial intemperances, he had a confidence in them wrought of an understanding mind anda sympathetic heart. So this watcher by the side of the road loved the night and all of her mysterious, alluring children. In his fancy he followed in and out of their varied lives until his soul became a part of those to whom he deemed it the biggest thing in the world to bring joy.
After such a night, again in his home with the day's work and play ended, kneeling beside his lonely little bed beneath the crucifix, the sorrow, the shame, the pain, the misery caused by all of life seemed to surge through his veins like a tempestuous sea overwhelming all before it. Quickly crossing himself, sighing while gently shaking his head, he would once again become the good Abbé Jacques Picot. He was, so to speak, a religious free-lance; a priest without benefice, whose relations with the authority of the Church were scarcely evident—a condition somewhat prevalent in France. Yet, unlike many of his brother clerics, he believed his parish to consist of humanity at large.
"Wherever a heart is broken, a soul issick, or a body suffering," he is known to have said, "it is there I have a work to do.Patria est ubicumque est bene.So my task is wherever joy may be made."
Yet withal, at heart and in temperament he was a loyal Parisian.
Just how long the Abbé's meditations had been going on from the moment he had ceased to read until the concièrge, after knocking upon the door, slipped in and laid a letter upon his lap, it would be difficult to calculate. Whatever that may have been, for much longer did he read, reread, and study the missive before him. Finally he raised his good gray eyes, filled with a sort of an amazing despair, and cried aloud:
"Jacques, Jacques, thou art indeed sore beset. To be one man is of course to be none at all; to be two is the average lot of the more fortunate; but to be no less than five, by all the saints in paradise, is to be worse off than that angel whose right wing was born of heaven and the left of hell!"
"What is it, my brother?" one of the men within him seemed quietly to ask. In fact, the wee, small voice appeared so actual that the good Abbé was startled.
By way of reply, for the hundredth time he read the letter.... It was from a Doctor Felix Longstreet of Oldmeadow, Kentucky, United States of America, announcing an inheritance—that is, with conditions. To him it meant wealth.
"Shall you go?" now inquired the quiet man uneasily.
"It is a green, grassy old name for a town," was the rather irrelevant reply.
"Do you wish to go?" again came the inquiry from the same anxious source.
"Kentucky!" he pronounced with not unbeautiful accents. "Kentucky sounds like poetry for 'out of doors.'"
"What will you do?" insisted several of the little men within at once.
"Things will be different there," argued the Abbé. "It is an old Protestant community. So said the letter.... You will not be in unconventional Rue St. Jacques. You cannot have liberties."He advanced a hundred objections, yet scarcely believing in any of them.
"But I may study," he continued. "I scarcely have an opportunity here. And my beloved philosophy shall have more time. I might even write my memoirs.... You know," in a tone of apology to the quiet one, "every Frenchman who can hold a pen wants to write memoirs.... Besides, cannot I make the people good Catholics?" This he said for conscience's sake.
"That, you know when you say it, would be next to impossible," came the prompt objection.
"I can try very hard, very gently."
"Certainly! It will ease your conscience for accepting quiet, well-ordered years of ease away from the problems of life."
"O, thou tender friend, you are brutally frank.... You help me make up my mind.... I shall go to this land of Kentucky."
"Do.... 'Au revoir, my happy, sunny France,' you shall say, but many's the time your poor heart shall break forher freedom, the merry, care-free streets of Paris, and the road to Amiens we have traveled so often together."
"Very likely.... I think I shall go," came from the Abbé.
"Are you certain?" again insisted the quiet one, with a note of suspicious eagerness illy suppressed.
The Abbé looked about him, before replying, as if sensing something wrong. "I am absolutely sure!" he said a trifle vehemently.
"I am glad," chuckled the quiet one good humoredly. "I wanted to go myself."
It was thus, after much debating with himself, that Monsieur l'Abbé Jacques Picot came to live in the old-fashioned home of the many pillars.
Monsieur l'Abbé Jacques Picot, in the old home of many pillars, sat in the library at his desk writing his memoirs. He was dressed with unusual neatness in the garb of a French priest. His closely cropped hair showed a well-shaped head, while his face, freshly shaven, presented strikingly interesting features. His mouth was big and amiable, his lips full yet firmly set, his nose almost too large, and his prominent lower jaw bespoke a strong will. It was a pair of humorous gray eyes, twinkling in irrepressible goodwill, that lighted and relieved a countenance which otherwise might have appeared unduly severe.... Can you imagine the disciple Peter with the eyes of Rabelais? Had he been a saint he would have been Francis of Assisi.
The room in which he wrote was filledwith books and manuscripts. The library, upon closer inspection, would have shown that it was largely given to general literature. Subjects upon theology were conspicuously absent. The tastes of the owner were evidenced by the volumes upon the table. Poems by Ronsard; Rabelais' "Les Faits et Dicts Heroisques du Bon Pantegruel," "Twelfth Night" by Shakespeare, and "The Life and Adventures of Guzman d'Alfarache" by Mateo Aleman.
As he wrote in a memorandum evidently intended for amplification later, then to be placed in the memoirs, he smiled as if taking a whimsical joy in what he recorded.
This is what Monsieur l'Abbé wrote:
On the afternoon of September 14, as I took my first walk upon my return home, I watched, quite unobserved by me, a tow-headed, freckle-faced boy, just reaching the Dumas stage of his charmed life, wade through the hot limestone dust of the turnpike, which forms Oldmeadow's chief street, and, uponreaching the spring just without the town, stand and cool his feet in the water of which he had drunk but a moment before. Even to this day I never see a small boy but what, if the opportunity presents itself, I look to see if he is web-footed. If certain illustrious warriors of an age when there never appeared to have been any real boys may be said to have been, like Romulus, suckled by a she-wolf, so it seems most of the youths I know must have been turned out by their mothers to be reared by the ducks. At any rate I know what an instinct all normal, healthy boys have for puddles.
Now I think I have a very acute intuition about boys and their thoughts. This time it was not different. This self-conscious boy was saying good-by to the very little boy, more than half baby, that he had been ever since he could remember. Previously he had been just a child, without sex-consciousness. All of the fluffy little girls were merely a part of the landscape. A part, at that, whose existence to him, so far as their being of any use, was a mystery. To him they were assuperficial in their importance as the mice from which they ran in horror, or the abominable cats which they chose to pet. He had always proved sufficient unto his little self, and there was really no one whom he felt that he could really do without, unless it be mother, father, and the river. Recognizing his superior physical strength when compared with that of girls, and measuring all things by this prowess, his inability to place them in their proper relationship to life increased with each new feat. There was where his world lay, and girls were forbidden. It is true Nance Gwyn possessed some recommendatory qualifications, yet her frequent readiness to tears kept her without the pale.
Finally it was this same Nance who burst his world like a bubble and sent him forth upon a quest which would occupy him for the remainder of his life. Within the past year there had softly and unwittingly crept upon him a knowledge of her necessity to his well-being. He now saw in a measure her place in the whole. She was now in the ascendancy,and he knew in his boyish heart that she always would be. And while he never doubted it being worth it, he was sure that he had paid a great price. He had given something that, however much he longed to retain it, he might never hope to have again. He had given his very little boyhood with its irresponsible innocence born of this same lack of any appreciation of sex. For this tenderness that had brought him to know and feel the thrill of a thousand sweet mysteries in the now glorious Nance he had given up the circus days, the joy in a dirty face, the fun of hearing her squeal in response to his torments, and from a sort of undesirable, weak boykin, in a fluff of little skirts, whose only redeeming quality was a vain attempt to be like "the fellows," she became of a sudden a woman-child with all the alluring and delightful charms of girlhood.
It is only fair to say that had the boy been asked to choose between the two, he would have unhesitatingly taken the life he knew lay all before him, unlived, unfulfilled, full of mystery, hope and Her.Yet it was no disloyalty, no cowardice to spend a day in getting used to the new by dwelling in tender memory over the old.
So he stretched himself under a hillside tree, and held his head in his hands with fingers interlaced beneath. His bare knees were crossed with one wet muddy foot propped in the air, while the other found a hold in the moss at the roots of his shelter. His eyes wandered through the green cool leaves above him and noted the wonderful blue of the sky where the white clouds sailed like great, snow-sheeted ships in a sea of turquoise. They seemed very beautiful, very kind, very prophetic of the joy of the long, long days to be. Everything now seemed different. It was the same colorful late summer heaven of a year ago, it was true, but to it there had been added a new, more vital meaning. The blue was the same as that of her eyes and the clouds spelled her name.
It seemed that before he had never discovered that there were so many girls in the world. Everywhere there wasnothing but bright eyes in lovely fresh faces, always beaming in friendly innocence upon him. He had scarcely noticed them before. Now they lent a subtle joy, an alluring mystery to everything with which they were associated. A bit of ribbon, a piece of lace, was no longer a portion of silk or so much linen.
For him, of a surety, God had created "a new heaven and a new earth." Forgotten was the ancient story of Eve and the garden. Now Nance, of the sun-colored hair, was the first woman. And as he lay in a fine sensuous health beneath the sky, which brought to him the deep color of her eyes, it seemed that a voice, calling him from somewhere within the mighty distance, named him Adam. It unnerved and startled him. Turning upon his face he burst into tears. His small shoulders shook convulsively, and for the first time he sobbed as does a man. As his body heaved with the pain of his unaccountable sorrow, a top with a soiled string fell from his pocket, and, rolling down the hill, lay neglected in the mud; a bird in the tree-top above broke the stillness of the afternoon with a full-throated, joyous song to his mate; a great white cloud, passing over the sun, cast a soft running shadow across the valley to the ridges; all nature seemed to sigh, like a sleeping child, or was it the oaten pipes of Pan, and then to awaken into new life.
It was the same colorful late summer heaven of a year ago it was true, but to it there had been added a new, more vital meaning. The blue was the same as that of her eyes and the clouds spelled her name.The Boy ceased his sobbing. After a while, looking up with a tearful, smiling face, he announced, as if to the Voice that had called him:"Now I must go to work."
It was the same colorful late summer heaven of a year ago it was true, but to it there had been added a new, more vital meaning. The blue was the same as that of her eyes and the clouds spelled her name.
The Boy ceased his sobbing. After a while, looking up with a tearful, smiling face, he announced, as if to the Voice that had called him:
"Now I must go to work."
The boy ceased his sobbing. After a while, looking up with a tearful, smiling face, he announced, as if to the voice that had called him:
"Now I must go to work."
O master, if you did but hear the pedler at the door, you would never dance again after a tabor and a pipe; no, the bagpipe could not move you: he sings several tunes faster than you'll tell money; he utters them as he had eaten ballads and all men's ears grew to his tunes.
O master, if you did but hear the pedler at the door, you would never dance again after a tabor and a pipe; no, the bagpipe could not move you: he sings several tunes faster than you'll tell money; he utters them as he had eaten ballads and all men's ears grew to his tunes.
—A Winter's Tale.
The morning road—jocund, robust, strong, and bright—dropped slowly over the long hill, crossed a merry little river through a covered bridge, turned to the right, ran sinuously through a green valley for a mile and a half, quickly gathered a cluster of houses about it, and promptly became the street of a small town of southern Kentucky. The crimson of the sunrise, like blushes on the cheeks of a child, patched the eastern sky. A haze of misty blue lingered above the stream, the eye thus being able to follow it for miles through the bottom lands. The mountain tops to the west wore their eternal gray, the shade of the uniforms of Confederate soldiers. The sun's yellow splendor shimmered warm and soft as if caressing the pregnant fields. The air was charged with gentle breezes perfumedfrom the woodland of the ridges and the fresh, mellow scent of rich earth, newly stirred by the plow. Orioles, robins, blue jays, larks: a perfect medley of rollicking song flew by on joyous wing. A solitary man standing on the hilltop turned slowly from mountain to valley, from sky to field, seeming to eat and drink and breathe—to make a part of him by some paganish transubstantiation—the very day itself. Like a brother to Pan, he belonged to it all, and the impulse to make himself felt, as the other forces abroad, was strong within him.... No wonder the entire earth was happy: there had been born that dawn, full-grown like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus, the spirit of June.
A solitary man standing on the hilltop turned slowly from mountain to valley, from sky to field, seeming to eat and think and breathe—to make a part of him by some paganish transubstantiation—the very day itself.
A solitary man standing on the hilltop turned slowly from mountain to valley, from sky to field, seeming to eat and think and breathe—to make a part of him by some paganish transubstantiation—the very day itself.
A few moments later the eyes of this lone son of the morning sought the distant village. The gray smoke of wood-fires, bespeaking the approach of the breakfast hour, arose from the chimneys of friendly kitchens. Far-away voices, calling the cows to be milked, mingled with snatches of song, the rattle of well-sweeps and the chopping of wood lent a human note of melody to the hour. The man's nostrils extended as in imagination he scented the smell of frying ham. He had slept by the roadside on the hilltop, and his appetite was healthful and ample. He had provisions with him, it was true, but for ten days he had eaten his own cooking by the camp-fire, and he had promised himself a change of food at the table of the little hotel the virtue of whose menu he had learned years ago. Besides, while the roving spirit of the road was strong in his blood, he loved human companionship. This morning he wanted the touch of some congenial hand.
"All right, Rogue," said he, and the shaggy mare, pulling onto the turnpike, began to leisurely make her way toward the village. Columbine was glorying in a glistening new coat of paint—yellow, to be sure. Pierrett, yes, certainly, the immortal Pierrett, only a trifle blacker, a bit more burned at the bowl, a little more worn at the mouthpiece. Following them all—Rogue, Columbine, Pierrett—insingle file, was the happy master of the caravan, Jean François. As he walked, hatless, coatless, head thrown back and eyes upon the sky, he sang. The music, if music it might be called at all, seemed an improvisation, yet it had a certain strange, chanting melody in harmony with this picture of the morning:
"Will you buy any tape,Or lace for your cape,My dainty duck, my dear-a?Any silk, any thread,Any toys for your head,Of the new'st and finest, finest wear-a?Come to the pedler,Money's a meddler,That doth utter all men's ware-a."
"Will you buy any tape,Or lace for your cape,My dainty duck, my dear-a?Any silk, any thread,Any toys for your head,Of the new'st and finest, finest wear-a?Come to the pedler,Money's a meddler,That doth utter all men's ware-a."
As he sauntered singing down the hill-road the thoughts of Jean François were in Oldmeadow. This was for more reasons than one. His mood called for friends, and there were to be found his truest. Also the village in the valley below him, with its inviting streets and old hotel, recalled certain pleasant features of the home of Nance and Charles and Doctor Longstreet. More than all else, less than two weeks and once morehe would be camping on his friendly common by the river. He expected this summer to be the best in many years. The little freckle-faced King boy, after four years in a deadly medical college, had graduated in April, and was now occupying Doctor Longstreet's office, while trying to assume the old gentleman's practise. There was doubtless a new sign hung from the post by the door, bearing the legend: