CHAPTER XIX
Whythe recoil of the pieces did not sink the old pettiaugre with all on board, to their imminent danger of drowning in the tumultuous depths of the spring floods, Captain Howard could never understand, except on the principle that “Naught is never in danger,” as he said bluffly, now that his anxiety was satisfied. The heavy rainfall and the melting of the snows had swollen the watercourses of the region to such a degree that they had risen out of their deep, rock-bound channels, and this enabled Raymond to secure water-carriage for the guns the greater part of the return journey. He had some hardships to relate of a long portage across country when the pack animals which had carried his supplies and ammunition had been utilized as artillery horses, and had drawn the guns along such devious ways as the buffalo paths from one salt spring to another might furnish. Then they had embarked on the Keowee, and had come down with a rushing current, firing a salute to Fort Prince George as they approached, eliciting much responsive cheering from the garrison, and creating more commotion than they were worth, the commandant gruffly opined.
He hearkened with a doubtful mien to the ensign’s report of the vicissitudes of the expedition, and wasobviously of the opinion that the whole mission could have been as well accomplished in a less melodramatic and turbulent manner.
“I knew,” he said, “that the official demand for the guns would anger the chiefs, for they have long craved the possession of a few pieces of artillery, and nothing in their hands could be so dangerous to the security of the colonies. But I was sure that being in Choté, you were safe, and that if you should find it necessary to seize the guns they would protect you against all odds on your march back to Fort Prince George. I did not imagine the chiefs would venture so far as to conceal the cannon, and of course that gave you a point of great difficulty. But the feint of firing on the town was altogether unnecessary. There was no occasion for incivility.”
“Stop me, sir, if it had not been for their lies and conjuring tricks I should have been as polite as pie.”
Captain Howard listened with an impartial reservation of opinion to the detail of the magic red light, but his face changed as Raymond took from his pocket a gem-like stone, large, translucent, darkly red, and caught upon it an intense reflection from the dull fire in the commandant’s office.
“This must be their famous ‘conjuring-stone,’” he said gravely.
“The fellow dropped it when I knocked him down,” Raymond explained, graphically. “I lost my balance, and we rolled on the ground together, and as I pulled loose I found this in my hand.”
Early travellers in this region describe this “conjuring-stone” of the Cherokees as the size of a hen’s egg, red and of a crystalline effect, like a ruby, but with a beautiful dark shade in the centre, and capable of an intense reflection of light.
The next day Captain Howard received from the Indians the strange complaint that the British ensign had their “religion,” with a demand that he be required to return it. They stated that they had searched all their country for the sacred amulet, and they were convinced that he had possessed himself of it. They were robbed of their “religion.”
“This is idolatry,” exclaimed the old missionary, rancorously, vehement objection eloquent on his face.
“They tried to put my eyes out with their ‘religion,’” declared Raymond. “They shall not have the amulet back again. They are better off without such ‘religion.’”
“That is not foryouto judge,” said Arabella, staidly.
They were all strolling along the rampart within the stockade after retreat. The parade was visible on one side with sundry incidents of garrison life. The posting of sentinels was in progress; a corporal was going out with the relief, and the echo of their brisk tramp came marching back from the rocks of the river-bank; the guard, a glitter of scarlet and steel, was paraded before the main gate. From the long, dark, barrack building rose now and again the snatch of a soldier’s song, and presently a chorus oflaughter as some barrack wit regaled the leisure of his comrades. The sunset light was reflected from the glazed windows of the officers’ quarters; several of the mess had already assembled in their hall to pass the evening with such kill-time ingenuities as were possible in the wilderness. Now and again an absentee crossed the parade with some token of how the day had been passed;—a string of mountain trout justified the rod and reel of an angler, coming in muddy and wet, and the envy of another soldier meeting him; at the further end, toward the stables, a subaltern was training a wild young horse for a hurdle race, and kept up the leaping back and forth till he “came a cropper,” and his sore bones admonished him that he had had enough for one day.
The air was soft and sweet; the Keowee River, flush to its brim with the spring floods, sang a veritable roundelay and vied with the birds. Sunset seemed to have had scant homing monitions, for wings were yet continually astir in the blue sky. All the lovely wooded eminences close about the fort, and the Oconee mountain, and the nearer of the great Joree ranges, were delicately, ethereally green against the clear amethystine tone of the mountain background.
And as if to fairly abash and surpass the spring, this dark-eyed, fair-haired girl herself wore green, of a dainty shadowy tint, and carried over one arm, swinging by a brown ribbon, a wide-brimmed hat, held basket-wise, and full of violets, while the windstirred her tresses to a deeper, richer glitter in the sunset after-glow. For these violets Raymond had rifled the woods for fifty miles as he came, and she turned now and again to them with evident pleasure, sometimes to handle a tuft especially perfect.
Despite his hopelessness, in view of the impression he had received as to Mervyn’s place in her good graces, Raymond set a special value on aught that seemed to commend him. He had greatly enjoyed the pose of a successful soldier, who had returned from the accomplishment of a difficult and diplomatic mission. He cared not asou marquéfor the criticism of several of the other officers of the post who opined that it was a new interpretation of the idea of diplomacy to train cannon on commissioners in session and bring off the subject of negotiation amidst the thunders of artillery. He had felt that it was enough that he was here again, all in one piece, and so were the cannon,—and he had brought off, too, it seemed, the “religion” of the Cherokees. He experienced a sudden reaction from this satisfaction when Arabella turned from the violets, and pronounced him unfit to judge of the Indian’s religion.
“Why not? I am as good a Christian as anybody,” he averred.
Mervyn at this moment had a certain keenness of aspect, as if he relished the prospect of a difference. This eagerness might have suggested to Raymond, but for his own theory on the subject, that the placid understanding which seemed to him to subsist betweenArabella and the captain-lieutenant was not as perfect as he thought.
The Reverend Mr. Morton paused, with his snuff-box in his hand, to cast an admonitory glance upon the young ensign.
“There is none good,—no, not one,” he said rebukingly.
He solemnly refreshed his nose with the snuff, although that feature seemed hardly receptive of any sentiment of satisfaction, so long and thin it was, so melancholy of aspect, giving the emphasis of asceticism to his pallid, narrow face, and his near-sighted, absent-minded blue eyes.
“I mean, of course, by ordinary standards, sir. I’m as good a Christian as Mervyn, or Lawrence, here, or Innis, or—or—the captain,” Raymond concluded, with a glance of arch audacity at the commandant.
“Hoh!” said Captain Howard, hardly knowing how to take this. He did not pretend to be a pious man, but it savored of insubordination for a subaltern to claim spiritual equality with the ranking officer.
“When we are most satisfied with our spiritual condition we have greatest cause for dissatisfaction,” declared the parson.
With his lean legs encased in thread-bare black breeches and darned hose,—he had been irreverently dubbed “Shanks” during the earlier days of his stay at Fort Prince George,—his semi-ludicrous aspect of cadaverous asceticism and sanctity, so incongruous with the haphazard conditions of thefrontier, it would have been difficult for a casual observer to discern the reason of the sentiment of respect which he seemed to command in the minds of these gallant and bluff soldiers. Their arduous experience of the hard facts of life and the continual defiance of death had left them but scant appreciation of the fine-spun sacerdotal theories and subtle divergencies of doctrine in which Mr. Morton delighted. Seldom did he open his oracular lips save to exploit some lengthy prelection of rigid dogma or to deliver the prompt rebuke to profanity or levity, which in the deep gravity of his nature seemed to him of synonymous signification. He might hardly have noticed the subject of conversation of the party as he walked by the commandant’s side along the rampart, but for the word “religion.” He seemed to be endowed with a separate sense for the apprehension of aught appertaining to the theme that to him made up all the interest of this world and the world to come. Therefore he spoke without fear or favor. His asceticism was not of a pleasing relish, and his rebukes served in no wise to commend him. It was his fearlessness in a different sense that had made his name venerated. The rank and file could not have done with rehearsing, with a gloating eye of mingled pride, and derision, and pity, how he had driven the gospel home on the Cherokees, in season and out, they being at his mercy, for by the rigid etiquette of the Indians they were forbidden to interrupt or break in upon any discourse, however lengthy or unpalatable. And how he had persisted, albeit his life was notsafe; and how the head-men had finally notified Captain Howard; and how Captain Howard had remonstrated in vain; and how at last Ensign Raymond had had the old parson literally brought off in the arms of two of their own command. It is to be feared that it was neither learning nor saintliness that so commended the old missionary to the garrison of Fort Prince George.
Now it seemed that the Cherokees had lost their own religion, if this amulet represented it, for by their curious racial logic Raymond possessed its symbol and therefore they no longer had the fact.
“It is a heathen notion that I have got their religion,” protested Raymond. “They never had any religion.”
“It is religion to them,” said Arabella. “Religion is faith. Religion is a conviction of the soul.”
“True religion is a revelation to the mind direct from God,” said Mr. Morton, didactically. “The name doth not befit the hideous pagan follies of the Indians.”
She did not feel qualified to argue; she only said vaguely with a certain primness, in contrast with her method of addressing the young men:—
“Faith always seems to me the function of the soul, as reason is of the mind. You can believe an error, but mistakes are not founded on reason.”
Then she asked him suddenly if the stress that the Cherokees laid on this amulet did not remind him of the attributes of the ark of the Hebrews and their despair because of its capture.
“The ark was a type,—a type,” he declared, looking off with unseeing eyes into the blue and roseate sky and launching out into a dissertation on the image and the reality, the prophecy and its fulfilment, with many a digression to a cognate theme, while Captain Howard affected to listen and went over in his mind his quarter-master’s accounts, the state of the armament of the fort, and the equipment of the men, all having relation to the settling of his affairs in quitting his command. The younger people chatted in low voices under cover of the monologue, it not being directly addressed to them.
They had slowly strolled along the rampart as they talked, the two elderly men in the rear, the girl in the centre, with her charming fair-haired beauty, more ethereal because of that pervasive, tempered, pearly light which just precedes the dusk, while the young officers, in the foppery of their red coats, their white breeches, their cocked hats, and powdered hair, kept on either side. The party made their way out from the dead salient of the angle, only to be defended by the musketry of soldiers standing on the banquettes, and ascended the rising ground to the terre-pleine, where cannon were mounteden barbetteto fire above the parapet.
As Arabella noticed the great guns, standing a-tilt, she said they reminded her of grim hounds holding their muzzles up to send forth fierce howls of defiance.
“They can send forth something fiercer than howls,” said Raymond, applausively. He was a very young soldier, and thought mighty well of the little cannon.Captain Howard, who had seen war on a fine scale and was used to forts of commensurate armament, could not repress a twinkle of the eye, although for no consideration would he have said aught to put the subaltern out of conceit with his little guns.
The other cannon were pointed through embrasures beneath the parapet. One of them had been run back on its chassis. She paused beside it, and stood looking through the large aperture, languid, and silent, and vaguely wistful, at the scene from a new point of view.
As she lingered thus, all fair-haired in her faint green dress, with her hat on her arm full of violets, one hand on the silent cannon, she seemed herself a type of spring, of some benison of peace, of some grave and tender mediatrix.
The foam was aflash on the rapids of the Keowee River; the sound of its rush was distinct in the stillness. Now and again the lowing of cattle came from some distant ranch of pioneer settlers. The Indian town of Keowee on the opposite side of the river was distinct to view, with its conical roofs and its great rotunda on a high mound, all recognizable, despite the reduction of size to the proportions of the landscape of the distance. No wing was now astir in the pallid, colorless sky. One might hardly say whence the light emanated, for the sun was down, the twilight sped, and yet the darkness had not fallen. A sort of gentle clarity possessed the atmosphere. She noted the line of the parapet of the covered way, heretofore invisible because of the highstockade, and beyond still the slope of the glacis, and there—
“Whatisthat?” she said, starting forward, peering through the embrasure into the gathering gloom. A dark object was visible just beyond the crest of the glacis. It was without form, vague, opaque, motionless, and of a consistency impossible to divine.
“Why,—the Indian priests or conjurers,” Mervyn explained. “They have been there all day.”
“They are called thecheerataghe,—men possessed of divine fire,” Raymond volunteered.
The captain-lieutenant somewhat resented the amendment of his explanation. “They are the only people in the world who believe that Raymond has any religion of any sort.” He laughed with relish and banteringly.
“Don’t you think that is funny, Mr. Mervyn?” she demanded, her tone a trifle enigmatical. She did not look at him as she still leaned with one hand on the cannon, her hat full of violets depending from her arm.
“Vastly amusing, sure,” declared Mervyn,—and Ensign Innis laughed, too, in the full persuasion of pleasing.
“I can’t see their feathers or bonnets,” she said.
“No,” explained Raymond, “they have their heads covered with the cloth they weave, and they heap ashes on the cloth.”
“Oh-h-h!” cried out Arabella.
“Watch them,—watch them now,” Raymond said quickly. “They are heaping the ashes on their heads again.”
There was a strange, undulatory motion among the row of heavily draped figures, each bending to the right, their hands seeming to wildly wave as they caught up the invisible ashes before them and strewed them over their heads, while a low wail broke forth. “And you think this is funny?” demanded Arabella of the young men, looking at them severally.
“I can’t say I think it isunfunny,” said Innis, with a rollicking laugh.
“I think it is very foolish,” said Lawrence.
“I don’t believe they have lost a religion because I’ve got it in my pocket,” said Raymond.
“And they are old men—are they?” she asked.
“Old?”—said Mervyn. “Old as Noah.”
“And they have had a long journey?”
“Pounded down here all the way from Choté on their ten old toes.”
“And how long will they stay there, fasting, and praying, and wailing, and waiting, in sackcloth and ashes?”
“Perhaps till they work some sort of spell on me,” suggested Raymond. She laughed at this in ridicule.
“Till the fort is evacuated, I suppose,” said Mervyn.
“So long as that!” she exclaimed, growing serious. All at once she caught her breath with a gasp, staring at the Indians in the gathering gloom, as with a sudden inspiration.
“I would speak with them!—Oh, la!—what a thing to tell in England! Take me down there,—quick. Tillie vallie!—there is no water in the fosse. What a brag to make in Kent! There can be nodanger under the guns of the fort. Lord, papa,—let me go!”
Captain Howard hesitated, but made no demur. The war was over, and there was indeed no risk; and Arabella’s pilgrimage into primeval realms would be infinitely embellished by this freak. All of the young officers accompanied her, the interpreter, hastily summoned, following; the commandant and the parson watched from the rampart.
She went through the gray dusk like some translucent apparition, the figment of lines of light. The moon, now in the sky, hardly annulled the tints of her faint green gown; her hair glittered in the sheen; her face was ethereally white.
The wailing ceased as her advance was observed. The swaying figures were still. A vague fear seized her as she came near to those mysterious veiled creatures, literally abased to the ground. She wavered for a moment,—then she paused on the crest of the glacis in silence and evident doubt.
There was an interval of suspense. The odors of violets and dust and ashes were blended on the air. Dew was falling; the river sang; and the moon shone brighter as the darkness gathered.
“Good people,” she said, with a sort of agitated, hysteric break in her clear voice, for she was realizing that she knew not how to address magnates and priests of a strange alien nation.
The croak of the interpreter came with a harsh promptitude on each clause.
“Good people, I hear a voice,”—she paused again, and corrected her phrase,—“I feel a monition—to tell you that your prayers are answered. Your ‘religion’ I have the power to restore. To-morrow, at the fort, at high noon, it shall be returned to you. If you help the helpless, and feed the hungry, and cherish the aged, and show mercy to captives, it will be a better religion than ever heretofore. I promise,—I pledge my word.”
She wavered anew and shrank back so suddenly that Raymond thought she might fall. But no! She fled like a deer, her green draperies all fluttering in the wind, the moonlight on her golden hair and in her shining eyes. The officers followed, half bewildered by her freak, Raymond first of all. He overtook her as she was climbing through the fraise of the steep exterior slope of the rampart, clutching at the sharp stakes to help her ascent.
“Stop! stop!” he said, catching at her sleeve and pausing to look up gravely into her eyes as she, laughing, gasping, half-hysterical, looked down at him standing on the berme below. “Are you in earnest?” he demanded.
“Yes,—yes,—I shall give back the amulet.”
She seemed hardly to realize that it was his; that he had captured it in a mêlée; that it was now in his possession; that he had a word in the matter, a will to be consulted.
“I don’t understand—” he hesitated.
“Oh,—la,—you! You make no difference.Ihave worked a spell onyou,—as you know!”
She laughed again, caught her breath with a gasp, and began once more to ascend swiftly through the fraise. But he was beside her in a moment. He caught her little hand trembling and cold in his.
“Arabella,” he cried, in agitated delight, “you know I worship you,—you know that you have indeed all my heart,—but only a subaltern,—I hardly dared to hope—”
“La! you needn’t bestir yourself to hope now! Sure, I didn’t sayyouhad worked any spell onme.”
Not another word was possible to him, for the others had overtaken them, and it was in a twitter of laughter that she climbed through the embrasure, and in a flutter of delighted achievement that she breathlessly detailed the adventure to her father and the parson. Then hanging on the commandant’s arm she demurely paced to and fro along the moonlit rampart, now and again meeting Raymond’s gaze with a coquettish air of bravado which seemed to say:—
“Talk love to menow,—if you dare!”
The embassy of Indians had disappeared like magic. The party from the fort declared that upon glancing back at the glacis the row of veiled, humiliated figures had vanished in the inappreciable interval of time like a wreath of mist or a puff of dust.
One could hardly say that they returned the next day,—so unlike, so far alien to the aspect of the humble mourners, who had wept and gnashed their teeth and wailed in sackcloth and ashes on the glacis of the fort in the dim dusk, was the splendidly armed and arrayed delegation that high noon ushered intothe main gate. Their coronets of white swan’s feathers, standing fifteen inches high, with long pendants trailing at the back, rose out of a soft band of swan’s-down close on the forehead. They wore wide collars or capes of the same material, and the intense whiteness heightened the brilliancy of the blotches of decorative paint with which their faces were mottled. Each had a feather-wrought mantle of iridescent plumage, the objects of textile beauty so often described by travellers of that date. They bore the arms of eld, in lieu of the more effective musket, wearing them as ornaments and to emphasize the fact that they were needed neither for defence nor aggression. The bows and arrows were tipped with quartz wrought to a fine polish, and the quivers were covered with gorgeous embroidery of beads and quills. Their hunting shirts and leggings were similarly decorated and fringed with tinkling shells. They were shod with the white buskins cabalistically marked with red to indicate their calling and rank as “beloved men.” Their number was the mystic seven. They were all old, one obviously so infirm that the pace of the others was retarded to permit him to keep in company. They advanced with much stateliness, and it was evidently an occasion of great moment in their estimation.
Captain Howard, adopting the policy of the government to fall in with the Indian ceremonial rather than to seek to force the tribes to other methods, met them in person, and with some pomp and circumstance conducted them to the mess-hall in one of the block-houses,as the most pretentious apartment of the fort. He was an indulgent man when off duty. He was rather glad, since to his surprise Ensign Raymond had suddenly declared that he was willing to return the amulet, that the Indians should have the bauble on which they set so much value, and he was altogether unmoved by Mr. Morton’s remonstrance that it was a bargaining with Satan, a recognition of a pagan worship, and a promotion of witchcraft and conjure work to connive at the restoration of the red stone to its purpose of delusion.
Inclination fosters an ingenuity of logic. “I am disposed to think the stone is a symbol—a type of something I do not understand,” Captain Howard replied; evidently he had absorbed something of Mr. Morton’s prelections by the sheer force of propinquity, for certainly he had never intentionally hearkened to them. “You, yourself, have often said the Cherokees are in no sense idolaters.”
The officers of the post had no scruples. They were all present, grouped about the walls, welcoming aught that served to break the monotony. Mrs. Annandale, cynical, inquisitive, scornful, and deeply interested, was seated in one of the great chairs so placed that she could not fail to see all of what she contemptuously designated as “the antics.” Norah stood behind her, wide-eyed and half-frightened, gazing in breathless amazement at the proceedings. The room was lighted only by the loop-holes for musketry, looking to the outer sides of the bastion, and the broadly flaring door, for there was no fire thiswarm, spring day. The great chimney-place was filled with masses of pine boughs and glossy magnolia leaves, to hide its sooty aperture, and on the wide hearth, near this improvised bower, stood Arabella, looking on, a pleased spectator, as Raymond advanced to the table in the centre of the floor, and laid upon it the great red stone, which shone in the shadowy place with a translucent lustre that might well justify its supernatural repute. The interpreter repeated the courteous phrases in which Ensign Raymond stated that he took pleasure in returning this object of beauty and value which had by accident fallen into his possession.
His words were received in dead silence. The Indians absolutely ignored him. They looked through him, beyond him, never at him. He had been the cause of much anguish of soul, and the impulse of forgiveness is foreign to such generosity of spirit as is predicable of the savage.
A moment of suspense ensued. Then the tallest, the stateliest of the Indians reached forth his hand, took the amulet, passed it to a colleague, who in his turn passed it to another, and in the continual transfer its trail was lost and the keenest observer could not say at length who was the custodian of the treasure.
Another moment of blank expectancy. There were always these barren intervals in the leisurely progress of Indian diplomacy. The interview seemed at an end. The next incident might be the silent filing out of the embassy and their swift, noiseless departure.
Suddenly the leader took from one of the others a small bowl of their curious pottery. It was full of fragrant green herbs which had been drenched in clear water, for as he held them up the crystal drops fell from them. There was a hush of amazed expectancy as he advanced toward the young lady. With an inspired mien and a sonorous voice he cried, casting up his eyes, “Higayuli Tsunega!”
“Oh, supreme white Fire!” echoed the interpreter.
“Sakani udunuhi nigesuna usinuliyu! Yu!”
“Grant that she may never become unhappy! Yu!”
Then lifting the fresh leafage aloft, the cheerataghe, with a solemn gesture, sprinkled the water into her astounded face.
“Safe! Safe!” the interpreter continued to translate his words. “Safe forever! She and hers can never know harm in the land of the Cherokee. Not even a spirit of the air may molest her; no ghost of the departed may haunt her sleep; not the shadow of a bird can fall upon her; no vagrant witch can touch her with malign influence.”
“Ha-usinuli nagwa ditsakuni denatlu hisaniga uy-igawasti dudanti!” declared the cheerataghe.
“We have keenly aimed our arrows against the accursed wanderers of darkness!” chanted the interpreter.
“Nigagi! Nigagi!”
“Amen! Amen!”
A breathless silence ensued. No word. No stir. The amazement depicted on the faces of the staring officers, the dubitation intimated in CaptainHoward’s corrugated, bushy eye-brows, the perplexity in Mrs. Annandale’s eagerly observant, meagre little countenance, were as definite a comment as if voiced in words. This was all caviare indeed to their habits of mind, accustomed as they were to the consideration of material interests and the antagonisms of flesh and blood. But the pale ascetic face of the old missionary was kindled with a responsive glow that was like the shining of a flame through an alabaster vase, so pure, so exalted, so vivid an illumination it expressed, so perfect a comprehension this spark of symbolism had ignited.
As a type of covenant the suggestions afforded by this incident occupied several learned pages of Mr. Morton’s recondite work on “Baptism in its Various Forms in Antient and Modern Times,” published some years afterward, a subject which gratefully repays amplification and is susceptible of infinite speculation. The peculiar interest which the occasion developed for him served to annul the qualms of conscience which he had suffered, despite which, however, instigated by the old Adam of curiosity, he had permitted himself to be present at the restoration of the conjuring-stone to its mission of delusion.
A mention of the amulet as a “lost religion” was the next moment on the lips of the interpreter, echoing the rhetorical periods of Yachtino, the chief of Chilhowee, who had stepped forward and was speaking with a forceful dignity of gesture and the highly aspirated, greatly diversified intonations of the Cherokee language, illustrating its vauntedcapacity for eloquent expressiveness, and affording the group a signal opportunity of judging of the grace of oratory for which these Indians were then famous.
The gratitude of the Indians, the spokesman declared, was not to be measured by gifts. Not in recognition of her beneficence, not in return for her kindness,—for kindness cannot be bought or repaid, and they were her debtors forever,—but as a matter of barter the Cherokee nation bestowed upon her their pearl, the “sleeping sun,” in exchange for the amulet which she had caused to be returned by the ruthless soldier.
Forthwith the chief of Chilhowee laid upon the table the beautiful fresh-water pearl which Raymond had seen at Cowetchee.
Heedless of all the subtler significance of the ceremony, and, under the British flag, caring naught for the vaunted puissance of Cherokee protection against the seen and the unseen, the astonished and delighted young beauty gazed speechless after the embassy, for their grotesquely splendid figures had disappeared as silently as the images of a dream, feeling that the reward was altogether out of proportion with the simplicity of the kindly impulse that had actuated her girlish heart. Because they were very old and savage, and, as she thought, very poor, and were agonized for a boon which in their ignorance they craved as dear and sacred, she had exerted the influence she knew she possessed to restore to them this trifle, this bauble,—and here in her hand thetear of compassion, as it were, was metamorphosed into a gem such as she had never before beheld.
Mounted by a London jeweller between prongs set with diamonds it was famous in her circle for its size and beauty, and regarded as a curio it could out-vie all Kent. She long remembered the Cherokee words which described it, and she entertained a sort of regretful reminiscence of Fort Prince George, soon dismantled and fallen into decay, where the spring had come so laden with beauty and charm, and with incidents of such strange interest.
Mrs. Annandale also remembered it regretfully, and with a bitter, oft-reiterated wish that Arabella had never seen the little stronghold or the officers of its garrison. She used her utmost endeavors against Raymond’s suit, but threats, persuasion, appeals, were vain with Arabella. She had made her choice, and she would not depart from it. Her heart was fixed, and not even the reproach to which her generous temper rendered her most susceptible,—that she had caused pain and unhappiness to Mervyn, encouraging him to cherish unfounded hopes,—moved her in the least. She reminded them both that she had warned him he must not presume on her qualified assent as a finality; she had always feared she did not love him, and now she knew it was impossible.
“I can’t imagine how Ensign Raymond had the opportunity to interfere,” Mrs. Annandale said wofully to her brother in one of their many conferences on the unexpected turn of the romance the match-maker had fostered. “I am sure I never gavehim the opportunity to make love to her; it was dishonorable in him to introduce the subject of love when he knew of her engagement.”
“He did not introduce the subject of love,” said Arabella, remembering the scene in the fraise above the scarp, and laughing shyly. “I, myself, spoke first of love.”
Then awed by her aunt’s expression of horror and offended propriety, she added demurely:—
“It must have been the influence of that amulet. He had it then. They say it bestows on its possessor his own best good.”
Captain Howard also remembered Fort Prince George regretfully, and also with a vague wish that she had never seen the little stronghold. He was not exactly discontented with Raymond as a son-in-law, but this was not his preference, for he had advocated her acceptance of Mervyn’s suit. His own limited patrimony lay adjoining the Mervyn estate, and he thought the propinquity a mutual advantage to the prospects of the two young people, and that it materially enhanced Arabella’s position as a suitable match for the Mervyn heir. The succeeding baronet was a steady conventional fellow, and had been very well thought of in the regiment before he sold out upon coming into his title and fortune. Raymond would be obliged to stick to the army, having but small means, and he would doubtless do well if he could be kept within bounds.
“But,” Captain Howard qualified, describing the absent soldier to an intimate friend and countryneighbor in Kent, over the post-prandial wine and walnuts,—“but he is such a frisky dare-devil! If he could be scared half to death by somebody it would tame him, and be the making of him.”
In a few years it might have seemed that this had been compassed, for it was said that Raymond was afraid of his lovely wife. He was obviously so solicitous of her approval, he considered her judgment of such peculiar worth, and he thought her so “monstrous clever,” that when impervious to all other admonitions, he could be reached, advised, warned, through her influence.
When he became a personage of note, for in those days of many wars he soon rose to eminence, and it was desired to flatter, or court, or conciliate him, a difficult feat, for he was absolutely without vanity for his own sake, it was understood that there was one secure road to his favorable consideration,—he was never insensible to admiration of his wife’s linguistic accomplishments, which included among more useful tongues, the unique acquisition of something of the Cherokee language. Then, too, he was always attentive and softened by any comment, in some intimate coterie, upon the jewel, now called a pendant, which, hanging by a slender chain, rose and fell on a bosom as delicately white as the gem itself. The great pearl was associated with the most cherished sentiments of his life, his love and his pride in his professional career,—with the inauguration of his dear and lasting romance, and his first independent command. With a tender reminiscent smile on his war-wornface, he would ask her to repeat the word for the moon in the several dialects, and would listen with an unwearied ear as she rehearsed her spirited story of the “sleeping sun,” and the method of its barter for the amulet.