Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “I am thinking of a morning very, very long ago,” I said, slowly.

  “I, too,” said Silver Heels.

  “Almost a year ago,” I said.

  “A year ago,” said Silver Heels.

  “You little wild-cat thing!” I whispered, tenderly, and took her by the waist so that her face lay upturned on my shoulder.

  “Stupid,” she said, “I loved you that very day.”

  “What day?”

  “The day we both are thinking on: when you met me in the hall with your fish-rod like a guilty dunce—”

  “You wore a skirt o’ buckskin and tiny moccasins and stockings with scarlet thrums; and you were a-nibbling a cone of maple-sugar,” said I.

  “And you strove to trip me up!”

  “And you pushed me!”

  “And you thrust Vix at me!”

  “And you kicked my legs and ran up-stairs like a wild-cat thing.”

  There was a silence; she looked up into my face from my shoulder.

  “This, for a belt of peace betwixt those two children who live in memory,” said I, and kissed her.

  “Oonah! All is lost,” she said; “he does with me as he will!” and she rendered me my kiss, saying, “Bearer of belts, thy peace-belt is returned.”

  So was perfect peace established, not only for the shadowy children of that unforgotten past, but for us, and for all time betwixt us; and our belts were offered and returned, and the sign was the touching of her lips and mine.

  For Shemuel’s sake, and because we would not desert him, we continued in Albany until near the end of April.

  Taking counsel together, we had determined to build a mansion, when the times permitted, midway on the road ‘twixt Johnstown and Fonda’s Bush, our lands joining at that place. But I feared much that the war which now flamed through Massachusetts Bay might soon creep northward into our forest fastness and set the border ablaze from the Ohio to Saint Sacrement. Much, too, I feared that the men of the woods whose skin was red would league with the men whose coats were red. All his later days Sir William had striven to avert this awful pact; Dunmore played against him, Butler betrayed him, Cresap was tricked, and Sir William lost. Now, into his high place sneaked a pygmy, slow, uncertain, sullen, treacherous — his own son, who would undo the last knot which bound the Indians to a fair neutrality. Perhaps he himself would even lead them on to the dreadful devastation all men dreaded; and, if he, men must also count on the Butlers, father and son, to carry terror through our forests and hunt to death without mercy all who stood for freedom and the rights of man.

  One of these I had held in my hand and released. Yet still that old certainty haunted me, the belief that one day I was to meet and kill him, not in honourable encounter, now, for he had lost the right to ask such a death from me; but in the dark forest, somewhere among the corridors of silent 502 pines, I would slay him as sachems slay ferocious beasts that track men through ghost-trails down to hell.

  Then should we be free at last of this fierce, misshapen soul, we People of the Morning, Tierhansaga, and the shrinking forest should straighten, and Oya should be Oyabanh, and the red witch-flower should wither to a stalk, to a seed, and sprout a fair white blossom for all time, Ahwehhah.

  That night, as I stood on the steps of Peter Weaver’s red brick house, turning to look once more into the coals of the setting sun ere I entered the door, a hand twitched at my coat-skirt, and, looking down, I saw below me on the pavement an Indian dressed in the buckskins of a forest-runner.

  “Peter!” I cried, for it was he, my dusky kinsman on the left hand; then my eyes fell on his companion, a short, squat savage, clad in red, and painted hideous with strange signs I could not read.

  “Red Jacket,” said Peter, calmly.

  I looked hard at Peter; he had grown big and swart and fat like a bear-cub in November; Red Jacket raised his sullen eyes, then dropped them.

  Suddenly, as I stood there, at a loss what next to say, came a heavy man, richly clothed, flabby face bent on the ground. Nor would he have discovered me, so immersed in brooding reverie was he, had not Peter touched his elbow.

  A bright flush stained his face; he looked up at me where I stood. Then I descended the steps, shoving Peter from between us, and Sir John Johnson, for it was he, moved back a pace and laid his heavy hand on his sword-belt as I came close to him, looking into his cold eyes.

  “Liar!” I said; “liar! liar!” And that was all, for he gave ground, and his hand fell limply from his dishonoured hilt.

  So I left him, there in the darkening street, the Indians watching him with steady, kindling eyes.

  We started next day at dawn, Silver Heels riding Warlock in her new kirtle and little French three-cornered hat with its gilt fringe, to which she had a right, as she was now My Lady Cardigan, if she chose.

  I rode a bay mare, bought in Albany, yet a beauty, and 503 doubtless the only decent horseflesh in all that town of rusty rackers and patroons’ sorry hacks. Mount and the Weasel, leather-clad, and gay with quilled moccasins and brilliant thrums, journeyed afoot, on either side o’ Shemuel, who bestrode a little docile ass.

  His noddle, neatly mended and still bound up, he had surmounted with a Quaker hat so large that it rested on his large flaring ears; peddlers’ panniers swung on either flank, crammed deep with gewgaws; he let his bridle fall on the patient ass’s neck, and, thumbs in his armpits, joined lustily the chorus raised by Mount and Renard:

  “Come, all ye Tryon County men,

  And never be dismayed;

  But trust in the Lord,

  And He will be your aid!”

  Roaring the rude chorus, Jack Mount marched in the lead, his swinging strides measured to our horses’ steady pacing; beside him trotted the little Weasel, his hand holding tightly to the giant’s arm; and sometimes he took three steps to Mount’s one, and sometimes he toddled, his little, leather-bound legs twinkling like spokes in a wheel, but ever he chanted manfully as he marched:

  “O trust in the Lord,

  And He will be your aid!”

  And Shemuel’s fervent whine from his lowly saddle rounded out the old route-song.

  An hour later I summoned Jack Mount, and he fell back to my stirrups, resting his huge hand on my saddle as he walked beside me.

  “Jack,” I said, “is poor Cade cured o’ fancy and his mad imaginings?”

  “Ay, lad, for the time.”

  “For the time?”

  “A year, two years, three, perhaps. This is not the first mad flight o’ fancy Cade has taken on his aged wings.”

  “You never told me that,” I said, sharply.

  “No, lad.”

  “Why not?”

  “Do you spread abroad the sorry secrets of your kin, Mr. Cardigan?”

  “He is not your kin!”

  “He is more,” said Mount, simply.

  After a silence I asked him on what previous occasion the little Weasel had gone moon-mad.

  “On many — every third or fourth year since I first knew him,” said Mount, soberly. “But never before did he leave me to follow his poor mad phantoms — always the phantom of his wife, lad, in divers guises. He saw her in a silvery bush o’ moonlight nights, and talked with her till my goose-flesh rose and crawled on me; he saw her mirrored in cold, deep pools at dawn, looking up at him from the golden-ribbed sands, and I have laid in the canoe to watch the trouts’ quick shadows moving on the bottom, and he a-talking sweet to his dear wife as though she hid under the lily-pads like a blossom.”

  He glanced up at me pitifully as he walked beside my stirrup; I laid my hand on his leather-tufted shoulder.

  “Sir, it is sad,” he muttered; “a fair mind nobly wrecked. But grief cannot deform the soul, Mr. Cardigan.”

  “He knows you now?”

  “Ay, and knows that he has dwelt for months in madness.”

  “Does he know that it was me he loved so deeply in his madness?” asked Silver Heels, gently.

  “I think he does,” whi
spered Mount.

  Silver Heels turned her sorrowful eyes on poor Cade Renard.

  Riding that afternoon near sunset, at the False Faces’ Carrying-Place upon the Mohawk, we spoke of Johnson Hall and the old life, sadly, for never again could we hope to enter its beloved portals.

  Naught that belonged to us remained in the Hall, save only the memories none might rob us of.

  “If only I might have Betty,” said Silver Heels, wistfully.

  “Betty? Did she not attend you to Boston with Sir John?” I asked.

  “Yes, but she was slave to Sir John. I could not buy her; you know how poor I awoke to find myself in Boston town.”

  “Would not that brute allow you Betty?” I asked, angrily.

  “No; I think he feared her. Poor, blubbering Betty, how she wept and roared her grief when Sir John bade her pack up, and called her ‘hussy.’”

  That night we lay at Schenectady, where also was camped a body of Sir William’s Mohawks, a sullen, watchful band, daubed in hunting-paint, yet their quivers hung heavy with triple-feathered war-arrows, and their knives and hatchets and their rifles were over-bright and clean to please me.

  Some of them knew me, and came to talk with me over a birch-fire. I gave them tobacco, and we tarried by the birch-fire till the stars waned in the sky and the dawn-stillness fell on land and river; but from them I could learn nothing, save that Sir John and Colonel Guy had vowed to scalp their own neighbours should they as much as cry, “God save our country!” Evil news, truly, yet only set me firmer in my design to battle till the end for the freedom that God had given and kings would take away.

  Silver Heels, quitting the inn with Mount, came to warn me that I must sleep if we set out at sunrise. Graciously she greeted the Mohawks who had risen to withdraw; they all knew her, and watched her like tame panthers with red coals in their eyes.

  “But they are panthers yet; forget it not,” muttered Jack Mount.

  At sunrise we rode out into the blue hills. Homeless, yet nearing home at last, my heart lifted like a singing bird. Dew on the sweet-fern exhaling, dew on the ghost-flower, dew on the scented brake! — and the whistle of feathered wings, and the endless ringing chorus of the birds of Tryon! Hills of pure sapphire, streams of gems, limpid necklaces festooned to drip diamonds from crags into some frothing pool! Pendent pearls on vines starred white with bloom; a dun deer at gaze, knee-deep in feathering willow-grass; a hermit-bird his morning hymn, cloistered in the vaulted monastery where the great organ stirs among the pines!

  Hills! Hills of Tryon, unploughed, unharrowed, save by the galloping deer; hills, sweet islands in the dark pine ocean, over whose waste the wild hawk’s mewing answers the 506 cry of its high-wheeling mate; hills of the morning, aromatic with spiced fern, and perfumed of the gum of spruce and balsam; hills of Tryon; my hills! my hills!

  “The spring is with us,” said Jack Mount, stooping to pluck a frail flower.

  “Ka-nah-wah-hawks, the cowslip!” murmured Silver Heels.

  “Savour the wind; what is it?” I asked, sniffing.

  “O-neh-tah, the pine!” she cried.

  “O-ne-tah, the spruce!” I corrected.

  “The pine, silly!”

  “The spruce!”

  “No, no, the pine!”

  “So be it, sweet.”

  “No, I am wrong!”

  And we laughed, and she stretched out her slender hand to me from her saddle.

  Then we galloped forward together, calling out greeting to our old friends as we passed; and thus we saluted Jis-kah-kah, the robin, and Kivi-yeh, the little owl, and we whistled at Koo-koo-e, the quail, and mocked at old Kah-kah, the watchful crow.

  Han-nah-wen, the butterfly, came flitting along the roadside, ragged with his long winter’s sleep.

  “He should not have slept in his velvet robe for a night-shift,” said Silver Heels; “he is a summer spendthrift, and Nah-wan-hon-tah, the speckled trout, lies watching him under the water.”

  Which set me thinking of my feather-flies; and then the dear old river flashed in sight.

  “I see — I see — there, very far away on that hill—” whispered Silver Heels.

  “I see,” I muttered, choking.

  Presently the sunlight glimmered on a window of the distant Hall.

  “We are on our own land now, dear heart,” I said, choking back the sob in my throat.

  I called out to Jack Mount and unslung my woodaxe. He 507 drew his hatchet, and together we cut down a fair young maple, trimmed it, and drove a heavy post into the soil.

  “Here we will build one day,” said I to Silver Heels. She smiled faintly, but her eyes were fixed on the distant Hall.

  I had leased, from my lawyer, Peter Weaver, a large stone mansion in Johnstown, which stood next to the church where Sir William lay; this until such time as I might return from the war and find leisure to build on my own land the house which Silver Heels and I had planned to stand on a hill, in full view of the river and of the old Hall where our childhood had been passed.

  It was night when we rode into Johnstown. I could discover no changes in the darkness, save that a few new signs swung before lighted shops, and every fifth house hung out a lanthorn and a whole candle-light.

  Our stone house was vast, damp, and scantily furnished, but Jack Mount lighted a fire in the hallway, and Silver Heels went about with a song on her lips, and Cade Renard sent servants from the nearest inn with cloth and tableware, and meats smoking hot, not forgetting a great bowl of punch and a cask of ale, which the scullions rolled into the great hall and hoisted on the skids.

  So we were merry, and silent, too, at moments, when our eyes met in faint smiles or wistful sympathy.

  Shemuel, with his peddling panniers, had strangely disappeared, nor could we find him high or low when Mount and Cade had set their own table by the fire and the room smelled sweet with steaming toddy.

  “Thrift! Thrift!” muttered Mount, rattling his toddy-stick impatiently; “now who could have thought that little Jew would have cut away to make up time in trade this night!”

  But Shemuel had traded in another manner, for, ere Mount had set his strong, white teeth in the breast-bone of a roasted fowl, I heard Silver Heels cry out: “Betty! Betty! Oh dear, dear Betty!” And the blubbering black woman came rolling in, scarlet turban erect, ear-rings jingling.

  “Mah li’l dove! Mah li’l pigeon-dove! Oh Gord, mah li’l Miss Honey-bee!”

  “You must keep her, lad,” muttered Mount.

  “I think Sir John will sell,” I said, grimly.

  And so he did, or would have, had not his new wife, poor Lady Johnson, whom I had never seen, writing from the Hall, begged me to accept Betty as a gift from her. And I, having no quarrel with the unhappy lady, accepted Betty as a gift, permitting Lady Johnson to secure from the incident what comfort she might.

  All through the sweet May-tide, Jack Mount and Cade Renard sunned themselves under the trees in our garden, or sprawled on the warm porch like great, amiable wolf-hounds, dozing and dreaming of mighty deeds.

  Ale they had for the drawing, yet abused it not, respecting the hospitality of the house and its young mistress, and none could point the shameful finger at either to cry: “Fie! Pottle-pot! Malt-worm! Painted-nose! Go swim!” At times, sitting together on the grass, cheek by jowl, I heard them singing hymns; at times strolling through the moon-drenched garden paths they lifted up their souls in song:

  “The hunter has taken the trail to the East;

  The little deer run! The little deer run!

  Fear not, little deer, for he hunts the Red Beast;

  Ye are not for his gun! Ye are not for his gun!

  “The hunter lies cold on the trail to the East;

  His bosom is rent! His bosom is rent!

  He died for his country, to slay the Red Beast;

  To Heaven he went! To Heaven he went!”

  In the moonlight the doleful chant droned on, night after night, under the dewy lilacs; and the great horn
ed-owl answered, hooting from the pines; and Silver Heels and I listened from the porch, hand clasping hand in fearsome content. For out in the dark world God was busy shaping the destiny of a people; even the black forest knew it, and thrilled like a vast harp at the touch of the free winds’ fingers — unseen fingers, delicate, tentative, groping for the key to a chord of splendid majesty. And when at last the chord should be found and struck, resounding to the deep world’s rock foundation, a free people’s voices should repeat, singing forever and for all time throughout the earth:

  “Amen!”

  Meanwhile, stillness, moonlight, and a “Miserere” from the lips of two strange forest-runner folk, free-born and ready when the Lord of all led forth His prophet to command.

  On that night I heard a man in the street repeat a name, Washington. And all that night I thought of it, and said it, under my breath. But what it might portend I knew not then.

  May ended, smothered in flowers; and with the thickening leaves of June came to us there in the North rumours of the times which were to try men’s souls. And again I heard, somewhere in the darkness of the village streets, the name I heard before; and that night, too, I lay awake, forming the word with silent lips, close to my young wife’s breast.

  The full, yellow moon of June creamed all our garden now; Mount and Renard sat a-squat upon the grass, chin on fist, to muse and muse and wait — for what? The King of England did not know; but all the world was waiting, too.

  Then, one dim morning, while yet the primrose light tinted the far hills, I awoke to see Silver Heels in her white night-robe, leaning from the casement, calling out to me in a strange, frightened voice: “Michael! Michael! They are coming over the hills — over the hills, dear heart, to take you with them!”