Читать книгу Throckmorton - Molly Elliot Seawell - Страница 3

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In a lowland Virginia neighborhood, strangely cut off from the rest of the world geographically, and wrapped in a profound and charming stillness, a little universe exists. It has its oracles of law, medicine, and divinity; its wars and alliances. Free from that outward contact which makes an intolerable sameness among people, its types develop quaintly. There is peace, and elbow-room for everybody’s peculiarities.

Such was the Severn neighborhood—called so from Severn church. Every brick in this old pile had been brought from green England two hundred years before. It seemed as if, in those early days, nothing made with hands should be without picturesqueness; and so this ancient church, paid for in hogsheads of black tobacco, which was also the currency in which the hard-riding, hard-drinking parsons took their dues, was peaked and gabled most beautifully. The bricks, mellowed by two centuries, had become a rich, dull red, upon which, year after year, in the enchanted Southern summers and the fitful Southern winters, mosses and gray lichens laid their clinging fingers. It was set far back from the broad, white road, and gnarled live-oaks and silver beeches and the melancholy weeping-willows grew about the churchyard. Their roots had pushed, with gentle persistence, through the crumbling brick wall that surrounded it, where most of the tombstones rested peacefully upon the ground as they chanced to fall. Within the church itself, modern low-backed pews had supplanted the ancient square boxes during an outbreak of philistinism in the fifties. At the same time, a wooden flooring had been laid over the flat stones in the aisles, under which dead and gone vicars—for the parish had a vicar in colonial days—slept quietly. The interior was darkened by the branches of the trees that pressed against the wall and peered curiously through the small, clear panes of the oblong windows; and over all the singular, unbroken peace and silence of the region brooded.

The country round about was fruitful and tame, the slightly rolling landscape becoming as flat as Holland toward the rich river-bottoms. The rivers were really estuaries, making in from the salt ocean bays, and as briny as the sea itself. Next the church was the parsonage land, still known as the Glebe, although glebes and tithes had been dead these hundred years. The Glebe house, which was originally plain and old-fashioned, had been smartened up by the rector, the Rev. Edmund Morford, until it looked like an old country-woman masquerading in a ballet costume; but the Rev. Edmund thought it beautiful, and only watched his chance to lay sacrilegious hands on the old church and to plaster it all over with ecclesiastical knickknacks of various sorts.

The Rev. Mr. Morford had come into the world handicapped by the most remarkable personal beauty, and extreme fluency of tongue. Otherwise, he was an honest and conscientious man. But he belonged to that common class among ecclesiastics who know all about the unknowable, and have accurately measured the unfathomable. On Sundays, when he got up in the venerable pulpit at Severn, looking so amazingly handsome in his snow-white surplice, he dived into the everlasting mysteries with a cocksureness that was appalling or delightful according to the view one took of it. In the tabernacle of his soul, which was quite empty of guile and malice, three devils had taken up their abode: one was the conviction of his own beauty, another was the conviction of his own cleverness, and still another was the suspicion that every woman who looked at him wanted to marry him. Mr. Morford reasoned thus:

I. That all women want to get married.

II. That an Edmund Morford is not to be picked up every day.

III. That eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

On Sundays he scarcely dared look toward the pew where General and Mrs. Temple sat, with their beautiful widowed daughter-in-law, Mrs. Beverley Temple, on one side of them, and Jacqueline Temple, as lovely in her small, kittenish way, on the other, for fear that one or the other of these young women would fall hopelessly in love with him. Mrs. Beverley, as the young widow was called, to distinguish her from the elder Mrs. Temple, had the fatal charm for the Rev. Edmund that all things feared and admired have. He believed in his heart of hearts that widows were made for his undoing, and that the good old Hindoo custom of burning them up alive was the only really safe disposition to make of them. The charm of Judith Temple’s piquant face and soft, shy eyes was somewhat neutralized by a grim suspicion lodged in Mr. Morford’s mind that she was unnecessarily clever. The Rev. Edmund had a wholesome awe of clever women, especially if they had a knack of humor, and was very much afraid of them. Judith had a sedate way of replying to Morford’s resounding platitudes that sometimes created a laugh, and when he laboriously unwound the meaning, he was apt to find the germ of a joke; and Judith was so grave—her eyes were so sweetly serious when she was laying traps to catch the Rev. Edmund’s sluggish wits. But Judith herself thought of no man whatever, and had learned to regard the sparkle of her unquenchable humor almost as a sin. However, having got a bad name for cleverness, neither the most sincere modesty nor the deepest courtesy availed her in keeping it quiet. Morford, in his simple soul, thought a clever woman could do anything; and suppose Judith should cast her eyes on—at this the Rev. Edmund would turn pale in the midst of his sermon when he caught Judith’s gray eyes fixed soberly on him. Soberness—and particularly Judith’s soberness—was deceitful.

Barn Elms, the Temple place, was near to the Glebe and to Severn church. The house was rambling and shabby, and had been patched and pieced, with an utter disregard of architectural proportion that resulted in a curious and unexpected picturesqueness. A room was put on here, and a porch was clapped up there, just as the fancy of each successive Temple had dictated. It was partly of brick and partly of stone. Around it stood in tall ranks the solemn, black-leaved poplars, and great locust-trees grew so close to the house that on windy nights the sound of their giant arms beating the shingled roof awoke superstitious fears in the negroes, who declared it to be the “sperrits” of dead and gone Temples struggling to get in through the chimneys. There was a step up or a step down in every room in the house, and draughts enough in the unnecessary halls and passages to turn a windmill. There was, of course, that queer mixture of shabbiness and luxury about the old place and the mode of living that is characteristic of Virginia. Mrs. Temple had piles and piles of linen sheets laid away with the leaves of damask roses between them in the old cedar chests, but half the rooms and all the stairs and passages were uncarpeted. It required the services of an able-bodied negro to keep these floors polished—but polished they were, like a looking-glass. The instrument used in this process was called a “dry-rubbin’ bresh” by the manipulators, and might well have been used in Palestine during the days of Herod the tetrarch, being merely a block of wood covered with a sheepskin, well matted with wax and turpentine. At unearthly hours, in cold winter mornings and gray summer dawns, the monotonous echo of this “bresh” going up and down the hall-floors was the earliest sound in the Barn Elms house. There was a full service of silver plate displayed upon a huge and rickety mahogany sideboard, but there was a lack of teaspoons. Mrs. Temple had every day a dinner fit for a king, but General Temple was invariably behindhand with his taxes. The general’s first purchase after the war was a pair of splendid Kentucky horses to pull the old carriage bought when Mrs. Temple was a bride, and which was so moth-eaten and worm-eaten and rust-eaten that when it started out it was a wonder that it ever came back again. The kitchen was a hundred yards from the house in one direction, and the well, with its old-fashioned bucket and sweep, was a hundred yards off in another direction. The ice-house and stables were completely out of sight; while the negro houses, annually whitewashed a glaring white, were rather too near. But none of these things annoyed General and Mrs. Temple, who would have stared in gentle surprise at the hint that anything at Barn Elms could be improved.

General Temple, six feet tall, as straight as an Indian, with a rich, commanding voice and a lofty stride, stood for the shadow of domestic authority; while Mrs. Temple, a gentle, affectionate, soft-spoken, devoted, and obstinate woman, who barely reached to the general’s elbow, was the actual substance. From the day of their marriage he had never questioned her decision upon any subject whatever, although an elaborate fiction of marital authority was maintained between them and devoutly believed in by both. Mrs. Temple always consulted the general punctiliously—when she had made up her mind—and General Temple, after a ponderous pretense of thinking it over, would say in his fine, sonorous voice: “My dear Jane, the conviction of your extremely sound judgment, formed from my experience of you during thirty years of married life, inclines me to the opinion that your suggestion is admirable. You have my permission, my love”—a permission Mrs. Temple never failed to accept with wifely gratitude, and, like the general, really thought it amounted to something. This status is extremely common in Virginia, where, as a rule, the men have a magnificent but imaginary empire, and the women conduct the serious business of life.

Brave, chivalrous, generous, loving God and revering woman, General Temple was as near a monster of perfection as could be imagined, except when he had the gout. Then he became transformed into a full-blown demon. From the most optimistic form of Episcopal faith, he lapsed into the darkest Calvinism as soon as he felt the first twinge of his malady, and by the time he was a prisoner in the “charmber,” as the bedroom of the mistress of the family is called in Virginia, he believed that the whole world was created to be damned. Never had General Temple been known under the most violent provocation to use profane language; but under the baleful influence of gout and superheated religion combined, he always swore like a pirate. His womenkind, who quietly bullied him during the best part of the year, found him a person to be feared when he began to have doubts about freewill and election. To this an exception must be made in favor of Mrs. Temple and of Delilah, the household factotum, who was no more afraid of General Temple than Mrs. Temple was. She it was who was mainly responsible for these carnivals of gout by feeding the patient on fried oysters and plum-pudding when Dr. Wortley prescribed gruel and tapioca. Delilah was one of the unterrified, and used these spells to preach boldly at General Temple the doctrines of the “Foot-washin’ Baptisses,” a large and influential colored sect to which she belonged.

“Ole marse,” Delilah would begin, argumentatively, “if you wuz ter jine de Foot-washers—”

“Jane! Jane!” General Temple would shout.—“Come here, my love. If you don’t get rid of this infernal old fool, who wants absolutely to dragoon me out of my religion, I’ll be damned if I—God forgive me for swearing—and you, my dear—”

Sometimes these theological discussions had been known to end by Delilah’s flying out of the room, with the general’s boot-jack whizzing after her. At Mrs. Temple’s appearance, though, the emeute would be instantly quelled. Delilah was also actively at war with Dr. Wortley, as the black mammies and the doctors invariably were, and during the visits of the doctor, who was a peppery little man, it was no infrequent thing to hear his shrill falsetto, the general’s loud basso, and Delilah’s emphatic treble all combined in an angry three-cornered discussion carried on at the top of their lungs.

Like mistress, like maid. As Mrs. Temple ruled the general, Delilah ruled Simon Peter, her husband, who since the war was butler, coachman, gardener, and man-of-all-work at Barn Elms. Mrs. Temple, however, ruled with circumlocution as well as circumspection, and had not words sufficient to condemn women who attempt to govern their husbands. But Delilah had no such scruples, and frequently treated Simon Peter to remarks like these:

“Menfolks is mighty consequenchical. Dey strut ’bout, an’ dey cusses an’ damns, an’ de womenfolks do all de thinkin’ an’ de wukkin’. How long you think ole marse keep dis heah plantation if it warn’t fur mistis?”

“Look a heah, ’oman,” Simon Peter would retaliate, when intolerably goaded, “Paul de ’postle say—”

“What anybody keer fur Paul de ’postle? Womenfolks ain’ got no use fur dat ole bachelor. Men is cornvenient fur ter tote water, an’ I ain’ seen nuttin’ else much dey is good fur.”

Simon Peter’s entire absence of style partly accounted for the low opinion of his abilities entertained by his better half. He was slouchy and sheep-faced, and, when he appeared upon great occasions in one of General Temple’s cast-off coats, the tails dragged the ground, while the sleeves had to be turned back nearly to the elbow. Delilah, on the contrary, was as tall as a grenadier, and had an air of command second only to General Temple himself and much more genuine. She was addicted to loud, linsey-woolsey plaids, and on her head was an immaculately white “handkercher” knotted into a turban that would have done credit to the Osmanlis.

The war had given General Temple the opportunity of his lifetime. He “tendered his sword to his State,” as he expressed it, immediately organized Temple’s Brigade, and thereafter won a reputation as the bravest and most incompetent commander of his day. His ideas of a brigade commander were admirably suited to the middle ages. He would have been great with Richard Cœur de Lion at the siege of Ascalon, but of modern warfare the general was as innocent as a babe. It was commonly reported that, the first time he led his brigade into action, he did not find it again for three days. His men called him Pop, and always cheered him vociferously, but pointedly declined to follow him wherever he should lead, which was invariably where he oughtn’t to have been. He had innumerable horses shot under him, but, by a succession of miracles, escaped wounds or capture. It was a serious mortification to the general that he should have come out of the war with both arms and both legs; and it was marvelous, considering that he put himself in direct line of fire upon every possible occasion, and galloped furiously about, waving his sword whenever he was in a particularly ticklish place.

Since the war General Temple had found congenial employment in studying the art of war as exemplified in books, and in writing a History of Temple’s Brigade. As he knew less about it than any man in it, his undertaking was a considerable one, especially as he had to give a personal sketch, with pedigree and anecdotes, of every member of the brigade. He had started out to complete this great work in three volumes, but it looked as if ten would be nearer the mark. As regards the theory of war, General Temple soon became an expert, and knew by heart every campaign of importance from those of Hannibal, the one-eyed son of Hamilcar, down to Appomattox. A good deal of the money that would have paid his taxes went into the general’s military library, which was a source of endless pride to him, and which caused the History of Temple’s Brigade to be, in some sort, a history of all wars, ancient and modern.

The pride and satisfaction this literary work of his gave the general’s honest heart can not be described. He read passages of it aloud to Mrs. Temple and Judith and Jacqueline in the solemn evenings in the old country-house, his resonant voice echoing through the old-fashioned, low-pitched drawing-room. Mrs. Temple listened sedately and admiringly, and thanked Heaven for having given her this prodigy of valor and learning. Nor, after hearing the History of Temple’s Brigade all the evening, was she wearied when, at two o’clock in the morning, General Temple would have a wakeful period, and striding up and down the bedroom floor, wrapped in a big blanket over his dressing-gown, declaimed and dissected all the campaigns of the war, from Big Bethel to Appomattox. Mrs. Temple, sitting up in bed, with the most placid air in the world, would listen, and thank and admire and love more than ever this hero, whom she had wrapped around her finger for the last thirty years. O blessed ignorance—O happy blindness of women! which gracious boon God has not withheld from any of the sex. But there was something else that made General Temple’s long-winded war stories so deeply, tragically interesting to Mrs. Temple. There had been a son—the husband of the handsome daughter-in-law—Mrs. Temple could not yet speak his name without a sob in her voice. That was what she had given to the great fight. When the news of his death came, General Temple, who had never before dreamed of helping Mrs. Temple’s stronger nature, had ridden night and day to be with her at that supreme moment, knowing that the blow would crush her if it did not kill her. She came out of the furnace alive but unforgetting. She would not herself forget Beverley, nor would she allow anybody else to forget him. She remembered his anniversaries, she cherished his belongings; she, this tender, excellent, self-sacrificing woman, sacrificed, as far as she could, herself and everybody else to the memory of the dead and gone Beverley. As fast as one crape band on the general’s hat wore out, she herself, with trembling hands, sewed another one on. As for herself, she would have thought it sacrilege to have worn anything but the deepest black; and Judith, after four years of widowhood, wore, whether willingly or unwillingly, the severest widow’s garb. Jacqueline alone had been suffered, out of consideration for her youth and the general’s pleading, to put on colors. The girl, who was beautiful and simple, but quite different from other girls, in her heart cherished a hatred against this memory of the dead, that had made her youth so sad, so encompassed with death. Jacqueline loved life and feared death; and whenever her mother began to speak of Beverley, which she did a dozen times a day, Jacqueline’s shoulders would twitch impatiently. She longed to say: “What is he to us? He is dead—and we live. Why can’t he be allowed to rest in peace, like other dead people?” Jacqueline was far from heartless; she loved her sister-in-law twice as well as she had ever loved her handsome silent brother, whose death made no gap in her life, but had ruthlessly barred out all brightness from it. Jacqueline, in her soul, longed for luxury and comfort. All the discrepancies and deficiencies at Barn Elms were actually painful to her, although she had been used to them all her life. She wanted a new piano instead of the wheezy old machine in the drawing-room. She wanted a thousand things, and, to make her dissatisfaction with Barn Elms more complete, not a quarter of a mile away, across a short stretch of feathery pine-trees, on a knoll, stood a really great house, Millenbeck by name. To Jacqueline’s inexperienced eyes, the large square brick house, with its stone balustrade around the roof, its broad porch, with marble steps that shone whitely through the trees around it, was quite palatial. And nobody at all lived there. It was the family place of the Throckmortons. The last Throckmorton in the county was dead and gone; but there was another—grandson to the last—a certain Major George Throckmorton, who, although Virginian born and bred, had remained in the regular army all through the war, and was still in it. This George Throckmorton had spent his boyhood at Millenbeck with his grandfather, who was evil tempered and morose, and thoroughly wicked in every way. The old man had gone to his account during the war, and since then his creditors had been fighting over his assets, which consisted of Millenbeck alone. Major Throckmorton had money, and it had been whispered about that, whenever Millenbeck was sold, this army Throckmorton would buy it. But it was freely predicted that he would never dare show his face in his native county after his turpitude during the war in fighting against his State, and he was commonly alluded to as a traitor. Nevertheless, at Severn church, one Sunday, it was said that this Throckmorton had bought Millenbeck, and would shortly make his appearance there.

General and Mrs. Temple, as they sat on opposite sides of the fireplace at Barn Elms, discussing the matter with the profound gravity that the advent of a new neighbor in the country requires, to say nothing of the sensation of having a traitor at one’s doors, came nearer disagreeing than usual. The night was cool, although it was early in September, and a little fire sparkled cheerfully upon the brass andirons on the hearth in the low-pitched, comfortable, shabby drawing-room. Mrs. Temple, clicking her knitting-needles placidly, with her soft eyes fixed on the fire, went over the enormity of those to whom Beverley’s death was due. To her, the gentlest and at the same time the sternest of women, the war took on a personal aspect that would have been ludicrous had it not been pathetic. Ah! what was that boy that Beverley had left, what was Judith the young widow, or even Jacqueline, to that lost son? Nothing, nothing! Mrs. Temple, still gazing at the fire, saw in her mind, as she saw every hour of the day and many of the night, the dead man lying stark and cold; and, as if in answer to her thoughts, General Temple spoke, laying down his volume of Jomini:

“My love, what will you do—ahem! what would you recommend me to do regarding George Throckmorton when he arrives? Speak frankly, my dear, and do not be timid about giving me your opinion.”

A curious kind of resentment shone in Mrs. Temple’s face.

“It is not for a woman to guide her husband; but we at least can not forget what the war has cost us.”

General Temple sighed. He had heard that Throckmorton had got a year’s leave and would probably spend it at Millenbeck. How fascinating did the prospect appear of a real military man with whom he could discuss plans of campaign, and flank movements, and reconnaissances, and all the technique of war in which his soul delighted! For, although Dr. Wortley had become a great military critic, as everybody was in those days, he had never smelt powder, and was a very inferior antagonist for a brigadier-general, who had been in sixteen pitched battles without understanding the first thing about any of them.

Jacqueline, who sat in her own little chair, with her feet on a footstool, and her elbows on her knees, began in an injured voice:

“And the house is going to be perfectly grand. Mrs. Sherrard told me about it to-day. A whole parcel of people”—Jacqueline was a provincial, although an amazingly pretty one—“a whole parcel of people came by the boat—workmen and servants, and most splendid furniture, carpets, and pictures, and cabinets, and all sorts of elegant things—just for those two men—for there is a young man, too—Jack is his name.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Temple, meditatively, as she still clicked her knitting-needles together with a pleasant musical sound, “the boy must be about twenty-two. George Throckmorton I well remember was married at twenty-one to a pretty slip of a girl, so I’ve heard, who lived a very little while. He can’t be more than forty-four now. He is the last man I ever supposed would ever turn traitor. He was the finest lad—I remember him so well when he was a handsome black-eyed boy; and when we were first married—don’t you recollect, my dear?”

General Temple rose gallantly, and, taking Mrs. Temple’s hand in his, kissed it.

“Can you ask me, my love, if I remember anything connected with that most interesting period of my life?” he asked.

Neither the handsome Judith nor little Jacqueline were at all discomposed by this elderly love-making, to which they were perfectly accustomed. A slight blush came into Mrs. Temple’s refined, middle-aged face. It was worth while to coddle a man, and take all the labor of thinking and acting off his shoulders, for the sake of this delightful sentiment. Like his courage, General Temple’s sentiment was high-flown but genuine.

“I was about to say,” resumed Mrs. Temple, when the general had returned to his chair, “that when I came to Barn Elms a bride, George Throckmorton was much here. You did not notice him, my love, as I did—but I felt sorry for the boy; old George Throckmorton certainly was a most godless person. The boy’s life would have been quite wretched, I think, in spite of his grandfather’s liberality to him, but for the few people in the neighborhood like Kitty Sherrard and myself, who tried to comfort him. He would come over in the morning and stay all day, following me about the house and garden, trying to amuse Beverley, who was a mere baby.”

Mrs. Temple never spoke the name of her dead son without a strange little pause before it.

“And, my dear,” answered the general, making another feeble effort, “can you not now embrace the scriptural injunction?”

“The Scripture says,” responded sternly this otherwise gentle and Christian soul, “that there is a time to love and a time to hate.”

All this time, Judith, the young widow, had not said a word. She was slight and girlish-looking. Her straight dark brows were drawn with a single line, and in her eyes were gleams of mirth, of intelligence, of a love of life and its pleasures, that habitual restraint could not wholly subdue. When she rose, or when she sat down, or when she walked about, or when she arched her white neck, there was a singular grace, of which she was totally unconscious. Something about her suggested both love and modesty. But Fate, that had used her as if she were a creature without a soul, had married her to Beverley Temple—and within two months she was a widow. The shock, the horror of it, the willingness to idealize the dead man, had made her quietly assume the part of one who is done with this world. And Nature struggles vainly with Fate. Judith, in her black gown, and a widow’s cap over her chestnut hair, with her pretty air of wisdom and experience, fancied she had sounded the whole gamut of human love, grief, loss, and joy. Neither Millenbeck, nor anything but Beverley’s child and his father and mother and sister, mattered anything to her, she thought.

Jacqueline, however, looked rebellious, but said nothing. Like her father, she was under the rule of this soft-voiced mother. But it was certainly very hard, thought Jacqueline, bitterly, that with Millenbeck beautifully fitted up, with a delightful young man like Jack Throckmorton—for Jacqueline had already endowed him with all the graces and virtues—and a not old man, a soldier too, should be right at their doors, and she never to have a glimpse of Millenbeck, nor a chance for walks and drives with them. Jacqueline sighed profoundly, and looked despairingly at Judith, who was the stay, the prop, the comforter of this undisciplined young creature.