Читать книгу The Road to Paris - Robert Neilson Stephens - Страница 6

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In the Jacobite army that followed Prince Charlie and shared defeat with him at Culloden in 1746, were some who escaped hanging at Carlisle or elsewhere by fleeing to Scottish ports and obtaining passage over the water. A few, like the Young Chevalier himself, fled to the continent of Europe; but some crossed the ocean and made new lives for themselves in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other provinces. Two of these refugees, tarrying not in the thickly settled strip of country along the Atlantic coast, but pushing at once to the backwoods of Pennsylvania, were Hugh Mercer, the young surgeon destined to die gloriously as an American general thirty years later, and Alexander Wetheral, one of the few Englishmen who had rallied to the Stuart standard at its last unfurling. From Philadelphia, where they disembarked from the vessel that had brought them from Leith, straight westward through Lancaster and across the Susquehanna, the two young men made a journey which, thanks to the privations they had to endure, was a good first lesson in the school of wilderness life.

They arrived one evening at the wigwams of a Shawnee village on the verge of a beaver pond, and were received in so friendly a manner by the Indians that Wetheral decided to live for a time among them. Mercer, joined by some other enterprising newcomers from the old country, went farther westward; but the two friends were destined to meet often again. Wetheral built himself a hut near the Indian village and indulged to the full his love of hunting, fishing, and roaming the silent forest. Often he saw other white men, for already the Scotch and Irish and English had begun to build their cabins and to clear small fields on both sides of the Susquehanna, across which river there were ferries at a few infantile settlements. By 1750 so many other English and Scotch, some of the men having their wives with them, had put up log cabins near Wetheral's, and had cleared ground for farming all around, that the settlement merited a name, and took that of Carlisle. The Indians, succumbing to the inevitable, betook themselves elsewhere.

Wetheral, with all his love for the free life of the woods, welcomed civilization, for he was of gentle birth and of what passed in those days as good education, and had a taste for learning. His life was now more diversified. He not only hunted and fished, but also cultivated a few acres, and during a part of each year he did the duties of schoolmaster to the settlement,—for the Scotch-Irish, like the Puritans of New England, went in for book-learning. He sent the skins obtained by him in the chase to Philadelphia by pack-horse, and sometimes, for the sake of variety, accompanied them, passing, on the way, through the belt of country industriously tilled by the growing German Protestant population, and through that occupied by Quakers and other English, in the immediate vicinity of Philadelphia. In his own neighborhood the people of the best manners and information were Presbyterians, and in course of time he came to count himself as one of them, less from religious ideas than from a natural wish to associate himself with the respectable and lettered element; for, much as he loved the roaming life of the hunter, he was repelled by the coarseness and violence and ill living of a certain class of nomadic frontiersmen who doubtless had good reason to keep their distance from politer communities.

He was one of the Pennsylvanians who went as pioneers in Braddock's fatal expedition, and on that he saw Colonel Washington. He marched with his old friend, Hugh Mercer, in the battalion of three hundred men under Col. John Armstrong, of Carlisle, in 1756, from Fort Shirley to the Indian town of Kittanning, which the troops destroyed after killing most of its hostile inhabitants. During a part of that year and of the next, he served in the provincial garrison at Fort Augusta, far north from Carlisle, and east of the Susquehanna.

Returning home when his period of enlistment was up, he stopped at the large house of a prosperous English settler possessing part of a fine island in the Susquehanna, fell in love with one of the settler's daughters, prolonged his visit two weeks, proposed marriage to the daughter, was accepted, spoke to her father, was by him violently rejected and subsequently ejected, ran away with the girl, or rather paddled away, for the means of locomotion in this elopement was an Indian canoe, and was married in the settlement of Paxton, near John Harris's ferry, by the Reverend John Elder.

As the young wife, who was kind of heart and wise of head, desired to be near the roof whence she had fled, that a reconciliation might be the more easily attempted, Wetheral traded off his field and cabin at Carlisle, returned northward across the Kitocktinning mountains to the neighborhood of his wife's former home, built a log house of two rooms and a loft, near the left bank of the Juniata, a few miles above that river's junction with the Susquehanna, and there, in the month of April, 1758, he became the father of Richard Wetheral, the hero of this book.

The child's arrival was aided by his maternal grandmother, who had already melted towards the young couple, although her husband still held out against them. The surgeon whom Mr. Wetheral had summoned from Fort Hunter, which the settlers were garrisoning because of signs of an Indian outbreak, arrived too late to do more than pronounce the boy a healthy specimen and predict the speedy recovery of the mother, who was indeed of sturdy stock. The household whose different members the observant infant soon began to discriminate consisted of the father, whose dauntless and hearty character has already been slightly indicated; the mother, who was comely and strong in nature as in face and form; a younger sister of the mother's, and a raw but ready youth hired by the father to aid in working the little rude farm and in protecting the family from any of the now rampant Indians who might threaten it. For Mr. Wetheral's house was so near Fort Hunter that he chose to stay and occupy it rather than to take refuge within the stockade of the fort, which latter course was followed by many settlers of the near-by valleys when the Indian alarm came in the month of our hero's birth.

But the Wetherals were not molested by any of the Indians that roamed the woods in small parties, in quest of the scalps of palefaces, during the spring and summer of 1758. Often, though, there came news by horse and canoe, and carried from settlement to settlement, from farm-cabin to farm-cabin, of frequent depredations: how in York County Robert Buck was killed and scalped at Jamieson's house and all the rest of its dwellers were carried away; how, near at home, in Sherman's Valley, a woman was horribly killed and scalped; how, in July, Captain Craig, riding about seven miles from Harris's Ferry, was suddenly struck in the face by a tomahawk thrown from ambush, put spurs to his horse and fled from his yelling savage assailants, escaping by sheer speed of his animal, the blood flowing from the huge gash cut in his cheek by the well-aimed hatchet; how fared the soldiers who set off in search and pursuit of the red-faced enemy, and who were none other than the hardiest of the settlers themselves, accustomed to shoot Indians or bear, to burn out rattlesnake nests, or to farm the ill-cleared land, as occasion might require.

Thus the talk to which Dick Wetheral (for it was early settled that he should be called Richard, a favorite name in his mother's family) became accustomed, as soon as he knew what any talk meant, was of frightful perils and daring achievements. Such talk continued throughout all his childhood, though after 1758 the Indians were peaceful towards central Pennsylvania until 1763.

The boy early showed an adventurous disposition. His first explorations, conducted on all-fours, were confined to the two rooms on the ground floor of the house, but at that stage of his career a journey to the end of the kitchen from the extremity of the other apartment, which served as parlor and principal bedroom, was one of length and incident. New territory was opened to him to roam, on that eventful day when his aunt carried him up the ladder to the loft, which was divided by a partition into two rude sleeping-chambers, and in which he derived as great joy from being set at large as Alexander would have drawn from the discovery of a new world to conquer.

When the boy was in his second year, his world underwent a vast enlargement. This came about through his father's building a house to which the original log cabin of his birth became merely the rear wing. The new structure, made of logs covered with rough-sawn planks, destined to be annually whitewashed, provided two rooms on the ground floor, and two bed-chambers overhead. One of these lower rooms communicated by a door with the original log building, of which the ground floor was transformed, by the removal of the partition, into one large kitchen. From the new parlor a flight of stairs led to the room above, whence a low door and a few descending steps gave entrance to the old loft, so that the young explorer, by dint of long exertion, could reach the second story unaided. And now his days were full of experiences. From his favorite spot near the kitchen fireplace, to the farthest corner of the spare bedroom down-stairs, by way of the parlor (which was invariably called "the room"), was a trip sufficient for ordinary days. But in times of extraordinary energy and ambition, the crawling Dick would make the grand tour up the stairs and through the four second-story apartments, which seemed countless in number, and each a whole province in itself. So long ago was yesterday from to-day, at that time of his life, that this immense journey was full of novelty to him at each repetition, the adventures of one journey having been forgotten before another could be undertaken. And these adventures were as numerous as befell Christian in his Pilgrim's Progress. There were dark corners, queer-looking articles of furniture seemingly with life and expression, shadows of strange shapes, that made the young traveller pause and hold his breath and half turn back, until reassured by the sound of his aunt's voice calling to the chickens in the kitchen yard, his father or the hired man sharpening his sickle or calling to the plow-horse in the field beyond, or—most welcome and reassuring of all—his mother singing at her work in the rooms below.

What a great evening was that when the little indoor explorer found a fellow traveller! Dick was already in bed and asleep, having retired somewhat against his will, as he would have preferred to remain up until his father's return from a horseback journey on business down the river. When he was awakened by his mother, on whose face he saw a smile that promised something pleasant, he blinked once or twice in the candle-light, and looked eagerly around. He saw his father standing near his mother, and between the two a great black head whose long jaws were open in a kind of merry grin of good-fellowship, and from between whose white teeth protruded a red tongue that evinced an impulse to meet the wondering Dickie's face half way. The boy gazed for a moment, then threw out his hands towards the beaming face of the newcomer, and screamed with gleeful laughter. A moment later the dog was licking the youngster's face, while Dick, still laughing, was burying his fingers in the animal's shaggy black coat. Thereafter, the boy Dick was attended on all his expeditions by the dog Rover, and never were two more devoted comrades. The dog was a mixture of Scotch collie and black spaniel, and, though in size between those two breeds, looked a huge animal from the view-point of two years. If Dick required less than the usual grown-up assistance in learning to walk, it was because Rover was of just the size to serve as a support.

Dick now began to make excursions outdoors. Of course he had already spent much time in the open air, but always under the eye of some member of the household. His previous travels from the house had, by this guardianship, been robbed of the zest of adventure. The first trips abroad that he made independently were clandestine. Thus, one afternoon when the men were in the fields, and his aunt was busy tracing figures in the fresh sand that had been laid on the parlor floor, he availed himself of his mother's preoccupation over her spinning-wheel to sally forth from the kitchen door with no other company than Rover. His mother, humming a tune while she span, did not at first notice the silence in that part of the kitchen where Dick's presence was usually manifest to the ear. At last, the bark of Rover, coming with a note of alarm from a distance of several rods beyond the kitchen door, roused her to a sense of the boy's absence. With wildly beating heart she ran out, and towards the sound, which came from beyond the fruit-trees and wild grapevines that bounded the kitchen yard. She soon saw that Rover's call for help had reason. Little Dick was leaning over the edge of a deep spring, staring with amusement at his own image in the clear shaded water. Who knows but the nymphs of the spring would have drawn him in, as Hylas was drawn, had not the mother arrived at that moment, for the boy was reaching out to grasp the face in the water when she caught him by the waist?

Another time, it was not the warning bark of Rover, but the merest accident, that rescued the boy from a situation as perilous. His aunt, going into the little barn near the house, to look for eggs, saw him sitting directly under one of the plow-horses in a stall, watching with interest the movements of the animal's fore-feet, as they regularly pawed the ground. On being taken back to the house, little Dick was made to understand that solitary expeditions were forbidden, and in so sharp a manner that thereafter he rarely violated orders. He was carefully watched against the recurrence of temptation to travel. A constant source of terror to the mother, on Dick's account, was the nearness of the river, whose bed lay a few rods to the south, not far from the foot of a steep bank which fell from the piece of ground on which the house stood. This piece of ground was surrounded by a rude fence, and the boy spent many a longing quarter of an hour in looking through the rails at the river that flowed gently, with constant murmur, below. Between the river and the bank ran what some called a road, what may have formerly been an Indian trail, and what in Dick's time was really but a rough path for horses. It led from the farms farther back up the river, behind the azure mountains at the west, down to the more thickly settled country beyond the mountains at the east, and afar it joined the road to Lancaster and Philadelphia.

The boy's parents early taught him his letters, for the elder Wetheral had brought a few books with his meagre baggage from the old country, and had since acquired, from some of the settlers of the best class, a few more, two by dying bequest, two by gift, and four or five by purchase and trade. With the contents of some of these, Dick first became acquainted through his father's reading aloud on Sundays and rainy days, before the kitchen fire. One of these was Capt. John Smith's account of his marvellous achievements. Strangely enough, or rather naturally enough, the parts of this book that most interested Dick were not where Smith told of his adventures with Indians in America, but where he related his doings in Europe; for Indians and primitive surroundings were familiar matters to Dick, whereas accounts of the old world had for him all that charm which a boy reared in the midst of civilization finds in pictures of wilderness life. A few of the books were illustrated with prints, which the boy studied by the hour. One of these books was an odd volume of a history of the world, and contained mainly that part which related to France. It had crude engravings of two or three palaces, a few kings, three or four queens, a Catholic killing a Huguenot in front of the Church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, a royal hunt, and the Pont Neuf, backed by the towers of Notre Dame and flanked by buildings along the Seine. These rough pictures, thanks to some mysterious cause or other, exercised on little Dick a potent fascination.

"Who is that?" he asked his mother one day, pointing to a wood-cut that purported to portray a human being, as he lay sprawling on the floor, his favorite book opened out before him.

"That is a king," replied his mother, looking down from her sewing. The mother and the boy were alone in the kitchen.

"King David?"

"No; a king of France."

"King George?"

"No; King George is king of England, where your father came from, and your grandfather, and of America, where we are. France is another country."

"Where does this king live?" pointing to the wood-cut.

"He is dead now. He died long ago. He lived in a city called Paris, in the country called France."

"Is that a house?" The boy had turned to a supposed picture of the Louvre.

"Yes, a great, big house, a palace they call it, because it belongs to the king."

"Did it belong to that king?"

"Yes, I think so. It is in the city where I told you that king lived, Paris."

"Is this house in that city, too?" He indicated a building in the picture that showed the Pont Neuf.

"Yes." The mother laid down her sewing and stooped beside the boy. "And so is this house in Paris. And this. And this, too. All these houses are in Paris."

"Do all these people live there, the pretty ladies and soldiers?"

"They all did, I suppose."

"How many houses are there in Paris?"

"Oh, a great many thousand."

"More than there are in Carlisle?"

"Oh, yes! A hundred times more."

"Where is Paris?"

"Oh, very, very far away."

"Which way?"

"Why, that way, I think." She pointed towards the east. "Your father can tell you exactly, when he comes in."

"How far away is it? As far as Carlisle?"

"Much farther than that. Your father can tell you."

"As far as Lancaster?"

"Oh, farther. Farther than Philadelphia. Away across land and water."

"As far away as the farthest mountains yonder, the blue ones against the sky?" He had risen from the floor, and he pointed eastward through the open kitchen doorway.

"Oh, yes. If you went clear across those mountains, you wouldn't be near Paris yet."

"But if I went on and on, far enough, I'd get to Paris at last, wouldn't I?"

"Yes, at last," said the mother, smiling, and drawing the boy to her and kissing him, impelled by the mere thought of the separation his query suggested to the fancy.

When she returned to her sewing, he continued looking for awhile towards the distant east, then resumed his study of the pictures. At supper that evening he made his father laugh by asking which way a body should go, to get to Paris. His mother explained how his curiosity had been aroused. His father, laughing again, and winking at the mother, said:

"Why, boy, a body would have to start by the road that goes down the river to your grandfather's, that's certain. And if a body travelled long enough, and never lost his way, yes, he would surely get to Paris at the end."

"Would he be very tired when he got there?"

"Very tired, indeed, if he didn't rest several times on the way," replied Wetheral, Senior, keeping up the joke.

The next afternoon Dick's mother, having baked some cakes of a kind that she knew her husband liked hot, sent some of them by the boy to the two men in the field, which was not far from the house but was partly hidden therefrom by the barn and out-buildings and some fruit-trees. Dick, being now four years old, had often gone to the fields with his aunt or mother when water or food had been carried out to the men at work, and as the way did not lie near the river, there seemed no risk in sending him now alone. When, after due time, he did not return to the house, the two women supposed the men had kept him with them in the field. But this was not the case. Mr. Wetheral and the hired man, having seen little Dick tripping back towards the house, ate the cakes in the shade of a tree and returned with sickles to their attack on the wheat, with no thought of the boy but that he was now safe home. When they returned in the evening for supper, their surprise in not finding him there was reciprocated by that of the women at his not coming back with the men. The dog, which had accompanied him to the field and from it, also was missing. The men immediately started in search.

The boy by this time was some distance away. He had crawled through the fence, near the barn, descended the declivity to the horse-path by the river, turned his face eastward, and trudged resolutely on with Rover at his heels. It was some time before he would admit to himself that he was becoming a little tired, and that the stones and twigs in the way were bruising his bare feet perceptibly. At last he conceded himself a short rest, and, following Rover's example, leaned over where the bank was low and the river shallow, and drank. He was soon up again and going forward, forgetful of his former fatigue, and heedless that the sun behind him was nearing the horizon. So long a time is a day to a child! In the afternoon the doings of the morning are of the dim past, or are forgotten, while the evening is yet far away, and countless things may be done before the night comes. He could surely reach those farthest blue mountains in an hour or so, and a little walking thereafter must bring him to this strange, wonderful Paris, so entirely different from his own home and from his grandfather's place down the river. He would have to pass his grandfather's place, by the way, on his walk, and it never occurred to him how long a time it would take him to reach merely his grandfather's, so vague was his recollection of his former visits there. He could see Paris, the king and the palaces and the soldiers and the beautiful ladies and the great bridge, and return home by supper-time; and he would have so many things to tell that his father and mother would make his punishment a light one, or might even forget to punish him at all.

He came to a place where the path divided. After a moment's hesitation, he took the wider branch, which carried him from the riverside, straight into the unbroken woods. Presently this path ended abruptly, so that there was nothing before him but thick undergrowth. Rather than retrace his steps to reach the branch that he had rejected, which must be the one he ought to have taken, he started to reach it directly through the woods, moving towards where he thought it should be. He made his way cautiously, lest he might tread on some rattlesnake or other serpent, which could not be as easily seen in the dimness of the forest as in the path by the river. That dimness increased apace, and still he had not found the path. At last the boy paused, perplexed and a little appalled. The chill of evening came on. He was very tired now. He began to think of Indians, bears, and other savage things with whose existence in the neighborhood he was well acquainted, and of monsters of which he had heard from his parents, such as giants, lions, and other horrible things. Wherever his view lost itself in the dark arches of the trees, he imagined mysterious and frightful creatures were concealed, ready to appear at any moment. He summoned heart, and trudged on again. Finally it became so dark that he feared to proceed lest he might, at any step, land in a nest of snakes. Rover stopped close beside him, and looked in his face, as if for counsel. He put his arm around the dog's neck, and the two together sank down on some mossy turf at the foot of a tree. Rover curled up with his chin on the boy's shoulder, and Dick lay with his head on the dog's shaggy side. Dick would have cried, had his impulse ruled, but he was already too proud to make such an exhibition of weakness in the presence of Rover. Thus they lay while night fell. Now and then Rover raised his head a little and listened. The boy was too much overcome by his situation to think of what might ultimately befall. He could only wish, with an intensity as keen as could be endured, that he was home by his mother's side in the candle-lit kitchen, and nestle closer to the dog. The insects of the forest kept up an ear-piercing chorus of chirps, whirrs, and calls. At last reality melted imperceptibly into dreams, in which the boy was again toiling forward on the road to Paris. A terrible noise broke in upon his dream. Starting up, he found it was only the barking of Rover, a bark of eagerness and joy rather than of alarm or threat. A faint light approached slowly through the trees. It resolved itself at last into a lantern, and the huge dark object beside it became a man, who called out, as he came rapidly nearer:

"Dick, lad, are you there with the dog?"

A minute later the boy was in the arms of his father, who was striding back towards the path, while Rover ran yelping gleefully before and behind and on every side.

How short was the journey back to the house, compared with that which Dick had made from it in the afternoon! Almost before Dick had finished his explanation to his father, in somewhat incoherent speeches and a rather unsteady voice, they beheld the kitchen's open door, in which the mother stood waiting. She caught the boy in her arms, covered his face with kisses and tears, and declared he should never go out of her sight again.

"But I'll go some day, when I'm grown up," said little Dick, as he sat filling himself with supper a half-hour later. "I didn't know the road to Paris was so long."

And he didn't know his road to Paris should one day be taken with no thought of its leading him there, and how very roundabout that road should be.