you see it is one of the regulations and I subscribed them, and, of course,
I could not break my word. Nick, there, will drink my share, however,
when you are through; he isn't held up to quite such high accountability.'
And sure enough, Nick drained off a glass and made a speech
which got him a
handful of quarters. Well, of course, the old Captain
owned not only the car, but all in it by this time, and we spent
one of the jolliest evenings you ever saw. The glum fellow
who had insisted on his rights at Washington made a little speech,
and paid the Captain one of the prettiest compliments I ever heard.
He said he had discovered that the Captain had given him his own lower berth
after he had been so rude to him, and that instead of
taking his upper berth
as he had
supposed he would have done, he had given that to another person
and had sat up himself all night. That was I. The old fellow
had given the grumbler his `lower' in the smoking-room, and had given me
his `upper'. The fellow made him a very handsome
apology before us all,
and the Captain had his own berth that night, you may believe.
"Well, we were all on the `qui vive' to see the Captain's wife
when we got to New Orleans. The Captain had told us that she always
came down to the station to meet him; so we were all on the
lookout for her.
He told me the first thing that he did was to kiss her, and then he went
and filed his reports, and then they went home together,
`And if you'll come and dine with me,' he said to me, `I'll give you
the best dinner you ever had -- real old Virginia cooking;
Nick's wife is our only servant, and she is an excellent cook.'
I promised him to go one day, though I could not go the first day.
Well, the meeting between the old fellow and his wife was worth the trip
to New Orleans to see. I had formed a picture in my mind
of a queenly looking woman, a Southern
matron -- you know how you do?
And when we drew into the station I looked around for her.
As I did not see her, I watched the Captain. He got off,
and I missed him in the crowd. Presently, though, I saw him and I asked him,
`Captain, is she here?' `Yes, sir, she is, she never misses;
that's the sort of a wife to have, sir; come here and let me introduce you.'
He pulled me up and introduced me to a sweet little old lady, in an old,
threadbare dress and wrap, and a little, faded
bonnet, whom I had seen
as we came up, watching
eagerly for someone, but whom I had not thought of
as being possibly the Captain's grand-dame. The Captain's manner, however,
was beautiful. `My dear, this is my friend, Mr. Lesponts,
and he has promised to come and dine with us,' he said, with the air
of a lord, and then he leaned over and whispered something to her.
`Why, she's coming to dine with us to-day,' she said with a very
cheery laugh;
and then she turned and gave me a look that swept me from top to toe,
as if she were weighing me to see if I'd do. I seemed to pass,
for she came forward and greeted me with a
charming cordiality,
and invited me to dine with them,
saying that her husband had told her
I knew Miss So-and-So, and she was coming that day, and if I had
no other
engagement they would be very glad if I would come that day, too.
Then she turned to the Captain and said, `I saved Christmas dinner for you;
for when you didn't come I knew the
calendar and all the rest of the world
were wrong; so to-day is our Christmas.'
-- "Well, that's all," said Lesponts; "I did not mean to talk so much,
but the old Captain is such a
character, I wish you could know him.
You'd better believe I went, and I never had a nicer time.
They were just as poor as they could be, in one way, but in another
they were rich. He had a sweet little home in their three rooms.
I found that my friend always dined with them one day in the Christmas-week,
and I happened to hit that day." He leaned back.
"That was the
beginning of my good fortune," he said, slowly,
and then stopped. Most of the party knew Lesponts's
charming wife,
so no further
explanation was needed. One of them said
presently, however,
"Lesponts, why didn't you fellows get him some better place?"
"He was offered a place," said Lesponts. "The fellow who had made the row
about the lower berth turned out to be a great friend of the head
of the Pullman Company, and he got him the offer of a place
at three times the salary he got, but after
consideration, he declined it.
He would have had to come North, and he said that he could not do that:
his wife's health was not very
robust and he did not know how she could stand
the cold
climate; then, she had made her friends, and she was too old
to try to make a new set; and finally, their little girl was buried there,
and they did not want to leave her; so he declined. When she died, he said,
or
whichever one of them died first, the other would come back home
to the old place in Virginia, and bring the other two with him,
so they could all be at home together again. Meantime,
they were very comfortable and well satisfied."
There was a pause after Lesponts ended, and then one of the fellows
rang the bell and said, "Let's drink the old Captain's health,"
which was
unanimously agreed to. Newton walked over to a table
and wrote a note, and then slipped out of the club; and when next day
I inquired after him of the boy at the door, he said he had left word
to tell anyone who asked for him, that he would not be back
till after Christmas; that he had gone home to Virginia.
Several of the other fellows went off home too, myself among them,
and I was glad I did, for I heard one of the men say he never knew the club
so deserted as it was that Christmas-day.
Little Darby
I
The County had been settled as a "
frontier" in early
colonial days,
and when it ceased to be
frontier, settlement had taken a jump beyond it,
and in a certain sense over it, to the richer lands of the Piedmont. When,
later on, steam came, the railway simply cut across it at its narrowest part,
and then skirted along just inside its border on the bank of the little river
which bounded it on the north, as if it intentionally left it to one side.
Thus, modern progress had not greatly interfered with it
either for good or bad, and its development was entirely natural.
It was divided into "neighborhoods", a name in itself implying something
both of its age and
origin; for the population was old,
and the customs of life and speech were old likewise.
This
chronicle, however, is not of the "neighborhoods", for they were known,
or may be known by any who will take the trouble to
plungeboldly in
and throw themselves on the
hospitality of any of the dwellers therein.
It is rather of the unknown tract, which lay vague and undefined in between
the several neighborhoods of the upper end. The history of the former
is known both in peace and in war: in the pleasant homesteads which lie
on the hills above the little rivers which make down through the county
to join the great river below, and in the long list of those who fell
in battle, and whose names are recorded on the slabs set up by their comrades
on the walls of the old Court House. The history of the latter, however,
is unrecorded. The lands were in the main very poor and grown up in pine,
or else, where the head-waters of a little
stream made down
in a number of "branches", were swampy and malarial. Possibly it was
this
poverty of the soil or unwholesomeness of their location,
which more than anything else kept the people of this district
somewhat
distinct from others around them, however poor they might be.
They dwelt in their little cabins among their pines,
or down on the edges of the swampy district,
distinct both from
the gentlemen on their old plantations and from the
sturdy farmer-folk
who owned the smaller places. What title they had to their lands
originally,
or how they traced it back, or where they had come from, no one knew.
They had been there from time
immemorial, as long or longer, if anything,
than the owners of the plantations about them; and
insignificant as they were,
they were not the kind to attempt to question, even had anyone been inclined
to do so, which no one was.
They had the names of the old English
gentry, and were a clean-limbed,
blond, blue-eyed people.
When they were growing to middle age, their life told on them
and made them weather-beaten, and not infrequently hard-visaged;
but when they were young there were often among them straight,
supple young fellows with clear-cut features, and lithe,
willowy-looking girls, with pink faces and blue, or brown, or hazel eyes,
and a mien which one might have expected to find in a hall
rather than in a cabin.
Darby Stanley and Cove Mills (short for Coverley) were the leaders
of the rival factions of the district. They lived as their fathers had lived
before them, on opposite sides of the little
stream, the branches of which
crept through the alder and gum thickets between them, and contributed
to make the district almost as impenetrable to the uninitiated
as a mountain fastness. The long log-cabin of the Cove-Millses,
where room had been added to room in a straight line, until it looked
like the side of a log fort, peeped from its pines across at the clearing
where the hardly more pretentious home of Darby Stanley
was set back amid a little
orchard of
ragged peach-trees,
and half
hidden under a great wistaria vine. But though the two places
lay within rifle shot of each other, they were almost as completely divided
as if the big river below had rolled between them. Since the great fight
between old Darby and Cove Mills over Henry Clay, there had
rarely been
an
election in which some members of the two families had not had a "clinch".
They had to be thrown together sometimes "at meeting", and their children
now and then met down on the river
fishing, or at "the washing hole",
as the deep place in the little
stream below where the branches ran together
was called; but they held themselves as much aloof from each other
as their higher neighbors, the Hampdens and the Douwills,
did on their plantations. The children, of course, would "run together",
nor did the parents take steps to prevent them, sure that they would,
as they grew up, take their own sides as naturally as they themselves
had done in their day. Meantime "children were children",
and they need not be worried with things like
grown-up folk.
When Aaron Hall died and left his little farm and all his small belongings
to
educate free the children of his poor neighbors, the farmers about
availed themselves of his benefaction, and the children for six miles around
used to attend the little school which was started in the large
hewn-log school-house on the
roadside known as "Hall's Free School".
Few people knew the plain,
homely, hard-working man, or
wholly understood him.
Some thought him stingy, some weak-minded, some only queer, and at first
his benefaction was hardly comprehended; but in time quite a little oasis
began about the little
fountain, which the poor farmer's bequest had opened
under the big oaks by the
wayside, and gradually its borders extended,
until finally it penetrated as far as the district, and Cove Mills's children
appeared one morning at the door of the little school-house,
and, with sheepish faces and timid voices, informed the teacher
that their father had sent them to school.
At first there was some
debate over at Darby Stanley's place,
whether they should show their
contempt for the new
departure of the Millses,
by
standing out against them, or should follow their example. It was hard
for a Stanley to have to follow a Mills in anything. So they stood out
for a year. As it seemed, however, that the Millses were getting something
to which the Stanleys were as much entitled as they, one morning
little Darby Stanley walked in at the door, and without
taking his hat off,
announced that he had come to go to school. He was about fifteen at the time,
but he must have been nearly six feet (his sobriquet being
wholly due
to the fact that Big Darby was older, not taller), and though he was spare,
there was something about his face as he stood in the open door,
or his eye as it rested defiantly on the teacher's face,
which prevented more than a general buzz of surprise.
"Take off your hat," said the teacher, and he took it off slowly.
"I suppose you can read?" was the first question.
"No."
A snicker ran round the room, and little Darby's brow clouded.
As he not only could not read, but could not even spell,
and in fact did not know his letters, he was put into the
alphabet class,
the class of the smallest children in the school.
Little Darby walked over to the corner indicated with his head up,
his hands in his pockets, and a roll in his gait full of defiance,
and took his seat on the end of the bench and looked straight before him.
He could hear the titter around him, and a lowering look came into
his blue eyes. He glanced sideways down the bench opposite.
It happened that the next seat to his was that of Vashti Mills,
who was at that time just nine. She was not laughing,
but was looking at Darby
earnestly, and as he caught her eye
she nodded to him, "Good-mornin'." It was the first greeting
the boy had received, and though he returned it
sullenly, it warmed him,
and the cloud passed from his brow and
presently he looked at her again.