"Innocent or guilty," said Bradley Gaither, "he has been sent to the penitentiary."
Miss Jane gave a quick glance at Rose, and was just in time to catch her as she fell from her chair.
"Ah, poor child!" cried Miss Jane, "her heart is broke!"
"Rose!--Daughter!--Darling!" exclaimed Bradley Gaither, dropping on his knees beside her. "Oh, what is this? What have I done? Speak to her, Miss Inchly! What shall I do?" He was pale as death, and his features worked convulsively.
"Do nothin", Mr. Gaither. You"ve done more "n you can undo a"ready.
You"ve took and give that poor boy over for to be persecuted, Mr.
Gaither, and now the innocent suffers and the wicked goes scotch-free."
Bradley Gaither covered his face with his hands and groaned aloud.
"What have I done? What have I done?" he cried.
Miss Jane supported the girl in her strong arms with a grim display of affection, but her att.i.tude towards Bradley Gaither was uncompromising.
"Don"t alarm yourself, Mr. Gaither," she said; "this poor child"ll come too, quick enough. Folks don"t fling off the"r misery this easy!"
Rose revived after a while, but she seemed to have no desire to talk to her father. After a copious use of camphor, Miss Jane fixed Rose comfortably on the lounge, and the girl lay there and gazed at the ceiling, the picture of wide-eyed despair. Bradley Gaither paced the room like one distracted. His sighs were heart-rending. When Miss Jane succeeded in getting him out of the room, he paced up and down the entry, moving his lips and groaning as though in great mental agony.
Failing to understand what emotions he was at the mercy of, Miss Jane failed to sympathise with him. To her mind his display of grief bore no sort of proportion to the cause, and she had a woman"s contempt for any manifestation of weakness in man, even the weakness of grief.
"I"ll pray to the Lord to forgive me!" he cried out piteously.
"That"s right," exclaimed Miss Jane, in her decisive way. "But if the grace of pra"r was in the hinges of the knee, I know a heap of folks that"d be easy in the mind."
Every word she spoke cut like a knife, but not until long after did Miss Inchly realise the fact. When she did realise it, it is to be feared she hugged the remembrance of it to her bosom with a sort of grim thankfulness that Providence had so happily fashioned her words and directed her tongue.
As time pa.s.sed on, the Pinetuckians became aware that a great change had come over both Bradley Gaither and his daughter. The father grew old before his time, and fell into a decline, as his neighbours expressed it. The daughter grew more beautiful, but it was beauty of a kind that belonged to devoutness; so that in contemplating it the minds of men were led in the direction of mercy and charity and all manner of good deeds.
One night, a year or more after the trial and sentence of Jack Carew, a negro on horseback rode to Squire Inchly"s door, and said that his master, Bradley Gaither, desired the Squire to come to him at once. The worthy magistrate was prompt to obey the summons; and when he arrived at the Gaither place, he found that the preacher and other neighbours had also been summoned. Bradley Gaither lay upon his bed, surrounded by these, and it was plain to see that his sands of life had about run out. He presented a spectacle of dissolution calculated to arouse the sympathies of those who stood around his bed.
When Squire Inchly had arrived, Bradley Gaither lay a little while with his eyes closed as in a dream. Then he motioned to his daughter, who drew from beneath his pillow a few sheets of letter-paper stained and blotted with ink. This she handed to the minister.
"Read it aloud," said Bradley Gaither. The minister, with some degree of embarra.s.sment, adjusted his spectacles and read:--
"With this paper will be found my last will and testament. I am unhappy, but I should be less miserable if I knew I could put such meaning in these lines as no man could misunderstand. I have sinned against an innocent man, I have sinned against my dear daughter, I have sinned against myself, I have sinned against G.o.d. I have been guilty of a great wrong, and though I cannot forgive myself, yet I hope to be forgiven. John Carew, who is now in prison, is an innocent man. I coveted his land. In my worldly-mindedness I set my heart upon his possessions. I offered him double their value. I thought he treated me with contempt, and then I hit upon a plan to drive him out. I carried the cotton to his barn and hid it. He knew no more about it than any honest man. But as G.o.d is my judge, I did not foresee the end. I thought he would compromise and sell the land and go away. At the last the law took the matter out of my hands. John Carew believes that he is suffering punishment in place of his father; but William Carew is as honest as his son, and no man could be honester than that. I, Bradley Gaither, being in my right mind and of sound memory, do hereby charge myself with the crime for which John Carew has been adjudged guilty.
Let the disgrace of it be attached to me alone. The sin of it I hope a merciful G.o.d will forgive."
This doc.u.ment was duly signed and witnessed. When the preacher reached the end, he said, "Let us pray;" and while that prayer, as fervent as simplicity could make it, was ascending heavenward, the soul of Bradley Gaither took its flight.
"I glanced at him arter the breath left him," said Squire Inchly, relating the facts to his sister, "and he looked like a man that had shook hisself free from a heap of worriment. I hope he"s at peace. I do, from the bottom of my heart."
The confession was received with great wonder in Pinetucky; but there was not one among the Pinetuckians who did not believe that Bradley Gaither was a better man at bottom than his life had shown him to be, not one, indeed, who did not believe that his grievous errors were among the dispensations which an all-wise Providence employs to chasten the proud and humble the vainglorious.
When Jack Carew returned to his friends, he made his way straight to Squire Inchly"s. He was not much changed, but the sight of him gave Miss Jane the cue for tears. These, however, she dried immediately, and, with a smile that Jack remembered long, motioned towards the little sitting-room.
"Go in there, Jack. A man oughtn"t to grumble at waitin" for his dinner, if he knows he"ll git pie."
In the little sitting-room Rose Gaither was waiting for him.
BLUE DAVE
I.
THE atmosphere of mystery that surrounds the Kendrick Place in Putnam County is illusive, of course; but the illusion is perfect. The old house, standing a dozen yards from the roadside, is picturesque with the contrivances of neglect and decay. Through a door hanging loose upon its hinges the pa.s.ser-by may behold the evidences of loneliness and gloom,--the very embodiment of desolation,--a void, a silence, that is almost portentous. The roof, with its crop of quaint gables, in which proportion has been sacrificed to an effort to attain architectural liveliness, is covered with a greenish-grey moss on the north side, and has long been given over to decay on all sides. The cat-squirrels that occasionally scamper across the crumbling shingles have as much as they can do, with all their nimbleness, to find a secure foot-hold. The huge wooden columns that support the double veranda display jagged edges at top and bottom, and no longer make even a pretence of hiding their grim hollowness. The well, hospitably placed within arm"s reach of the highway, for the benefit of the dead and buried congregation that long ago met and worshipped at Bethesda meeting-house, is stripped of windla.s.s, chain, and bucket. All the outhouses have disappeared, if they ever had an existence; and nothing remains to tell the story of a flourishing era, save a fig-tree, which is graciously green and fruitful in season. This fig-tree has grown to an extraordinary height, and covers a large area with its canopy of limbs and leaves, giving a sort of Oriental flavour to the illusion of mystery and antiquity. It is said of this fig-tree that sermons have been preached and marriages solemnised under its wide-spreading branches; and there is a vague tradition to the effect that a duel was once fought in its shadow by some of the hot-bloods. But no harm will come of respectfully but firmly doubting this tradition; for it is a fact, common to both memory and observation, that duels, even in the old days, when each and every one of us was the pink of chivalry and the soul of honour, were much rarer than the talk of them.
Nevertheless, the confession may be made that without such a tradition a fig-tree surrounded by so many evidences of neglect and decay would be a tame affair indeed.
The house, with its double veranda, its tall chimneys, and its curious collection of gables, was built as late as 1836 by young Felix Kendrick, in order, as Grandsir Kendrick declared, to show that "some folks was as good as other folks." Whether Felix succeeded in this or not, it is impossible to gather from either local history or tradition; but there is no doubt that the house attracted attention, for its architectural liveliness has never to this day been duplicated in that region. In those days the Kendrick family was a new one, so to speak, but ambitious. Grandsir Kendrick--a fatal t.i.tle in itself--was a hatter by trade, who had come to Georgia in search of a precarious livelihood.
He obtained permission to build him a little log hut by the side of a running stream; and, for a year or two, people going along the road could hear the snap and tw.a.n.g of his bowstring as he whipped wool or rabbit fur into shape. Some said he was from North Carolina; others said he was from Connecticut; but whether from one State or the other, what should a hatter do away off in the woods in Putnam County?
Grandsir Kendrick, who was shrewd, close-fisted, and industrious, did what any sensible man would have done: he became an overseer. In this business, which required no capital, he developed considerable executive ability. The plantations he had charge of paid large profits to their owners, and he found his good management in demand. He commanded a large salary, and saved money. This money he invested in negroes, buying one at a time and hiring them out. He finally came to be the owner of seven or eight stout field hands; whereupon he bought two hundred acres of choice land, and set himself up as a patriarch.
Grandsir Kendrick kept to his sober ways, continued his good management, and, in the midst of much shabbiness, continued to put aside money in the shape of negroes. He also reared a son, who contrived somehow to have higher notions than his father. These notions of young Felix Kendrick were confirmed and enlarged by his marriage to the daughter of a Methodist circuit-rider. This young lady had been pinched by poverty often enough to know the value of economy, while the position of her father had given her advantages which the most fortunate young ladies of that day might have envied. In short, Mrs.
Felix turned out to be a very superior woman in all respects. She was proud as well as pretty, and managed to hold her own with the element which Grandsir Kendrick sometimes dubiously referred to as "the quality." The fact that Mrs. Felix"s mother was a Barksdale probably had something to do with her energy and tact; but whatever the cause of her popularity may have been, Grandsir Kendrick was very proud of his son"s wife. He had no sympathy with, and no part in, her high notions; but their manifestation afforded him the spectacle of an experience entirely foreign to his own. Here was his son"s wife stepping high, and compelling his son to step high. So far as Grandsir Kendrick was concerned, however, it was merely a spectacle. To the day of his death, he never ceased to higgle over a thrip, and it was his constant boast that in his own experience it had always been convenient to give prudence the upper hand of pride.
In 1850 the house was not showing many signs of decay, but young Mrs.
Felix had become the widow Kendrick, her daughter Kitty bad grown to be a beautiful young woman, and her son Felix was a lad of remarkable promise. The loss of her husband was a great blow to Mrs. Kendrick.
With all her business qualities, her affection for her family and her home was strongly marked, and her husband stood first as the head and centre of each. Felix Kendrick died in the latter part of November 1849, and his widow made him a grave under the shadow of a tree he had planted when a boy, and in full view of her window. The obsequies were very simple. A prayer was said, and a song was sung; that was all. But it was understood that the funeral sermon would be preached at the house by Mrs. Kendrick"s brother, who was on his way home from China, where he had been engaged in converting (to use a neighbourhood phrase) the "squinch-eyed heathen."
The weeks went by, and the missionary brother returned; and one Sunday morning in February it was given out at Bethesda that "on the first Sabbath after the second Tuesday in March, the funeral sermon of Brother Felix Kendrick will be preached at the house by Brother Garwood." On the morning of this particular Sunday, which was selected because it did not conflict with the services of the Bethesda congregation, two neighbours met in the forks of the public road that leads to Rockville. Each had come from a different direction. One was riding and one was walking; and both were past the middle time of life.
"Well met, Brother Roach!" exclaimed the man on horseback.
"You"ve took the words from my mouth, Brother Brannum. I hope you are well. I"m peart myself, but not as peart as I thought I was, bekaze I find that the two or three miles to come is sticking in my craw."
"Ah, when it comes to that, Brother Roach," said the man on horseback, "you and me can be one another"s looking-gla.s.s. Look on me, and you"ll see what time has done for you."
"Not so, Brother Brannum! Not so!" exclaimed the other. "There"s some furrows on your forrud, and a handful of bird-tracks below your eyes that would ill become me; and I"m plumper in the make-up, you"ll allow."
"Yes, yes, Brother Johnny Roach," said Brother Brannum, frowning a little; "but what of that? Death takes no time to feel for wrinkles and furrows, and nuther does plumpness stand in the way. Look at Brother Felix Kendrick,--took off in the very pulse and power of his prime, you may say. Yet, Providence permitting, I am to hark to his funeral to-day."
"Why, so am I,--so am I," exclaimed Brother Roach. "We seem to agree, Brother Brannum, like the jay-bird and the joree,--one in the tree and t"other on the ground."
Brother Brannum"s grim sense of superiority showed itself in his calm smile.
"Yet I"ll not deny," continued Brother Roach, flinging his coat, which he had been carrying on his arm, across his shoulder, "that sech discourses go ag"in the grain It frets me in the mind for to hear what thundering great men folks git to be arter they are dead, though I hope we may both follow suit, Brother Brannum."
"But how, Brother Johnny Roach?"
"Why, by the grace of big discourses, Brother Brannum. There "a many a preacher could close down the Bible on his hankcher and make our very misdeeds smell sweet as innocence. It"s all in the lift of the eyebrow, and the gesticures of the hand. So old Neighbour Harper says, and he"s been a lawyer and a schoolmaster in his day and time.".
"Still," said Brother Brannum, as if acknowledging the arguments, "I think Sister Kendrick is jestified in her desires."
"Oh, yes,--oh, yes!" replied Brother Roach, heartily; "none more so.
Felix Kendrick"s ways is in good shape for some preacher wi" a glib tongue. Felix was a good man; he wanted his just dues, but not if to take them would hurt a man. He was neighbourly; who more so? And, sir, when you got to rastlin" wi" trouble, he"d find you and fetch you out.
I only hope the Chinee preacher"ll be jedgmatical enough for to let us off wi" the simple truth."