They bowed to him ceremoniously, each in his way, with reverence, touching lips to his gla.s.s. As they parted, one for a moment stood alone, the dark man who had sat at the speaker"s right. For a moment he paused, as though absorbed, as finally he set down his gla.s.s, gazing steadily forward as though striving to read what lay in the future.
"The Union!" he whispered, almost to himself.
It might have been the voice, as it was the thought of all those who, now pa.s.sing, brought to a close this extraordinary meeting.
The Union!
CHAPTER IX
TALLWOODS
Meantime, events which might have held interest in certain circles in Washington had they been known, pa.s.sed on their course, and toward that very region which had half in jest been named as the storm center of the day--the state of Missouri, anomalous, inchoate, discordant, half North, half South, itself the birth of compromise and sired by political jealousy; whither, against her will, voyaged a woman, herself engine of turbulence, doubt and strife, and in company now of a savage captor who contemplated nothing but establishing her for his own use in his own home.
Tallwoods, the home plantation of the Dunwody family in the West, now the personal property of the surviving son, state senator Warville Dunwody of Missouri, presented one of the contrasts which now and again might have been seen in our early western civilization. It lay somewhat remote from the nearest city of consequence, in a region where the wide acres of the owner blended, unused and uncultivated, with those still more wild, as yet unclaimed under any private t.i.tle. Yet in pretentiousness, indeed in a.s.suredness, it might have rivaled many of the old estates of Kentucky, the Carolinas, or Virginia; so much did the customs and ambitions of these older states follow their better bred sons out into the newer regions.
These men of better rank, with more than competency at their disposal, not infrequently had few neighbors other than the humble but independent frontiersman who left for new fields when a dog barked within fifty miles of his cabin. There were neighbors within half that distance of Tallwoods, settlers nestled here or there in these enfolding hills and forests; but of neighbors in importance equal to that of the owner of Tallwoods there were few or none in that portion of the state. The time was almost feudal, but wilder and richer than any feudal day, in that fief tribute was unknown. The original landlord of these acres had availed himself of the easy laws and easy ways of the time and place, and taken over to himself from the loose public domain a small realm all his own. Here, almost in seclusion, certainly in privacy, a generation had been spent in a life as baronial as any ever known in old Virginia in earlier days. A day"s ride to a court house, two days to a steamer, five hours to get a letter to or from the occasional post--these things seem slight in a lifelong accustomedness; and here few had had closer touch than this with civilization.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Tallwoods]
The plantation itself was a little kingdom, and largely supplied its own wants. Mills, looms, shops,--all these were part of the careless system, easy and opulent, which found support and gained arrogance from a rich and generous environment. The old house itself, if it might be called old, built as it had been scarce thirty years before, lay in the center of a singular valley, at the edge of the Ozark Hills. The lands here were not so rich as the wide acres thirty miles or more below, where on the fat bottom soil, black and deep, the negroes raised in abundance the wealth-making crop of the country. On the contrary, this, although it was the capital of the vast Dunwody holdings thereabout, was chosen not for its agricultural richness so much as for its healthfulness and natural beauty.
In regard to these matters, the site could not better have been selected. The valley, some three or four miles across, lay like a deep saucer pressed down into the crest of the last rise of the Ozarks. The sides of the depression were as regular as though created by the hands of man. Into its upper extremity there ran a little stream of clear and unfailing water, which made its entrance at an angle, so that the rim of the hills seemed scarcely nicked by its ingress. This stream crossed the floor of the valley, serving to water the farms, and, making its way out of the lower end by a similar curious angle, broke off sharply and hid itself among the rocks on its way out and down from the mountains--last trace of a giant geology which once dealt in continental terms, rivers once seas, valleys a thousand miles in length. Thus, at first sight, one set down in the valley might have felt that it had neither inlet nor outlet, but had been created, panoplied and peopled by some t.i.tanic power, and owned by those who neither knew nor desired any other world. As a matter of fact, the road up through the lower Ozarks from the great Mississippi, which entered along the bed of the little stream, ended at Tallwoods farm. Beyond it, along the little river which led back into the remote hills, it was no more than a horse path, and used rarely except by negroes or whites in hunting expeditions back into the mountains, where the deer, the wild turkey, the bear and the panther still roamed in considerable numbers at no great distance from the home plantation.
Tallwoods itself needed no other fence than the vast wall of hills, and had none save where here and there the native stone had been heaped up roughly into walls, along some orchard side. The fruits of the apple, the pear and the peach grew here handsomely, and the original owner had planted such trees in abundance. The soil, though at first it might have been, called inhospitable, showed itself productive. The corn stood tall and strong, and here and there the brown stalks of the cotton plant itself might have been seen; proof of the wish of the average Southerner to cultivate that plant, even in an environment not wholly suitable. All about, upon the mountain sides, stood a heavy growth of deciduous trees, at this time of the year lining the slopes in flaming reds and golds.
Beyond the valley"s rim, tier on tier, stately and slow, the mountains rose back for yet a way--mountains rich in their means of frontier independence, later to be discovered rich also in minerals, in woods, in all the things required by an advancing civilization.
Corn, swine and cotton,--these made the wealth of the owner of Tallwoods" plantation and of the richer lands in the river bottoms below. These products brought the owner all the wealth he needed.
Here, like a feudal lord, master of all about him, he had lived all his life and had, as do all created beings, taken on the color and the savor of the environment about him. Rich, he was generous; strong, he was merciful; independent, he was arrogant; used to his own way, he was fierce and cruel when crossed in that way. Not much difference, then, lay between this master of Tallwoods and the owner of yonder castle along the embattled Rhine, or the towered stronghold of some old lord located along an easy, wandering, English stream; with this to be said in favor of this solitary lord of the wilderness, that his was a place removed and little known.
It had been pa.s.sed by in some manner through its lack of appeal to those seeking cotton lands or hunting grounds, so that it lay wholly out of the ken and the understanding of most folk of the older states.
If in Tallwoods the owner might do as he liked, certainly he had elected first of all to live somewhat as a gentleman. The mansion house was modeled after the somewhat stereotyped pattern of the great country places of the South. Originally planned to consist of the one large central edifice of brick, with a wing on each side of somewhat lesser height, it had never been entirely completed, one wing only having been fully erected. The main portion of the house was of two stories, its immediate front occupied by the inevitable facade with its four white pillars, which rose from the level of the ground to the edge of the roof, shading the front entrance to the middle rooms. Under this tall gallery roof, whose front showed high, white and striking all across the valley, lay four windows, and at each side of the great double doors lay yet other two windows. On either side of the pillars and in each story, yet other two admitted light to the great rooms; and in the completed wing which lay at one side of the main building, deep embrasures came down almost to the level of the ground, well hidden by the grouped shrubbery which grew close to the walls. The visitor approaching up the straight gravel walk might not have noticed the heavy iron bars which covered these, giving the place something the look of a jail or a fortress. The shrubs, carelessly, and for that reason more attractively planted, also stood here and there over the wide and smooth bluegra.s.s lawn.
The house was built in the edge of a growth of great oaks and elms, which threw their arms out over even the lofty gables as though in protection. Tradition had it that the reason the building had never been completed was that the old master would have been obliged to cut down a favorite elm in order to make room for it; and he had declared that since his wife had died and all his children but one had followed her, the house was large enough as it was. So it stood as he had left it, with its two tall chimneys, one at each end of the mid-body of the house, marking the two great fireplaces, yet another chimney at the other end of the lesser wing.
Straight through the mid-body of the house ran a wide hall, usually left open to all the airs of heaven; and through this one could see far out over the approach, entirely through the house itself, and note the framed picture beyond of woods glowing with foliage, and ma.s.ses of shrubbery, and lesser trees among which lay the white huts of the negroes. Still to the left, beyond the existing wing, lay the fenced vegetable gardens where grew rankly all manner of provender intended for the bounteous table, whose boast it was that, save for sugar and coffee, nothing was used at Tallwoods which was not grown upon its grounds.
So lived one, and thus indeed lived more than one, baron on American soil not so long ago, when this country was more American than it is to-day--more like the old world in many ways, more like a young world in many others. Here, for thirty years of his life, had lived the present owner of Tallwoods, sole male of the family surviving in these parts.
It might have been called matter of course that Warville Dunwody should be chosen to the state legislature. So chosen, he had, through sheer force of his commanding nature, easily become a leader among men not without strength and individuality. Far up in the northern comer, where the capital of the state lay, men spoke of this place hid somewhere down among the hills of the lower country. Those who in the easier acres of the northwestern prairie lands reared their own corn and swine and cotton, often wondered at the half-wild man from St. Francois, who came riding into the capital on a blooded horse, who was followed by negroes also on blooded horses, a self-contained man who never lacked money, who never lacked wit, whose hand was heavy, whose tongue was keen, whose mind was strong and whose purse was ever open.
The state which had produced a Benton was now building up a rival to Benton. That giant, then rounding out a history of thirty years"
continuous service in the Senate of the United States, unlike the men of this weaker day, reserved the right to his own honest and personal political belief. He steadily refused to countenance the extending of slavery, although himself a holder of slaves; and, although he admitted the legality and const.i.tutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, he deplored that act as much as any. To the eventual day of his defeat he stood, careless of his fate, firm in his own principles, going down in defeat at last because he would not permit his own state legislature--headed then by men such as Warville Dunwody and his friends--to dictate to him the workings of his own conscience. Stronger than Daniel Webster, he was one of those who would not obey the dictates of that leader, and he _did_ set up his "conscience above the law." These two men, Benton and Dunwody, therefore, were at the time of which we write two gladiators upon the scenes of a wild western region, as yet little known in the eastern states, though then swiftly coming forward into more specific notice.
Perhaps thirty or forty slaves were employed about Tallwoods home farm, as it was called. They did their work much as they liked, in a way not grudging for the main part. Idle and shiftless, relying on the frequent absence of the master and the ease of gaining a living, they worked no more than was necessary to keep up a semblance of routine. In some way the acres got plowed and reaped, in some way the meats were cured, in some way the animals were fed and the table was served and the rooms kept in a semi-tidiness, none too scrupulous. Always in Tallwoods there was something at hand ready to eat, and there was fuel whereby fires might be made.
Such as it was, the hospitality of the place was ready. It was a rich, loose way of life, and went on lazily and loosely, like the fashion of some roomy old vehicle, not quite run down, but advancing now and then with a groan or a creak at tasks imposed.
But now, another and most important matter for our note--there was no woman"s hand at Tallwoods. The care was that of servants, of slaves. When things grew insupportable in their shiftlessness the master lashed out an order and got what he demanded; then soon matters sank back again to their old state. None might tell when the master would ride away, and when gone none could say when he would return. Since the death of his mother no woman"s control had ruled here, nor, in spite of the busy tongues at the larger cities above, did there seem likelihood that any would soon share or alter the fortunes of Tallwoods. Rumors floated here and there, tongues wagged; but Tallwoods lay apart; and Tallwoods, as commonly was conceded, had ways of its own.
It was to these remote and somewhat singular surroundings that there approached, on the evening of a bland autumn day, along the winding road which followed the little stream, the great coach of the master of Tallwoods, drawn by four blooded carriage horses, weary, mud-stained and flecked with foam. At the end of the valley, where the road emerged from its, hidden course among the cliffs, the carriage now halted. Dunwody himself sprang down from the driver"s seat where he had been riding in order to give the occupants of the coach the more room. He approached the window, hat in hand.
"My dear lady," said he, "this is the end of our journey. Yonder is my home. Will you not look at it?"
It was a pale and languid face which greeted him, the face of a woman weary and even now in tears. Hastily she sought to conceal these evidences of her distress. It was the first time he had seen her weeping. Hitherto her courage had kept her cold and defiant, else hot and full of reproofs. This spectacle gave him concern.
His face took on a troubled frown.
"Come now, do not weep, my dear girl,--anything but that."
"What, then, is it you would say?" she demanded. "It makes little difference to me where you are taking me."
He threw open the coach door and extended a hand to aid her in alighting. "Suppose we walk up from here," he said. "I know you are tired by the ride. Besides," he added, with pride, "I want to show you Tallwoods."
Scarce touching his hand, she stepped down. Dunwody motioned to the driver to advance, and in spite of the protests of the maid Jeanne, thus left alone within, the coach rolled on up the driveway ahead of them.
It was in fact a beautiful prospect which lay before the travelers thus arrived. The sun was low in the west, approaching the rim of the hills, and its level rays lighted the autumn foliage, crossed the great trees, brightened the tall white pillars. It even illuminated the grounds beyond, so that quite through the body of the house itself its golden light could be seen on the farther slopes, framing the quaint and singular picture thus set apart.
All around rose the wide cup of the valley, its sides as yet covered by unbroken decoration of vivid or parti-colored foliage.
Here and there the vivid reds of the wild sumac broke out in riot; framed lower in the scale were patches of berry vines touched by the frost; while now and again a maple lifted aloft a fan of clean scarlet against the sky,--all backed by the more somber colors of the oaks and elms, or the now almost naked branches of the lindens.
These enfolding forests gave a look of protectedness to this secret place. They left a feeling not of discomfort but of shelter.
Moreover, the gra.s.s underfoot was soft and still green. Some sort of comeliness, picturesque though rude, showed in the scant attempts to modify nature in the arrangement of the grounds. And there, n.o.ble and strong, upon a little eminence swelling at the bottom of the valley"s cup, lay the great house, rude, unfinished, yet dignified. If it seemed just this side of elegance, yet the look of it savored of comfort. To a woman distracted and wearied it should have offered some sort of rest. To her who now gazed upon it the sight afforded only horror. This then was the place.
Here was to be her trial. This was the battle-ground.
Dunwody lingered, hoping to hear some word of satisfaction.
"The hills are beautiful, the trees are beautiful, and the sky,"
she said, at length. "What G.o.d has done here is beautiful. But G.o.d Himself is gone."
Rage filled him suddenly. "At any rate, this is what I have and all I have," he said. "Like it, woman, or by that G.o.d! hate it!
Here you are, and here you stay, until--until I die or until G.o.d returns. You are the only woman in it for me when you step into that house there. You are its mistress. I rule here. But what you want shall be yours at any time you want it. You can think of nothing in the world that shall not be brought to you when you ask for it. My servants are yours. Choose from them as many as you like."
"Slaves for your slave? You are full of kindness indeed! But I shall never be what you delicately call the mistress of Tallwoods."
"By the Lord! girl, if I thought that would be true--if I thought for one moment that it were true--" in a half-frenzy he threw out his arm, rigid. An instant later he had lapsed into one of the moods new to him. "There is no punishment I don"t deserve," he said. "All the time I have hurt you, when I"d rather cut my tongue out than hurt you. I"ve seen you, these few days. G.o.d knows, at the hardest--me at the worst--you at the worst. But your worst is better than the best of any other woman I ever saw. I"m going to have you. It"s you or nothing for me, and I"m going to have you.
Choose your own t.i.tle here, then, Madam. This is your home or your prison, as you like."
For a moment Josephine paused, looking around her at the surrounding hills. He seemed to catch her thought, and smiled at her.
"Twenty miles to the nearest house that way, Madam. None at all that other way. Every path known and guarded by my people. No paths at all in these hills out yonder. Wild animals in them, little food in them for man or woman not used to living wild. You would be helpless in one day, if you tried to get put. We"d find you before you"d gone five miles. Don"t attempt any foolishness about trying to escape from here. You"re mine, I say. I shall not let you go."
Yet in spite of his savagery, his face softened in the next moment.
"If it could only be in the right way! Look at me, look at you.
You"re so very beautiful, I"m so strong. There is only one right way about it. Oh, woman!
"But come," he resumed with a half sigh, seeking in a rough way to brush back a wisp of hair from his forehead, to join the tangled mane upon his crest; "I hate myself as much as you hate me, but it"s your fault--your fault that you are as you are--that you set me mad. Let"s try to forget it for to-night, at least. You"re tired, worn out. I"m almost tired myself, with all this war between us."
She was silent as they slowly advanced, silent as a prisoner facing prison doors; but he still went on, arguing.