IV
THE moment that Laroche was recalled to life was never very accurately defined in his mind, so gradually did a full consciousness return. Nor was he sure how entirely delirium had held him in its delusions. His speculations were of a metaphysical tendency when he afterward dwelt, with a microscopic scrutiny, upon those phenomena of involved cerebral processes manifested in the sudden silencing of the French words upon his dreaming tongue, as it vaguely shaped the confused thoughts of a stupefied brain,—all upon one coherent impulse, on the sound of an English phrase spoken in an English voice!
That salutary monition abode with him, whether he slept, whether he waked, whether he lay in that dim border world of swoons between sleeping and waking. He was stricken dumb, although he could hardly be said to have heard, for he consciously heard naught. And if, he argued, these perceptions could have been so alert to the mere vocal vibrations of the air, the instinct of danger so keenly receptive, the will so strangely responsive to the demands of those supersubtle, unclassified faculties, although every voluntary function of the muscles lay prostrate, and every recognized process of the brain was paralyzed, did not this imply some curious duality of identity, an absolute independence of the intellectual life, unrelated to the bodily functions, since so complete a solution of continuity had supervened? It might have been that, though he accounted himself a mere blunt soldier and upbraided his mismanagement that had jeopardized the interests of the French mission, he was so complete a diplomat at heart that he could withhold with a nerveless hand, hear with a deaf ear, plot albeit with a swooning brain, and hush the babblings of delirium to keep a secret, of which at the moment he had no consciousness!
Thus, although his pulses ran riot, he continued to maintain a tense silence. When the tumultuous phantasmagoria of frenzy gave place to visions as vain but calmer, he found himself still mute, quiet, orderly, exact, mentally verifying with mathematical accuracy the relative measurements of a line of field fortifications, so designed that an attacking column might be enfiladed thence. “For nothing,” he said to himself again and again, “can stop an attacking column that is not enfiladed.” Later, he was considering the possibility of defending effectively a certain salient angle of an imaginary redoubt.
To prevent the enemy from carrying the redoubt by storming this too acute angle he began to mount a battery en barbette in the dead salient. The doubt that now and again seized him as to the necessity of these labors was dispelled by the actual sight of the canvas walls of his tent about him, and therefore he would busily absorb himself once more in these duties, and actively prepared to defend the ditch of the redoubt by constructing there a solid caponnière.
The placid peace of the man who is consciously doing his best in his chosen vocation pervaded his whole system, mental, moral, and physical, and brought refreshing, curative sleep to his pillow. So definite a hold had this impression taken upon his mind, sleeping and waking, that one morning he lifted his head with a start of alarm. There upon the sloping canvas walls was a yellow streak, all the more vivid for the white glare of the cloth in the rising sun,—and how had he not heard the reveille? The echo of the bugle was in his ears, the molten, golden notes of the old French call.
A strong tremor ran through the elbow on which he had supported his head. Alack! no stirring, martial strain had summoned him. He lay back on his pillow, realizing in dismay and yet in surprise that the walls of the tent of his fancy were the dimity curtains of a bed, and he began to remember vaguely the chances that had befallen him and to seek the grace to be thankful.
“I will wait and see what cause for gratitude I may have,” said the unsubdued inner man, while his lips framed the verbal show of a thanksgiving. His state of mind might have furnished still more suggestive details of the possibility of a dual life in one identity.
Nevertheless he recognized the fact that as far as the bodily entity was concerned it was distinctly comfortable. Now and again he dropped off into short, luxurious naps, even between the stages of his investigation of his surroundings. In one waking interval he took account of the furnishings of the bed: it bore sheets, a rarity of the place and time so unexpected, so inexplicable, that it roused new doubts and anxieties as to where he was, what had befallen him, and what might yet betide. Still he could but finger them in pleasure and with a childish relish of luxury;—snow-white they were, of a heavy, fine linen smoothly woven, with the fragrance of the wood violets of the bleaching ground, and the freshness of the wind yet in their folds, as it seemed,—and once more he closed his eyes.
When he wakened again he had so far accustomed himself to the homely opulence of blankets and bedding that he was prepared in a measure for the night-rail in which he found himself clad, but not for its size. As he stretched out the voluminous length of its great sleeve and took account of its breadth of shoulder, “A big man in good earnest this was made for,—I shall take care to be friends with the monster!” he said.
He bethought himself suddenly of the English words that he had heard,—a mere sound and locution,—yet this was the only definite recollection that had stayed in his mind since the moment he had beheld the flying figures of the Choctaws speeding across the “beloved square” to the pettiaugre. He must bear a caution,—a Frenchman, and possibly liable to be accused as a spy! He lifted his wasted hands to his head: it was enveloped in a red nightcap, with a gay tassel swaying on its fez-like peak; and much he needed it, for the whole head had been shaved, sometime since evidently, for delicate tendrils of a new growth were starting there and he felt fibres moist and soft about his forehead.
A step sounded suddenly outside, heavy but cautious; a stealthy hand was laid upon the curtain; and as it was drawn aside the red face of a man of middle age, tall, powerful, flaxen-haired, with high cheek bones, a man whom Laroche had never before seen, looked in upon him. Grave, astonished, delighted, the stranger seemed,—with a sudden twinkle of comprehension in his blue eyes and an outburst of joy in his big voice that made the bedstead tremble on the uneven puncheons of the floor.
“Hegh, callant!” he cried, as their eyes met, “but this dings a’! Lilias! Callum!” he began to call over his shoulder to other inmates of the house in so stalwart a roar that it might have been heard half a mile. It easily penetrated the flimsy partitions of the primitive building, and the feet of those summoned were audible rapidly approaching. “Here’s the callant!” he exclaimed, as the door opened. “Here he is,—a’ himsel’ again!”
He had the manner of announcing the arrival of a guest, and Laroche easily divined, from the hiatus in his recollections, that he could hardly have been considered present hitherto, although visible in the flesh.
A young man, with less enthusiasm, but still an air of proper pleasure, partly induced by genuine gratulation upon so happy an augury of the termination of a serious illness, and partly in propitiation of the elder, whom it was evident he would have crossed upon no slight occasion, advanced to the bedside and declared that he was glad to see that the patient had recovered his consciousness and doubted not that he would soon be on his feet. This young man wore the Highland garb, from which Laroche inferred, somewhat quakingly, that he was of the British soldiery who had been active in this region during the previous two years, in the campaigns conducted by Montgomerie and afterward by Grant against the Cherokees, in which the Montgomerie Highlanders (the Seventy-Seventh Regiment) and others had participated, for at this time the national dress was proscribed except for those enlisted in British regiments. A barbarous garb the Frenchman considered it, hardly a whit in advance of the savage decorations he had been called upon to note at Tellico Great,—so strong were the international prejudices of those days. For in truth it was a manly and graceful figure appropriately bedight,—with swaying kilt, the short coat, the blue bonnet, with its bit of bearskin decoration. The young Highlander’s fair hair hung down thick and half curling from beneath this blue bonnet and lay in an effectively contrasting tint upon the collar of the red jacket, which constituted at that time part of the dress of the Forty-Second Regiment, and was worn with a red waistcoat. The latter, we are informed, was made over, in the governmental thriftiness, from the red coat after a year’s wear, while the plaid, furnished biennially, subsequently did duty cut down and frugally reconstructed into the filibeg. But if the wildernesses of the Great Smoky of that day at all resembled the tangled forest densities which still remain, the military tailor who refashioned any garments whatever from the gear that survived the marches through those brambly mountain jungles deserved immortalizing above all other knights of the shears.
The dark blues and greens of the sombre “Black Watch” tartan in Callum’s plaid and kilt afforded an added fairness to his locks. His florid complexion showed a fluctuating red and white. His blue eyes were large and well set, with lashes and eyebrows much darker than the shade of his hair. He had high cheek bones and an expressive mouth, with finely cut lips, red and mobile, often parted in the blithest laughter for very slight cause, and exhibiting two unbroken rows of strong, white teeth. His smiling face was as frank and honest as the sun.
Laroche’s sudden dislike of this young stranger surprised himself and dismayed him as well. For would he have experienced this emotion were the third member of the little group that stood by the bed different from what she was? Her likeness to her father might have served as an illustration of the apotheosis of humanity in a spiritual miracle. Jock Lesly’s flaxen hair, half gray, half tow, was golden in the glistening soft skeins of silk that swept upward from her brow in heavy undulations. The blue veins that showed so definitely in the temples could not have vaunted their delicate tracery through a skin less fine and fair. Here and there was a freckle, but a faint blush-rose bloomed over the whole cheek as if it sweetened the air. Her figure, draped in a sober, gray gown, was tall and strong, but a trifle angular, denoting more bone and muscle than exuberance of flesh. In fact she was frankly thin, although her face was so delicately rounded. No small rosebud mouth, but shapely, dainty, red lips, the upper deeply indented in the centre like the curve of a bow, opened over white, regularly formed teeth,—a mouth of beauty but of character also, whence might proceed sage household counsels, and words full of judgment, just reproof, and deserved applause. She was the ideal of a helpmeet. She seemed to Laroche the thought God had in mind when He made woman, before she so whimsically refashioned herself after her own feminine ideal. And if any man deemed that he needed help it was Callum MacIlvesty, and that the woman to assist him on the path of life was Lilias Lesly.
If aught of the cynical reflections that this discernment of the persons and predilections of the group afforded Laroche appeared in his worn and wasted countenance it went undiscovered, so great was their pleasure in the success of their ministrations and his happy prospect of a speedy recovery. They were all aimlessly laughing from sheer triumph; only there was a suggestion of moisture in the eyes of Lilias,—or were they always so liquid, so luminous, so deeply blue, so heavily lashed with those long, dark fringes.
“And ye’ll breakfast enow!” roared Jock Lesly heartily. “Lay the cloth here, Lilias. We’se all take potluck wi’ him!”
The young Highlander pleasantly seconded the hospitable motion, and the objection advanced by Lilias that the invalid was not equal to entertaining so much company was drowned and overborne in her father’s imperative orders.
“Aye, lass, ye ken how to care for a sick man, but this fallow is weel now an’ a proper lad, strong enough. D’ye think ye’ll hae him doun on spoon meat an’ gruel an’ sic like fripperies a’ his days! That’s aye the trouble wi’ the wimmin. They want to master ye! If ye are weel, they drive ye! An’ if ye are ill, they own ye! Na,—na,—lay the cloth,—an’ we’ll hear him tell his name an’ business.”
This suggestion placed Laroche upon his guard, but being of a quick and keen imagination and having a good sense of verisimilitude, he had his account of himself ready long before he was called upon to render it. In fact Jock Lesly was graciously disposed to be autobiographical himself, and in the course of his prelection was explained the unusual presence of a white woman in these regions at present; for the Scotch or English traders did not risk their families here, but left them far away in the safe precincts of the small white settlements or the coast towns. His daughter, Jock Lesly said, had heard,—and who could not hear anything “in sic a wild, ambiguous country” (to use his own expression), “where the news is carried by wild Injuns, wha lie, it seems, for the sheer purpose of provin’ themsel’s the children o’ the deil, wha is the father o’ lies an’ liars,—an’ a monstrous progeny he hae, to be sure!—a-weel, the lassie heard that her father—an’ that’s mysel’ an’ not the deil—had been ta’en doun wi’ the smallpox, an’ the bairn was worrited out o’ her life, mair especially as sae mony people—thae wild Injuns in particular—were deein’ wi’ the distemper, havin’ nae proper sense how it suld be treated. An’ sae the lassie started out for Ioco Town,—not that I hae forgiven Lilias for puttin’ hersel’ in sic a danger, forbye makin’ a fule o’ me, as weel as of Callum MacIlvesty also,—though that’s a smaller matter. A-weel—Callum heard o’ her intention an’ hired a wheen o’ young packmen in Charlestoun—they being mostly idle at this season,—he ca’s ’em ‘gillies,’—an’ started out with her, havin’ leave o’ absence to veesit his ’Merican relations, Callum bein’ a far awa’ cousin,—my mither was sibb to his mither,—an’ he overtook Lilias as she was about to come alane frae Charlestoun wi’ the under-trader an’ a packman or twa, an’ a lot o’ dour red deils of Injuns that could hae scalpit the haill party, gin the mind had ta’en them. An’ I as hearty an’ thrivin’ as e’er I was in a’ my life!”
He paused to emphasize the incongruity.
“But, lad,” resumed the joyous host, “a’ the bairn’s preparations for the sick that she fetched wi’ her on the pack-horse were na wasted at last,—for the Jeemes’s powder an’ the pills an’ the lotions an’ a’ thae dinged things she meant for me hae a’ gane into your inside, man, an’ the sheets an’ the curtains an’ sic-like were nae sooner unpacked than we clappit ye intill ’em!”
“An’ now will ye no tak a dish o’ your ain chocolate?” said Lilias, with a smile curving her red lips, “that we fetched a’ the way frae Charlestoun for ye, expressly, Mr.—”
Her father remarked her hesitation.
“Aye,” he exclaimed, with his mouth full of bread and meat. “Gie us your name, sir,—Maister—what?”
“Wilson,—Thomas Wilson,” replied Laroche, relying on the perfection of his English. But albeit an excellent linguist, he rejoiced in the discovery of their nationality as an additional pledge of safety, realizing that his English would better pass muster since they themselves spoke the language so ill.
“A proper name,—Tam Wilson,—I hae known a score of ’em,” said Jock Lesly, setting down the glass in which, following the old fashion, he drank something far stronger for breakfast than tea. He interpolated at this crisis a remonstrance with his daughter against the chocolate as a foreign kickshaw, protesting it “ower flimsy for a gude British stamach;” but the foreigner was secretly truly grateful for her persistence, for with the rising yet squeamish appetite of a convalescent, he doubted his capacity, even in the interests of his disguise, to forego the chocolate in favor of the ale and brandy with which the two Scotchmen moistened the meal.
“An’ whaur do ye hail frae?” Jock Lesly asked.
The question was sufficiently difficult of reply. Louisiana or the Illinois, in the French occupation, was obviously out of the question. Yet should the guest say Georgia or South Carolina, he might be exposed to conversation touching localities familiar to them which he did not know: people—citizens, as well as officials—with whom he must needs seem acquainted as were they; the names of ships or rivers or towns, all necessarily household words to one of the more southern provinces, yet of which he was densely ignorant.
“Virginia,” he said at a venture, “about Williamsburg.”
To his consternation Jock Lesly laid down his knife and fork, and he knew instinctively it was no slight matter that could check their activity. But for the fictitious glow that the hot chocolate had set up in his veins he might have succumbed to a rigor that had no relation to the vicissitudes of his disease.
“Now I hope ye are nane o’ thae Firginians[7] that latterly hae been tampering wi’ our Injuns, an’ invitin’ ’em to come for their goods to Firginia, an’ seekin’ to coup our trade out o’ our ain hands. Hae ye seen Governor Bull’s letter—Lieutenant-Governor Bull o’ South Carolina—Governor Bull’s ain letter to the governor o’ Firginia, man?”
It was well for Laroche that his cadaverous aspect, as he lay in bed, propped by pillows into a half sitting posture, his face almost as ghastly white as the voluminous folds of the night-rail—the scarlet flannel nightcap, with its gay and flaunting tassel accentuating his pallor—was ascribed altogether to the effects of illness. Much of it was doubtless due to his perturbation of mind and the conscious jeopardy of his position, although he managed to hold with a steady hand the cup containing his chocolate and to maintain a quiet, interrogative gaze as his eyes met the Scotchman’s eager blue orbs, and he replied succinctly, but definitely, in the negative.
“A-weel, man,” said Jock Lesly, the importance of the subject precluding the resumption of his knife and fork, “Governor Bull did set forth and make known unto his Excellency of Firginia that we of the king’s province o’ South Carolina had suffered much in the auld Proprietary days with thae bloody loons o’ Injuns, an’ had warked wi’ ’em an’ wrastled sair wi’ ’em, an’ had made unco gude friends wi’ several strong tribes on our borders,—Creeks, Chickasaws, an’ mair especially the Cherokees, till this late war,—all through the privileeges o’ the trade we had wi’ them an’ the restrictions an’ facilities of the licensed traders the government establishes an’ mainteens amang them, to furnish them wi’ a’ their needcessities, an’ powder an’ lead—a deal mair than is gude for them! An’ if Firginia draws aff this trade frae these distant tribes, for the sake o’ the bit profit to be had frae it, Georgia an’ South Carolina hae nae means o’ keepin’ thae blackguards o’ Injuns in order close on our settlements, whilk will be left to their mercies. Thae provinces would like be destroyed.”
He paused with earnest, convincing eyes, while the guest held his cup motionless and listened.
“Cain in the old days jaloosed his brother an’ for rivalry killed him, but I’se warrant even he wad na hae sold him fur a shillin’. It’s later times hae taught us better—or waur!”
“My dear sir,” exclaimed Tam Wilson, “you may rest assured that I am seeking no Indian trade for Virginia.”
Jock Lesly drew a long breath of relief.
“A-weel,” he said, easily placated, “his Excellency of Firginia answered and promised to let the Injun trade be as it was built. He had na seen the matter in sic a serious light, he said. No man could speak fairer. But I thought—I dooted—leastwise—hegh, man, what errand did bring you then to Great Tellico?”
“A matter of business,” said the French officer quickly. “Some of the Cherokees sold a lot of horses to our neighborhood near a year ago, and this spring most of them disappeared. It is said always that horses bred in the Indian country go back yearly to their old grass.”
Jock Lesly nodded his head in confirmation, his mouth again full, knife and fork plying.
“Is it true?—I doubted it. But I came with some neighbors as far as Tellico. I fell ill at Tellico,—and I remember no more.”
“They went off and left you!” exclaimed the young Highlander, with a touch of indignation.
“Wow, man,—what fearsome looking worriecows be thae medicine-men,—thae cheerataghe! But Moy Toy was kind and helpful, though fine he liked to get rid of ye! That was what made me jaloose that mebbe you were meddlin’ wi’ the trade.” Lesly recurred to the subject.
“How do thae Injuns come by sic prodigious fine horses?” demanded Callum MacIlvesty, effecting a diversion with more delicate tact than might have been anticipated from his lowly station and coarse garb as a common soldier. Laroche began to understand that the Highlander, despite his position and rude dialect, was of a higher social grade in his own country than these compatriots of his, and that their “far awa” connection with his family was a source of pride to them, albeit the relation of wooer and wooed had compassed a certain reversal of the natural order of precedence. It occurred to his quick mind immediately that one of the many individual disasters involved in the national calamities of the Scotch rebellions of 1715 and 1745 was represented in the impoverishment and exile of this scion of a family of degree, perhaps even of high birth, for the young man used their vernacular evidently by reason of association and lack of education rather than station. He had sundry unmistakable marks of a highly bred gentleman, despite his evident poverty. Laroche knew that certain such, serving as soldiers of fortune, held commissions in the foreign armies of Europe, while a few others, more destitute of money and influence, could be found as “private men” in those Highland regiments recruited by the British government for service in America against the French and Indians, and officered in several instances, strangely enough, by men who had recently themselves been arrayed in arms against the dynasty they now supported.
“Their horses come frae the Spanish barbs that De Soty an’ his men left amang them—an’ I wuss we had naething waur frae the dooms meddlin’ Spanish than their cattle. Lord, sir, the lies they tell the puir Injuns!—that the British are determinate to sweep them aff the face o’ the warld!”
“The Spaniards are na sae kittle as the French,” said Callum MacIlvesty.
“The French,” rejoined Jock Lesly, bringing his clenched fist down on the table,—“the French are the deevil! Did ye notice, lad, how mony o’ the Cherokees can speak a little French,—nae mair than a ‘polly voo’ or sic like,—but sae mony!”
Laroche was conscious and out of countenance. So weak he was he could ill resist the strain of anxiety. “I did not notice—I was there at Tellico so short a time—what am I saying?—I do not know how long I was there nor how you happened to find me!” But he could not divert his host from the subject.
“As sure as you are an unsanctified sinner thae gabbling, blackguard French bodies hae been again meddlin’ wi’ the Cherokees an’ their trade,” declared Lesly solemnly. “Moy Toy was too polite by half,—onything to be rid o’ me,—dry-scratchin’ the weans that kilt my sheep till their screechings wad hae melted a heart o’ stane! An’ when I begged him to let me ha’ the loan o’ ye for a while, he happed ye in a’ his fine furs. I had to be gey carefu’ in returnin’ them a’.”
So they were within reach of Moy Toy and the town of Great Tellico by an hour’s travel, perhaps, or two. Laroche felt his heart sink. He had not counted on this possibility nor on the capacity of the Indians to keep his secret. Nay, so capricious was the temper of the Cherokees that he could not be sure of their will to conceal the fact of his nationality and his connection with the Franco-Choctaw embassy. Even his own mission, the confidential and private assurances of the French government which he had conveyed to Great Tellico, might now be maliciously divulged as a means of currying favor with the British,—since the utility of the promises he had made seemed a thing of the past and the prospect which they had presented had faded like a mirage into thin air. His face, with these thoughts in his mind, showed so sharp a change that Lilias, alarmed, rose with a protest. Even Jock Lesly permitted himself to be convinced that the session of breakfast should not be unduly prolonged, and Callum MacIlvesty shook up the pillows and drew the curtains, and the Frenchman sank down in silence—not to sleep, he stipulated within himself, but to ponder, to devise, to plot.
He slept unaware, unadvisedly, peacefully as a three years’ child. And he dreamed placidly and in satisfaction. Moy Toy came and drew the curtains, he thought, and looked at him with keen and friendly eyes, and with a significant finger on his lips. When he woke at length, so far had the bodily man got the better of the intellectual entity which led together a dual existence that he felt scant care for aught,—his detention, the French interest, Moy Toy’s possible disclosures,—if but he had a sup of that mutton broth, the enticing odors of which permeated the whole house. As he himself, with his thin hand, pulled aside the curtain that he might call to Callum MacIlvesty to beseech a share in that delectable burden of the family board, he burnt his wasted fingers against the hot bowl which Lilias was in the act of bringing to the bedside, and he hardly could wait to join in the laugh which the two Scotchmen set up in triumph on the recovery of his appetite.
If it could make them happy to see another man eat, he ministered lavishly to their felicity in the days that ensued.
At first he was unsteady enough on his feet when he was permitted to quit the haven of the bed. He could only make short voyages, as it were, from one chair to another, catching at everything that came in his way for support. But although of no great strength or stature he was of a good, compact physique, and once “on the mend,” as Jock Lesly expressed it, he progressed rapidly. He developed to his surprise a sort of luxurious inertia; he would fall asleep after dinner on the shady porch, his head against the doorpost. Naught in Ioco Town was so lazy save an old collie sleeping at his feet in the sun. His inaction extended to his mental processes,—he revolted from thought. He would not address himself to consider his plight, his jeopardy, the future of his mission. In fact all his faculties were instinctively quiescent, facilitating recovery. He felt even that he had joyfully dispensed with his old troublous identity. As Tam Wilson he was a new man, with no plans, no past, no obligations, no imperative military duty. The pioneer garb of buckskin, with its many fringes and leather belt and coonskin cap, that he was constrained to wear aided his release from himself. It was like being in some new world, this freedom of the ways of the household, this transition into the identity of a man who had no past, no secrets, no duties, no future. A joyous, kindly fellow he was, too, and all who looked on him liked him.
“This is what I should have been, uninfluenced, unhindered; Tam Wilson is really I,—unhampered by circumstance,” he said to himself.
His haunts were chiefly about the dwelling, which was situated near the trading-house and in the very centre of the Indian town. The traders—of whom there had been but very few in the whole region, each always in great isolation, none of whom had now returned except Jock Lesly—were allowed by the Indian municipal authorities, so to speak, the “second men,” the choice of erecting dwellings at a little distance from the towns or in their midst, if this were deemed to conduce to the greater safety of the white inmates of the house, thus under the immediate protection of the headmen of the village, for whose behoof the trader was licensed. The Indians being often at war with other tribes, especially the northern savages, this method of hovering under the wing of the Cherokee strength, both civil and martial, commended itself to the prudence of the trading folk. But the aspect of the little Scotch home, with all its suggestions of exile, devoid of a loophole within or a palisade outside, with no defense save the uncertain faith of the red savages who swarmed through the surrounding village, was pathetic in its isolation, its unique dissimilarity, its effect of captivity.
A vine, only a trumpet vine, hung luxuriant over the eaves and sent tendrils astir above the lintels of doors and windows. Shining pans were suspended to take the air and the sun against the posts of the porch. Piggins, crocks—blue, brown, and yellow—ranged themselves in vaunting cleanliness on a window shelf outside the sill. Motherly hens pecked about the steps, and a coop of slats, built in the form of a peak, restrained the activities of one who might have led too far a brood of the newly hatched, mere balls of fluffy brown and yellow down, endowed with motion, that flickered in and out of the crevices. Often in her gray-green dress the golden haired Lilias sat here at her homely flax wheel, while in the “beloved square” a company of braves were marshaling for a northern expedition against the Shawnees, singing their war-songs, painted for the war-path, the fullest expression of the terrible upon which the eye might rest. Sometimes there would be races or exhibitions of strength in the game of “ball play,” when hundreds would assemble from other towns to witness these diversions. The visitors, lured by the report of something uncommon at the trader’s dwelling, would come after the more exciting events of the day and stand outside and gaze upon her with insatiable curiosity. They would watch the revolutions of the whirling wheel and the flying thread. Her deft white hand, her unfamiliar, smiling face, her strange, golden hair were all points of interest. They would listen to the whir of the spinning and the vague sound of her voice, as she hummed low a weird old song which she often sang about a “gyre-carline” and her witchlike doings of “lang syne.” The men expressed no surprise, it being a point of honor with the Indians to have known all things always. They would invariably turn away without a word or a sign. Not so the women! The fashion of attire it was that served in an instant to denationalize them. From silent amazement they passed to whispered comments as they stood in buzzing groups; then to open questions; to shrill exclamations; to an unmannerly yet kindly frenzy of inquisitiveness. Sometimes a girl would step gingerly forward, touch the slipper and the stocking on the slender foot,—then fall back with a hysterical twitter of mingled delight and ridicule. The vagaries of the mode, as it was understood in Charlestown, the fashion of the white kerchief about the shoulders of Lilias, the pleated folds of her dress, were of endless interest to the young Cherokee coquettes, and kept them grouped long about the porch, and Lilias’s pink and white dimples continually playing in her cheek.
Somehow this curiosity concerning her was displeasing to Laroche. He wished Lilias were at home in Carolina. This was no place for the rooftree and the ingleside. He always distrusted the savages’ protestations of peace and professions of friendship. He was happier when they were all gone and the little spinning wheel with its tuft of flax stood close by the window in the “spence,” as the Scotch household called the living-room. There the puncheon benches and the “creepies,” as the stools of blocks of wood were dignified, had a gossiping way of clustering around the hearth of flagstones, where an ember was always kept alive in the great chimney place, being renewed night and morning, as a fire was deemed salutary for the invalid. Its glamour held gay Tam Wilson loitering there as long as the little wheel whirled and the green shadows of the newly leaved trees without flickered across the sunshine of her hair. Sometimes her knitting needles clicked and shimmered in the firelight. Sometimes she compounded and stirred with a long spoon and a burning red cheek the contents of saucepans for his behoof, then laughed with frolicsome scoffings at the celerity with which he disposed of them. He and the two Scotchmen exchanged experiences and argued on political or religious themes, and throughout Tam Wilson supported his character with a verisimilitude that would have won him credit in the histrionic profession, and like the others took in good part the trenchant remarks having a personal application with which she saw fit to comment. He fell into the habit of holding the skeins of yarn while she wound the thread for her knitting. So adroit and persistent was he in thrusting himself forward for this duty that he almost supplanted the young Highlander whose coveted boon it had been. Indeed Callum MacIlvesty openly sulked, taking no blame that he was the slower or the more inexpert swain of the two in the proffer of assistance. And so far had the identity of Tam Wilson submerged that of the diplomat, the soldier, the ambassador, that he felt a great and irrelevant joy in the sight of the young Highlander, thrown back on the opposite settle, each arm extended at full length along its back, his eyes fixed dully, blankly, on the rafters, that he might meet no glance of Lilias to win him from his just displeasure, his long, muscular legs stretched out to the fire, his plaid, his sporran, his belt, his kilt,—mentally designated “ses jupons” by Laroche,—all in unpicturesque and careless disarray. So painful to Callum was the spectacle of the dual industry that one day, unable to endure it longer, he sprang up to leave the house, encountering Jock Lesly at the door, where his horse stood saddled.
“Are ye gaen aff enow?” he interrogated Callum. “I am na willin’ to leave the house wi’ Lilias.”
“Oh, Tam is there,” replied Callum impatiently. “An’ I am na goin’ further than the spring,”—which was scarcely ten steps from the door.
“Sae lang as there’s twa men about,” said her father, and he rode off on his errand.
But Lilias had overheard Callum’s first phrase and no more, and Tam Wilson’s quick ears were hardly less alert. Her face turned crimson. The young Scotchman had won much sincere gratitude and a very tender appreciation of his interest in her by his instant expedition to join her in her journey hither to her father’s rescue from the smallpox, a disease then so dreaded, his adequate, thoughtful measures for her safety and protection, and yet the swift forwarding of the succor she brought. Odd that a thoughtless phrase could work such wreck! It was but a fancy, a freak that had taken him, she said to herself. She had thought too much of it, rated its significance too high. As for the distance, the danger, the fatigue—were the men not all and always louping hither and thither through this wild country, like the ranting, gangrel chiels they were, where five hundred miles seemed a less journey to them than fifty at hame in the gude po’ shay. He came wi’ her because he maun aye be ganging—and now he was content to commend her to the protection o’ Tam Wilson. She wad na gainsay him. She was not seeking Callum MacIlvesty or his help, good sooth! Tam Wilson was a welcome substitute for his presence and guard.
She held her head high and proud on her delicate, white neck. Her eyes, half cast down on the skeins as she disentangled the thread, glowed and flashed, and Tam Wilson, the personification of demure mischief, gazed discerningly at close quarters at them. Her sensitiveness was the keener for the fact that Callum on his father’s side, the MacIlvestys, was kin to “gret folk,” and the relationship of Jock Lesly and his daughter to the young Highlander’s mother was so distant as to baffle any ordinary computation, despite their pride in the fact and its frequent mention. At that time in the colonies women were few and much in the ascendant, and Lilias Lesly felt all the importance of her position and the strength of her power to make Callum rue the slight if he really cared aught for her, and to show him her own indifference if he cared naught.
Tam Wilson, in his idleness, his enforced inactivity, had developed a domestic proclivity. He was seldom out of the house, and as the days wore on the desire to go vanished. He was promoted to many domestic duties. He was permitted to stem the wild strawberries that graced the evening meal, and felt a stealthy joy to be berated that he should be so slow, and to be accused of taking toll of the fruit too heartily to solace his labor. It was he who went back and forth in pride to the spring with the pail, who was set to guard the bannocks that they did not burn, and when all was done who lounged on the settle and idly watched her smilingly lay the cloth that he might dine. It was he who beguiled the tedium of the sudden storms in the spring evenings when the clouds shut out the stars and the door shut out the mists and the roof rang with the marshaling of the hosts of the rain and the wind sang like a trump. Then Tam Wilson would stir the fire and tell wonderful stories and sing songs—military songs, gay clashes of the cannikin, and stories of the camp and the field, showing a knowledge so intimate as to cause the lowering Highlander to ask suddenly one night,—
“Ye hae seen service, sir?”
“Aye, sir,” answered Tam Wilson, instantly on his guard. “Foreign service, sir, some years ago. I was at Hastenbeck in ’57, sir, fighting with the Duke of Cumberland.”
Which was true, but as one of the victorious French, and not, as the phrase implied, among the defeated allied forces of the famous English commander.
“And two years later,” Tam Wilson continued with less animation, “I was at the battle of Minden. I have participated in several campaigns.”
Having thus unwittingly enhanced his rival’s consequence, the young Highlander asked no more, but fell back to lower savagely and bite his lips, as perhaps an outward figure of how he was eating his own heart within.
But it was the glamour of the clear vernal moon that bewitched the unstable Tam Wilson, himself with as many phases. He would fall suddenly silent, as under a spell, when its rays aslant, just discerned, would drop down through the window from the west, where it hung little more than a crescent in a pink haze, and draw the outline of a leaf of a chestnut oak, an acorn half developed, and a bare twig upon the rugged puncheon floor of the spence. The girl’s fair face would be vague, ethereal; her hair dimly a-glimmer; her white homespun dress of linen a poetic suggestion in the gloom; her rich voice full of undreamed-of vibrations that he could study with a quickened perception lacking in the bold light of day. The ember faded to ashes; the candles, with the canny Scotch thrift, were not lighted, since the moon lent a torch; the sense of home, of simple, domestic habitudes, was in abeyance with the eclipse of the visible exponents. With its sights and sounds annulled, the abstract interpretations prevailed. The mind rose to loftier conceits. One felt the forces of life—not merely living; the endowment of absolute entity—not sheer individuality, with its limitations, its crippled past, its doubtful, hampered, anxious future. The wind stirred the foliage without and reminded one of the wilderness, the vastness of the world that was made for man; the spring floods of the Tennessee River lifted a voice into the air and thundered primeval truths.
Through this window they could see the mountains—far, near, always in massive majesty. Now a pearly, opalescent mist would glimmer among the domes with the witchery of the moon, and again after it had sunk the skies would be clear and densely instarred. Once a planet, so brilliant as to annul all lesser glories, showed through a great chasm, whose rugged, craggy slopes seemed illuminated in the surrounding gloom with a weird, unaccustomed luster, so different from the familiar light of the moon was the quality of the radiance shed by a star alone. Poetry was in the night—no lyric, no vague, murmurous rune, but with a splendid majesty of rhythm, with an epic grandeur and a meaning of awe that might be felt by the pulses of the heart and suggested to the brain—baffling language, never to be set forth in the paltry medium of mere words.
In differing degrees they all felt its influence, perhaps. Jock Lesly, smoking his pipe with an assiduity which he had learned from the Indians, talked, it is true, but casually, fragmentarily; and Callum heeded enough to respond in kind, with sedulous care for the respect he always maintained toward his host and far awa’ kinsman, but often the matter and manner of his replies showed that thought and heart were not in them. For the others they were silent, save now and again at long intervals a murmur of assent or negation,—a dangerous silence, instinct with a meaning no words might adequately interpret. As one night succeeded another and the moon waxed to fuller splendors and all the woods without were pervaded with that magic sheen which showed such silvery vistas in the dark umbrageous forest, which idealized the aboriginal architecture of Ioco, which made the feathered head and straight form of an Indian passing now and again adown the bosky ways of the woodland town so meet, so apt an incident of the picture, even the Europeans felt an irking in walls and restraint and longed for the freer air, a moonlight stroll, to stand unbonneted beneath the zenith.
“Eh—the wearying wa’s!” exclaimed Lilias one evening, her elbow on the sill of the window and the moonlight in her upturned eyes, with all the wistfulness of a prisoner in their sweet longing. “How thae flowers scent the air!”
“Whist—whist—bairn; oh fie! Ye maun bide here,” said her father in gentle reproof. “The moon will last our time. They’ll hae the moon yet in the lift at Charlestoun, an’ gowans to pu’, I’se warrant, by the time we get there.”
What was this pang in Tam Wilson’s unmannerly heart! He dared not, even in his most remote consciousness, attribute its pain to the French officer, the Sieur de Laroche. And even as the Virginia drover and herdsman he affected to be, did he expect Jock Lesly to keep his daughter here indefinitely? He was almost stunned by the discovery of the sentimental anguish occasioned him by the mere idea of her withdrawal from his sight. He wondered now, however, since his mind was drawn to the subject, that as the object of her wild-goose chase—her father’s supposed illness—was removed she had not already returned. So vital an interest he felt that he was moved to steady his voice, which—oh, how preposterously—trembled in the first words, to ask of her father a definite question concerning her departure, albeit his inquisitiveness in his host’s family affairs ill accorded with his position as a guest laden with many favors. And in fact the query gave rise to some embarrassment.
“The lassie might hae gane back at once,” Jock Lesly said, “but”—taking his pipe out of his mouth and glancing cautiously over his shoulder at the dusky room, still in the brown shadow, although the light of the moon lay in a broad silver square on the floor, so high had it climbed into the sky—“but”—evidently he hardly dared to put his prudence into words; only fragmentarily he explained that Callum and he had agreed that it would be injudicious to suggest the idea of fear or flight by leaving Ioco earlier than was the custom every spring. The Indians—“thae dour deevils”—so delighted in the terror they inspired that they could scarcely refrain from the exercise of its power. The little guard could be easily taken, overcome; and mischievous malice, originating perhaps with the mere intention of giving them a fright, might with the realization culminate in a massacre. The journey was fraught with much peril at best. The Indians always requited every grudge with the utmost rigor, and certainly to pass by those blackened charred skeletons of towns in the ashes of Grant’s fires, still tenantless for the lack of hands to rebuild them, would be a pertinent reminder. The bones of cattle and horses were bleaching along the watercourses. Other and human bones were even yet being slowly gathered from the débris of the battlefields, or on the site of remote hand-to-hand conflicts, and identified and conveyed to the town of their nativity, till one was forever in danger of stumbling on communities in all the gloom of funeral ceremonies when no death was recent—oh, there were grudges on every hand to claim requital, and the Cherokees never considered the identity of the individual who had wrought disaster.
Whereas, Jock Lesly reasoned, if Lilias remained here until the usual time of his semiannual pilgrimage to Charlestown, with all his force of packmen and pack-horses, laden with buckskins for the exchange of British goods, any demonstration on the pack-train would be associated with injury to the trade, the interests of which the Cherokees were always solicitous to conserve; hence it was hardly to be anticipated. The murder of an unofficial party, so to speak, would create scant stir; but an assault upon the pack-train of a licensed trader in his semiannual passage through the country would paralyze the trade for years to come, and necessitate investigation and retribution at the hands of the government.
And this result, the paralysis of the trade and the disaffection of the Cherokees, was precisely what that scheming Laroche had come to the town of Great Tellico on the Tennessee River in the earnest hope of compassing for the French interest. Had he been as true to it as he was accounted, he said to himself, he might have found means to promote this emprise of pursuit and capture and massacre. But it was with the sentiments that properly appertained to Tam Wilson that he perceived the wisdom and applauded the prudence of the proposed course. He resented that Callum MacIlvesty should have aught of weight in these councils, and began to grudge him, with all a lover’s niggardliness, the poor boon of having been her escort hither, and the torment of anxiety Callum must have experienced in his prayerful care in planning for her safety, and his generous courage, prepared to spill the last drop of his blood in her defense.
“That’s why we no keep the door open after dark,” Callum briskly explained. “The Injuns are used to seeing the door closed in winter, an’ they’ll no wonder we hae only the window open now, an’ dinna gae abroad.”
“An’ that’s why lassie Lilias hings here at the window sill, as wishfu’ as ony hempie ahint the bars at a tolbooth,” her father said, reaching out his hand and passing it over the sheen of her golden hair. “I’m thinking, Callum lad, its thae lint-white locks—the bairn’s tow head—that aye gars the Injuns stare. Mind how auld Moy Toy stretched his big black een?”
“Moy Toy?” said Laroche, with a sudden wrench at his heart. He felt as one might, long ago sold to the devil, at the abrupt reappearance of the fiend. “When was he here?”
“When ye were ailin’, lad. And now I come to think of it, the devil’s no sae black as he’s painted, an’ forbye, no sae red.”
He chuckled as he placed the long stem of his pipe in his mouth and talked on languidly as he drew at it. “The creatur seemed kindly, an’ wearyin’ to see you.”
Tam Wilson could have fallen from the settle.
“An’ when we wad na let him at ye on no account to speak till ye, he begged he might hae ae look at ye, an’ when he drew the bed curtains and he had just a gliff, he was satisfied, an’ went awa cannily enough.”
So it was no vision that Laroche had remembered amidst the disjointed phantasmagoria of his delirium. In terrible reality this red savage, with whom he shared the hidden, subtle scheme of the French government against the Carolina colonies and trading interests, had come to his bedside and sought through the mists of his wandering perceptions to sign to him, to promise silence, to counsel secrecy. More distinct than aught else of the images of his fevered brain had been the presentment of that feathered head, that many-lined, keen-featured face, the white curtain in the firm grasp, the intent, warning eye, the finger, mysterious, menacing, laid upon the long, flat, compressed lips. More distinct—since it was real.
Alack! of what avail the gay snatches of a soldier’s song; the tales of the tented field; the kind, sweet, homely present of this simple cotter life; the uplifting awe of nature that must needs follow that fine sweeping of the horizon line of mountain crest against the blue; the breath of the aromatic woodland; the mystery, the magic of the moon; the sheen of the girl’s golden hair—Laroche could not escape his doom. The past laid imperative hands upon the future. The reminder of Moy Toy left him the realization that there was no choice. Moy Toy had come—he would come again, bringing cogent influences of the Franco-Cherokee scheme, the political promises, the actuality of identity, and all a subordinate’s thraldom to the will of an official superior.