THE DABNEYS OF DEER TRACE
If you have never had the pleasure of meeting a Southern gentleman of the patriarchal school, I despair of bringing you well acquainted with Major Caspar Dabney until you have summered and wintered him. But the Dabneys of Deer Trace—this was the old name of the estate, and it obtains to this day among the Paradise Valley folk—figure so largely in Thomas Jefferson's boyhood and youth as to be well-nigh elemental in these retrospective glimpses.
To know the Major even a little, you should not refer him to any of the accepted types, like Colonel Carter, of Cartersville, or that other colonel who has made Kentucky famous; this though I am compelled to write it down that Major Caspar wore the soft felt hat and the full-skirted Prince Albert coat, without which no reputable Southern gentleman ever appears in the pages of fiction. But if you will ignore these concessions to the conventional, and picture a man of heroic proportions, straight as an arrow in spite of his sixty-eight years, full-faced, well-preserved, with a massive jaw, keen eyes that have lost none of their lightnings, and huge white mustaches curling upward militantly at the ends you will have the Major's outward presentment.
Notwithstanding, this gives no adequate hint of the contradictory inner man. By turns the most lovingly kind and the most violent, the most generously magnanimous and the most vindictive of the unreconstructed minority, Caspar Dabney was rarely to be taken for granted, even by those who knew him best. Of course, Ardea adored him; but Ardea was his grandchild, and she was wont to protest that she never could see the contradictions, for the reason that she was herself a Dabney.
It was about the time when Thomas Jefferson was beginning to reconsider his ideals, with a leaning toward brass-bound palaces on wheels and dictatorial authority over uniformed lackeys and other of his fellow creatures, that fate dealt the Major its final stab and prepared to pour wine and oil into the wound—though of the balm-pouring, none could guess at the moment of wounding. It was not in Caspar Dabney to be patient under a blow, and for a time his ragings threatened to shake even Mammy Juliet's loyalty—than which nothing more convincing can be said.
"'Fo' Gawd, Mistuh Scipio," she would say, when the master had sworn volcanically at her for the fifth time in the course of one forenoon, "I'se jus' erbout wo'ed out! I done been knowin' Mawstuh Caspah ebber sence I was Ol' Mistis's tiah-'ooman—dat's what she call me in de plantashum days—an' I ain't nev' seen him so fractious ez he been sence dat letter come tellin' him come get dat po' li'l gal-child o' Mawstuh Louis's. Seems lak he jus' gwine r'ar round twel he hu't somebody!"
Scipio, the Major's body-servant, had grown gray in the Dabney service, and he was well used to the master's storm periods.
"Doan' you trouble yo'se'f none erbout dat, Mis' Juliet. Mawstuh Majah tekkin' hit mighty hawd 'cause Mawstuh Louis done daid. But bimeby you gwine see him climm on his hawss an' ride up yondeh to whah de big steamboats comes in an' fotch dat li'l gal-child home; an' den: uck—uh-h! look out, niggahs! dar ain't gwine be nuttin' on de top side dishyer yearth good ernough for li'l Missy. You watch what I done tol' you erbout dat, now!"
Scipio's prophecy, or as much of it as related to the bringing of the orphaned Ardea to Deer Trace Manor, wrought itself out speedily, as a matter of course, though there was a vow to be broken by the necessary journey to the North. At the close of the war, Captain Louis, the Major's only son, had become, like many another hot-hearted young Confederate, a self-expatriated exile. On the eve of his departure for France he had married the Virginia maiden who had nursed him alive after Chancellorsville. Major Caspar had given the bride away,—the war had spared no kinsman of hers to stand in this breach,—and when the God-speeds were said, had himself turned back to the weed-grown fields of Deer Trace Manor, embittered and hostile, swearing never to set foot outside of his home acres again while the Union should stand.
For more than twenty years he kept this vow almost literally. A few of the older negroes, a mere handful of the six score slaves of the old patriarchal days, cast in their lot with their former master, and with these the Major made shift thriftily, farming a little, stockraising a little, and, unlike most of the war-broken plantation owners, clinging tenaciously to every rood of land covered by the original Dabney title-deeds.
In this cenobitic interval, if you wanted a Dabney colt or a Dabney cow, you went, or sent, to Deer Trace Manor on your own initiative, and you, or your deputy, never met the Major: your business was transacted with lean, lantern-jawed Japheth Pettigrass, the Major's stock-and-farm foreman. And although the Dabney stock was pedigreed, you kept your wits about you; else Pettigrass got much the better of you in the trade, like the shrewd, calculating Alabama Yankee that he was.
Ardea was born in Paris in the twelfth year of the exile; and the Virginian mother, pining always for the home land, died in the fifteenth year. Afterward, Captain Louis fought a long-drawn, losing battle, figuring bravely in his infrequent letters to his father as a rising miniature painter; figuring otherwise to the students of the Latin Quarter as "ce pauvre Monsieur D'Aubigné;" leading his little girl back and forth between his lodgings and the studio where he painted pictures that nobody would buy, and eking out a miserable existence by giving lessons in English when he was happy enough to find a pupil.
The brave letters imposed on the Major, as they were meant to do; and Ardea, the loyal, happening on one of them in her first Deer Trace summer, read it through with childish sobs and never thereafter opened her lips on the story of those distressful Paris days. Later she understood her father's motive better: how he would not be a charge on an old man rich in nothing but ruin; and the memory of the pinched childhood became a thing sacred.
How the Major, a second Rip Van Winkle, found his way to New York, and to the pier of the incoming French Line steamer, must always remain a mystery. But he was there, with the fierce old eyes quenched and swimming and the passionate Dabney lips trembling strangely under the great mustaches, when the black-frocked little waif from the Old World ran down the landing stage and into his arms. Small wonder that they clung to each other, these two at the further extremes of three generations; or that the child opened a door in the heart of the fierce old partizan which was locked and doubly barred against all others.
As may be imagined, the Major got away from Yankeeland with his charge as soon as a train could be made to serve; and he was grim and forbidding to all and sundry until the Cumberland Mountains had displaced the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge on the western horizon. Indeed, the grimness,—to all save Ardea,—persisted quite to and through the transformed and transforming city at the eastern foot of Lebanon. Major Caspar was not in tune with the bravura of modern progress, and if he had been, his hatred of Northern importations of whatever nature would have made and kept him hostile.
But when the ancient carriage, with Scipio and Ardea's one small steamer trunk on the box, had topped the shrugged shoulder of Lebanon, and that view which we have seen from the summit of Thomas Jefferson's high rock among the cedars opened out before the eyes of the wondering child, the Major grew eloquent.
"Look youh fill, my deah child; thah it lies—God's country, and youh's and mine; the fines', the most inspiring, the most beautiful land the sun eveh shone on! And whilst you are givin' praise to youh Makeh for creatin' such a Gyarden of Eden, don't forget to thank him on youh bended knees for not putting anything oveh yondeh in ouh home lot to tempt these house-buildin', money-makin', schemin' Yankees that are swarming again oveh the land like anotheh plague of Egyptian locus'es."
"These—Yankees?" queried Ardea. In his later years the exiled Captain Louis had remembered only that he was an American, and his child knew no North nor South.
The Major did not explain. Not that there were any compunctions of conscience concerning the planting of the seed of sectionalism in this virgin soil, quite the contrary. He abstained because he made sure that time, and the Dabney blood, would do it better.
So he talked to the small one of safely prehistoric things, showing her the high mountain battle-field where John Sevier had broken the power of the savage Chickamaugas, and, as the carriage rolled down toward the head of Paradise, the tract of land where the first Dabney had sent his ax-men to blaze the trees for his lordly boundaries.
It was all new and very strange to a child whose only outlook on life had been urban and banal. She had never seen a mountain, and nothing more nearly approaching a forest than the parked groves of the Bois de Boulogne. Would it be permitted that she should sometimes walk in the woods of the first Dabney, she asked, with the quaint French twisting of the phrases that she was never able fully to overcome.
It would certainly be permitted; more, the Major would make her a deed to as many of the forest acres as she would care to include in her promenade. By which we see that the second part of Unc' Scipio's prophecy was finding its fulfilment in the beginning.
How the French-born child fitted into the haphazard household at Deer Trace Manor, with what struggles she came through the inevitable attack of homesickness, and how Mammy Juliet and every one else petted and indulged her, are matters which need not be dwelt on. But we shall gladly believe that she was too sensible, even at the early and tender age of ten, to be easily spoiled.
Many foolish things have been said and written about the wax-like quality of a child's mind; how each new impression effaces the old, and how character in permanence is not to be looked for until the bones have stopped growing. Yet who has not known criminals at twelve, and saints and angels, and wise men and women—in fine, the entire gamut of humanity—in short frocks or knee-breeches?
Ardea, child of adversity and the Paris ateliers, brought one lasting memory up out of those early Deer Trace Manor years: she was always immeasurably older than such infants as Mammy Juliet and Uncle Scipio. And this also she remembered: that when these and all the others, including her grandfather and Japheth Pettigrass, were busily leveling all the barriers of restraint for her, she had built some of her own and set herself the task of living within them.
I am sure she began to realize, almost at the first, that she must rise superior to the Dabney weakness, which, as exemplified by the Major, was ungoverned, and perhaps ungovernable, temper. At all events, she never forgot a summer day soon after her arrival when she first saw her grandfather transformed into a frenzied madman.
He was sitting on the wide portico, smoking his long-stemmed pipe and directing Japheth Pettigrass, who was training the great crimson-rambler rose that ran well up to the eaves. Ardea, herself, was on the lawn, playing with her grandfather's latest gift, a huge, solemn-eyed Great Dane, so she did not see the man who had dismounted at the gate and walked up the driveway until he was handing his card to her grandfather.
When she did see him, she looked twice at him; not because he was trigly clad in brown duck and tightly-buttoned service leggings, but because he wore his beard trimmed to a point, after the manner of the students in the Latin Quarter, and so was reminiscent of things freshly forsaken.
She had succeeded in making the Great Dane carry her on his back quite all the way around the circular coleus bed when the explosion took place. There was a startling thunderclap of fierce words from the portico, and she slipped from the dog's back and stared wide-eyed. Her grandfather was on his feet, towering above the visitor as if he were about to fall on and crush him.
"Bring youh damned Yankee railroad through my fields and pastchuhs, suh? Foul the pure, God-given ai-ah of this peaceful Gyarden of Eden with youh dust-flingin', smoke-pot locomotives? Not a rod, suh! not a foot or an inch oveh the Dabney lands! Do I make it plain to you, suh?"
"But Major Dabney—one moment; this is purely a matter of business; there is nothing personal about it. Our company is able and willing to pay liberally for its right of way; and you must remember that the coming of the railroad will treble and quadruple your land values. I am only asking you to consider the matter in a business way, and to name your own price."
Thus the smooth-spoken young locating engineer in brown duck, serving as plowman for his company. But there be tough old roots in some soils, roots stout enough to snap the colter of the commercializing plow,—as, for example, in Paradise Valley, owned, in broken areas, principally by an unreconciled Major Dabney.
"Not anotheh word, or by Heaven, suh, you'll make me lose my tempah! You add insult to injury, suh, when you offeh me youh contemptible Yankee gold. When I desiah to sell my birthright for youh beggahly mess of pottage, I'll send a black boy in town to infawm you, suh!"
It is conceivable that the locating engineer of the Great Southwestern Railway Company was younger than he looked; or, at all events, that his experience hitherto had not brought him in contact with fire-eating gentlemen of the old school. Else he would hardly have said what he did.
"Of course, it is optional with you, Major Dabney, whether you sell us our right of way peaceably or compel us to acquire it by condemnation proceedings in the courts. As for the rest—is it possible that you don't know the war is over?"
With a roar like that of a maddened lion the Major bowed himself, caught his man in a mighty wrestler's grip and flung him broadcast into the coleus bed. The words that went with the fierce attack made Ardea crouch and shiver and take refuge behind the great dog. Japheth Pettigrass jumped down from his step-ladder and went to help the engineer out of the flower bed. The Major had sworn himself to a stand, but the fine old face was a terrifying mask of passion.
"The old firebrand!" the engineer was muttering under his breath when Pettigrass reached him; but the foreman cut him short.
"You got mighty little sense, looks like, to me. Stove up any?"
"Nothing to hurt, I guess."
"Well, your hawss is waitin' for ye down yonder at the gate, and I don't b'lieve the Major is allowin' to ask ye to stay to supper."
The railroad man scowled and recovered his dignity, or some portion of it.
"You're a hospitable lot," he said, moving off toward the driveway. "You can tell the old maniac he'll hear from us later."
Pettigrass stooped with his back to the portico and patted the dog.
"Don't you look so shuck up, little one," he whispered reassuringly to Ardea. "There ain't nothin' goin' to happen, worse than has happened, I reckon." But Ardea was mute.
When the engineer had mounted and ridden away down the pike, the foreman straightened himself and faced about. The Major had dropped into his big arm-chair and was trying to relight his pipe. But his hands shook and the match went out.
Pettigrass moved nearer and spoke so that the child should not hear. "If you run me off the place the nex' minute, I'm goin' to tell you you ort to be tolerably 'shamed of yourse'f, Maje' Dabney. That po' little gal is scared out of a year's growin', right now."
"I know, Japheth; I know. I'm a damned old heathen! For, insultin' as he was, the man was for the time bein' my guest, suh—my guest!"
"I'm talkin' about the little one—not that railroader. So far as I know, he earned what he got. I allowed they'd make some sort of a swap with you, so I didn't say anything when they was layin' out their lines thoo' the hawss-lot and across the lower corn-field this mornin'—easy, now; no more r'arin' and t'arin' with that thar little gal not a-knowin' which side o' the earth's goin' to cave in next!"
The Major dropped his pipe, laid fast hold of the arms of his chair, and breathed hard.
"Laid out theyuh lines—across my prope'ty? Japheth, faveh me by riding down to the furnace and askin' Caleb Gordon if he will do me the honor to come up heah—this evenin', if he can. I—I—it's twenty yeahs and mo' since I've troubled the law cou'ts of ouh po', Yankee-ridden country with any affai-ah of mine; and now—well, I don't know—I don't know," with a despondent shake of the leonine head.
After Pettigrass had gone on his errand the Major rose and went unsteadily into the house. Then, and not till then, Ardea got up on her knees and put her arms around the neck of the Great Dane.
"O, Hector!" she whispered; "me, I am Dabney, too! Once the gamins killed a poor little cat of mine; and I forgot God—the good God—and said wicked things; and I could have torn them into little, little pieces! But we—we shall be very good and patient after this, won't we, Hector—you and me—no, you and I? What is it when you lick my face that way? Does it mean that you understand?"