“One thing,”—laying his hand on Andrew's shoulder—“under no circumstances, not even to save your own life, must you slay Robards. You might better slay Rachel; since his death by your hand spells her destruction. Good people would avoid her as though she were the plague. Never more, on the Cumberland, should she hold up her head.”
That night the fear-eaten Robards solves the situation which his crazy jealousy has created. He starts secretly for the North. He tells two or three that he will never more call the blooming Rachel wife.
For a month there is much silence, and some restraint, at the widow Donelson's. This condition wears away; and, while no one says so, everybody feels relaxed and relieved by the absence of the drunken Robards. No one names him, and there is tacit agreement to forget the creature. The drunken Robards, however, has no notion of being forgotten. Word comes down from above that he will return and reclaim his wife. At this the black eyes of Rachel sparkle dangerously.
“That monster,” she cries, “shall never kiss my lips, nor so much as touch my hand again!”
By advice of her mother, and to avoid the drunken Robards—who promises his hateful appearance with each new day—the blooming Rachel resolves to take passage on a keel boat for Natchez. Andrew, in deep concern, declares that he shall accompany her. He says that he goes to protect her from those Indians who make a double fringe of savage peril along the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. Overton, the taciturn, shrugs his shoulders; the keel-boat captain is glad to have with him the steadiest rifle along the Cumberland, and says as much; the blooming Rachel is glad, but says so only with her eyes; the Nashville good people say nothing, winking in silence sophisticated eyes.
Robards the drunken, now when they are gone, plays the ill-used husband to the hilts. He seems to revel in the rôle, and, to keep it from cooling in interest, petitions the Virginia Legislature for a divorce. In course of time the news climbs the mountains, and descends into the Cumberland, that the divorce is granted; while similar word floats down to Natchez with the keel boats.
The slow story of the blooming Rachel's release reaches our two in Natchez. Thereupon Andrew leads Rachel the blooming before a priest; and the priest blesses them, and names them man and wife. That autumn they are again at the widow Donelson's; but the blooming Rachel, once Mrs. Robards, is now Mrs. Jackson.
Slander is never the vice of a region that goes armed to the teeth. Thus it befalls that now, when the two are back on the Cumberland, those sophisticated ones forget to wink. There comes not so much as the arching of a brow; for no one is so careless of life as all that. The whole settlement can see that the dangerous Andrew is watching with those steel-blue eyes.
At the first suggestion that his Rachel has been guilty of wrong, he will be at the throat of her maligner like a panther.
Time flows on, and a horrible thing occurs. There comes a new word that no divorce was granted by that Legislature; and this new word is indisputable. There is a divorce, one granted by a court; but, as an act of separation between Rachel the blooming and the drunken Robards, that decree of divorce is long months younger than the empowering act of the Richmond Legislature, which mistaken folk regarded as a divorce. The good priest's words, when he named our troubled two as man and wife, were ignorantly spoken. During months upon months thereafter, through all of which she was hailed as “Mrs. Jackson,” the blooming Rachel was still the wife of the drunken Robards.