The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

The mountaineer, lifting his chin, took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly between his lips.

"Well, stranger," he drawled, "I reckon God Almighty owned hit before that."

"You mean," said the Duke, "that this whole estate was then wilderness as I see it here?"

"Jist as the blessed God made hit," replied the man, "before He rested on the seventh day."

The Duke understood now something of the plan of this American Childers. He had secured, here on the coast, a great tract of wild, primeval forest, and was making of it an estate suited to his fancy. He smiled at the assurance of one assuming a labor so gigantic. Either the man was a dreamer, forgetting the brevity of life, or he was Pharaoh, or more likely yet, a fool. It took three hundred years to make a garden; and yet here was a great wilderness cleaned of its fallen timber and climbing through the mountain was this road—the work surely of no little man steeped in fancies. The Duke, pricked to wonder, strove to draw from the mountaineer some idea of this man, but he got in answer a jumble of extravagance and prophecy, drawled out in a medley of idiom, imagery, and scrappy biblical excerpts.

Childers was like those seditious persons who had builded the Tower of Tongues, like that one who had embellished Babylon; he had come into the West, got this great tract of virgin country, "an' set up shop agin', God Almighty!" The man made a great sweeping gesture, covering the mountains to the east. Who was Childers to change what God was pleased with? This night, or on some night desperately near, his soul would be required of him. He was over eighty. Did he hope to live forever? He had finished the term allotted man to live, and by reason of strength, had made it fourscore years. Did he think that Death, riding his pale horse, had forgotten the road leading to his door? Pride goeth before destruction! But this was something more than pride. It was a sort of sedition—a sedition that Jehovah would put down with the weapon of iron and the steel bow.

The declamation amused and puzzled the Duke of Dorset. He attributed the motive of it to the universal dislike of the peasant for the landed proprietor, to the distress with which the aborigine sees his forest felled and his rivers bridged. But the speech of it; the biblical words with which it was clothed; the intimate knowledge of the Hebrew Scripture which it indicated, was a thing, in this illiterate mountaineer, wholly incredible.

The man was swinging forward with long strides; the gunny sack across his shoulder; the mule's bridle over the crook of his arm; his tanned face stolid as leather. The Duke, walking beside him, put the question moving in his mind.

"My friend," he said, "what trade is it that you follow?"

The man walked on a moment, as though uncertain in what catalogue of trades he should be listed. He put up his hand and loosed the white button on his shirt, leaving his broad-corded throat, tanned like his face, open to the air. He thrust his thumb under his woolen brace, lifted it slowly, and moved his thumb down from the shoulder to the trousers button. Finally he spoke, coupling his vocations, since he was not able to say that either occupied exclusively his talents.