Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks

"You were asking about little Beauchamp," she said. "Your grandfather found him somewhere and brought him home with him a long time ago. He has been here ever since. I don't remember how long ago that was. I don't know anything about him before he came. I hardly noticed him, in fact, until after your grandfather's death, when I found him useful in helping me manage the farm."

The grandson looked at the grandmother in silence, paying little heed to what she was saying of the Frenchman. He was wondering why she said "your grandfather" instead of saying "my husband." He had already noted that she invariably said "your father" instead of saying "my son." He knew little of women's ways, having lost his mother before he could remember, so that his life had been mostly among men, and he knew nothing whatever of his grandmother. Yet he felt, nevertheless, that a wife and mother who had loved her husband and her son would not speak of them to her grandson as "your grandfather" and "your father," as his grandmother did. He had also a curious, half-amused, half-indignant feeling that her doing so was intended to make him feel somehow responsible for something which she disliked, and did not wish to assume responsibility for herself.

"I never thought of asking your grandfather where he found him," old lady Gordon went on indifferently. "Most likely it was in New Orleans. The few foreigners in this country mostly came from there. Your grandfather used to go there pretty often with flatboat-loads of horses. But it doesn't matter where Beauchamp came from in the first place. He's mighty useful to me now, wherever it was. I really don't see how I could get along without him. He is a faithful, honest, industrious little soul. Of course that bat in his belfry flies out now and then—as you saw and heard. I try to remember it, but I forget sometimes. And how could a body guard against such an unheard-of thing as that was?" She laughed lazily, fanning herself with the turkey-wing, and rocking slowly and heavily. "He isn't a bit luny about anything else, and he is just as useful to me as if he didn't believe he was the son of Napoleon Bonaparte. I don't care if he thinks he's Julius Cæsar himself. What's the odds—since it never interferes with his work? And his wife's a treasure too, in a different way. There's nothing French or flighty about her. She belongs around here—somewhere in the Pennyroyal Region. I don't know or remember where he picked her up. She is a great, slow-witted, homely, slab-sided drudge, almost twice his size. And such a worker! She never turns her head when he calls her the 'Empress Maria.' She just goes straight along, hoeing the garden and making butter. But—all the same—she thinks the sun rises and sets in him."

The young man laughed. "Fine! And he no doubt thinks she hung the moon."

His grandmother looked at him more attentively than she had done hitherto. She had never been thrown with men of quick mind, and was not accustomed to such ready response. She liked quickness of perception as she liked all bright and pleasant things; and she disliked slowness of understanding as she disliked everything tiresome—like the sybarite that she was.

"Certainly he does. That's always the way," she in turn responded, smilingly. "The worse mated the married seem to be—to outsiders, the better they appear to suit one another. Talk about 'careful, judicious selection!'" Old lady Gordon made an inarticulate but eloquent sound of scornful incredulity. "If you were to rush out there in the big road this minute—with your eyes shut—and seize the first passer-by, you would have just as much chance of knowing what you were doing—what you were getting—as you ever will have!"

Lynn wondered again what sort of a man his grandfather could have been. And his young mother, whom he had never known? Had this cynical old woman disapproved of her, had she been unkind to her? There is always something repellent to wholesome youth in the cynicism of the old. Feeling this, Lynn said rather coldly that he had thought little of such matters, he had been too much absorbed in other things, in laying life plans which must be quite apart from all thoughts of love and marriage for a good many years. The mere mention of these cherished plans brought a flush to his dark cheeks, and caused him to sit more proudly erect. They were seldom far absent from his mind, and the main thought lying nearest the heart is never long unspoken by frank young lips. It was less than a year since he had been graduated from the Harvard Law School, but his deep-laid plans lay far back of his graduation. He could hardly remember when he had not seen the path of his ambition straight and distinct before him. It was a steep one, to be sure, and hard and long, as the road to the heights must ever be. But he had faced all this wholly undaunted, knowing the power within himself, and the additional strength which fortune had given him. Yet he was a modest young fellow, and simple-hearted as well as single-minded. There was in him little vanity in his personal gifts, little pride in his inherited possessions. He simply recognized these as lucky accidents, for which he could claim no credit; holding them merely as the means whereby he might hope, more confidently than most young men, to reach the utmost limit of his ambition. The right to practise law was already his, and the rest of the way upward must open as he pressed earnestly and untiringly onward,—the bar, the bench, the supreme bench, those must be within the winning of any man having fair ability, unbounded capacity for hard work, and abundant means to wait for its fruition; and he knew himself to be possessed of all these. This seemed to him the highest ambition possible to an American, as perhaps it was, in those days when the ermine was still held unspotted, high above the mire of politics.

And yet, notwithstanding these lofty aims and matured plans, Lynn Gordon was very young, hardly more than a boy, after all, in many things, so that he soon began to talk with boyish openness of the herculean task which he thus had set himself in sober earnest. His grandmother listened with such intense interest, such thorough understanding, and such complete sympathy as surprised herself far more than it surprised her grandson. She was taken wholly unawares,—not dreaming of finding him anything like this,—having looked forward to his coming with but lukewarm enthusiasm.

The old who have been disappointed in almost everything that they have ever set their hearts upon, cease, after a while, to expect anything, and learn to shield themselves against further disappointment by real or assumed indifference. Old lady Gordon in her fierce pride had never owned, even to herself, how deep and bitter and lasting had been her disappointment in her own son. It counted for nothing with her that he had been what many would have considered a good man, though not an intellectual man in the estimation of any one. To his mother his goodness had seemed but the negative virtue of an undecided character and a mediocre mind. For the best love of a nature like hers cannot be born of mere toleration, even in a mother's heart. This mother—being what she was—might perhaps have come nearer to forgiving the things which were lacking, had this only child been a daughter. A woman like old lady Gordon never expects much of another woman, even though she be her own daughter. But she always expects everything of every man, especially when he belongs to her own family, and thus it was that old lady Gordon never could wholly forgive her only son. Least of all could she ever quite forgive him for being his father over again; an almost unpardonable offence which other poorly gifted children have committed in the eyes of other embittered mothers, who have illogically expected, as poor old lady Gordon had expected, to gather figs from thistles.

When she had first faced the truth in the prime of life, her fierce pride had raised the iron shield of pretended indifference, and she had upheld it so long that it had gradually grown into the rusty armor of age's insensibility. And yet, through all its steely coldness, the young man's warm words now struck fire. A deep glow came into the impassive, handsome old face, and a warm light into the hard, fine old eyes, as she looked at this spirited, strong, determined, capable young fellow, with his brilliant face aglow, and his intelligent eyes alight. She suddenly felt him to be much more her own spirit and flesh and blood than his father had ever been. It seemed for an instant as if her own strenuous youth, with its impassioned visions of conquest—so long forgotten—came rushing back through the eloquent lips of her grandson.