Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks

"You mean the old gentleman whom I saw yesterday? That stately, beautiful old man with the silver hair curling on his shoulders, and wearing the long black cloak?" Lynn said.

"That's the man, but I wish you might have seen him in those days. He was just about as fiery as Alvarado, though in a slightly more civilized way, and he never wanted Alice to have anything to do with him. He never wanted the Spaniard around his house at all. No man like Colonel Fielding—English in every drop of blood—ever wants anything to do with any foreigner. But there's no use in trying to manage a girl like Alice Fielding,—a little, soft, say-nothing, characterless thing,—there's nothing in her strong enough to get a good firm hold on. She's blown like a feather this way and that way by the strongest influence—good or bad—that she falls under. You'll find the kind, and plenty of them, all over the world. The Fielding negroes used to say Alvarado threw a spell over Alice. I presume he did, but it was the spell which that sort of man always throws over that sort of girl. She was a flighty, vain little creature, and flattered of course by his being so madly in love. That was plain enough for anybody to see. Nobody ever doubted that he loved her. But she had never thought of marrying him until she was terrified into doing it. She was probably in love with John Stanley so far as she was capable of loving any man. It was said they were upon the verge of becoming engaged to be married. I don't know about that, but there was no doubt of John's loving her. It took him years to get over her marriage to Alvarado."

"I don't understand. Why did she marry him?" asked Lynn.

"Through sheer fright mixed with a kind of silly romance, as nearly as anybody ever could make out. It happened in this way. There was some kind of a party at Colonel Fielding's. There always was something going on while his girls were young and gay; and there is plenty of room in the jailer's residence for any kind of entertainment—and many's the ball and dinner they gave! That night Alvarado was one of the guests, as he often was. Nobody knows what led up to the outbreak, but he suddenly fell on the floor in convulsions, stiff and stark and black in the face, and actually foaming at the mouth—a sight, they said, to make the strongest shudder. The doctor was hurriedly called out of the supper room and at once shut the door of the room in which Alvarado was lying—at the point of death as everybody thought. As the guests huddled together whispering, it flew all over the house that he had taken poison and that he refused to take an antidote unless Alice would consent to marry him. Your father was there and saw her go into the room, and he said afterwards that she looked as much like a dead woman then, as she did a year later when she lay in her coffin. No one, except those who were in the room, ever knew what happened, but the colonel presently came to the door and sent for the preacher. It was a dancing party, or he would have been there already, as almost everybody else was. But it didn't take long to fetch him, and he married Alvarado to Alice Fielding then and there."

"And John Stanley?" inquired Lynn.

"He knew nothing of the marriage till he came to see Alice on the next Sunday as he always did. He didn't live in Oldfield at that time. He had gone away soon after another unlucky affair which most men wouldn't have worried about, but which seems to have had a lifelong effect upon him. He was always a sensitive, high-strung fellow and deeply religious—full of lofty ideals and all that sort of thing—even then, when he was hardly more than a lad. He had come here only a week or so before to take an assistant's place in the clerk's office. He was a cousin of Jack Mitchell, the county clerk—that's the way he happened to come. Well, Jack Mitchell was a politician and as high a talker and as low a doer as was to be found betwixt the Cumberland and Green River, which is saying a good deal. I reckon he couldn't be more than matched in these days. I haven't noticed much change in politicians during the last quarter of a century. Jack had been elected by a large majority, and was reëlected, and had his hand fairly on a higher rung of the political ladder, when he made a false step and slipped. The trouble came from a foolish quarrel caused by drink. Jack Mitchell always was quarrelsome when in liquor, and on that day he happened to accuse another Kentuckian of cowardice. That, of course, was crossing the dead-line. It was just the same then that it is now and always will be, till our blood and training are different. And the fact that the man who had been branded as a coward was a worthless loafer, made no more difference then then it would make now. The wretch who had been 'insulted' rose up, as soon as he was sober enough, and borrowed a shot-gun and went to wipe out his dishonor, just as if he had been a real gentleman. Jack, with his usual luck, was not in the office when his enemy, who was still drinking heavily, suddenly appeared in the doorway, levelling the gun. He was not so drunk, though, that he didn't know that he was aiming at a boy whom he had never seen before, in place of the man whom he had come to kill. He knew it well enough, for he muttered something about killing the young one if he couldn't get the old one. But John Stanley was too quick for him. Jack's pistol lay handy, as it always did, as pistols always do, hereabouts. The boy hardly knew what was happening before he had shot dead a man whose name he didn't know—a man whom he had never seen or heard of before."

"What a strange story," Lynn said. "I think I have never heard a stranger one."

"Oh, I don't know about it's being strange. Of course somebody had to be killed," old lady Gordon responded indifferently.

"Somebody had to be killed—and why?" repeated Lynn, wonderingly; for, although to the manner born he was not to the manner bred.

"Oh, well, when things get into that shape somebody's bound to be killed! When a Kentuckian is accused of cowardice he has to kill somebody to prove his courage. There's nothing else to be done—apparently. And it might as well have been Betts as anybody else."