Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks

THE UPAS TREE

When Miss Judy, thus urged, set the day for the tea-party, naming even the hour, she forgot for the moment that the higher court of the district convened its summer session on the day which she had appointed. And this fact made it impossible to give the party on that day. Not because she had ever had or ever expected to have anything to do with any court of law—for coming events do not always cast their shadows before—but because she expected a visit from Judge Stanley on the evening of his first day in town. For she always knew just when to look for him; during many years he had come on the same day of the month, at the same hour and almost at the same minute. And Miss Judy had through all those years been in the habit of making certain delightful preparations for his visit, which nothing but her love and anxiety for Doris ever could have caused her to forget, and which not even that could now induce her to forego.

She looked forward from one of these visits to the next as to the greatest honor, and, after her love for Doris and her tenderness for her sister, the greatest happiness of her life. She knew how great a man this quiet, gray-haired, famous jurist was to a wider world than she had ever known; and the flattery of his open and exclusive devotion filled her gentle heart with sweet and tender pride. But there was something far tenderer and sweeter than pride in the feeling with which Miss Judy awaited the coming of John Stanley; for he was always John Stanley, and never the famous judge, to her. She had loved him before he became a judge, even before he had become a man. She had learned to love him soon after his coming to Oldfield, when he was a mere lad, and her own youth was not long past. She had loved him then as a young and happy mother loves a son who is all that the happiest, proudest mother could wish—noble, gifted, handsome, spirited, fearless—loving him as such a mother loves such a son when they are young together. She loved him afterward with a still more tender love—when, in the space of a pistol shot, he had changed from a light-hearted boy into a sad, silent man—loving him then as a tender mother loves a son who has suffered and grown strong.

His blamelessness in the hideous tragedy which had darkened his life, and the nobility with which he bore himself throughout the monstrous ordeal of blood, claimed all that was strongest and finest in Miss Judy's nature, and touched her romantic imagination as all the brilliant success which came to him later never could have done. It was not for such innocent gentleness as Miss Judy's ever fully to understand the meaning of the tragedy; to comprehend how much more terrible it was than the cruelest destiny of any one man, how much farther reaching through the past and the future than the length of any one man's life. John Stanley himself understood it at the time but dimly. Only by degrees did he come to see the truth: that his forced taking of the life of a man whom he did not know, whom he never had seen or heard of, had not been simply an unavoidable necessity in self-defence, as he had tried to believe,—nor an accident, as the verdict of the law and public opinion had decreed, seeing that it was accidental only so far as his instrumentality was concerned; that he himself was not the victim of chance—but the helpless transmitter of traditional bloodshed.

It was revealed to him at the trial which acquitted him, that the man whom he thus had been compelled to kill had been driven—ay, even hounded—by public opinion into seeking the life of the man who had taunted him, and in so doing into finding his own death at the hands of a lad who had no quarrel with any one. It was then shown him that the slain and the slayer were equal sacrifices to this monstrous tradition for the shedding of blood. So that, as he began to see, and as he continually looked back upon this blighting tragedy of his boyhood, it thus became—to John Stanley, who was a thinker, and a christian, even in his youth—infinitely more terrible than any really accidental or necessary taking of another's life would have been. He saw in this monstrous deed which he had been forced to commit, the direct result of a tradition of bloody vengeance: the unmistakable outcome of generations of false thinking, of false believing, of false teaching, of false example, of false following; all the rank growth from one poisonous root, all deeply rooted in a false sense of "honor," which, planted by the Power of Evil, had grown into the very life of the people, until it now towered, a deadly upas tree, darkening and poisoning that whole sunny country, almost as darkly and killingly as its murderous kind had ever darkened and poisoned beautiful Corsica.

When that awful truth first became plain to John Stanley—plain as the handwriting on the wall—it altered not only his character, but the whole trend of his life. From the day that he had first seen it through the bloody tragedy of his youth, John Stanley had watched the growth of the poison tree with ever deepening horror. He had seen its deadly shade pass the limits of the wrong which could never be washed out by the shedding of all the blood that ever flowed in human veins; he had watched its creeping on to trivial and even fancied offences, till it touched trifling discourtesies, till it reached at last inconceivably small things—the too quick lifting of a hat to a lady, the too slow response to the bow of another man—causing trifles light as air to be measured against a human life. As John Stanley thus looked on,—horror-stricken,—at the working of this deadly poison throughout the body of the commonwealth, he came gradually to believe it to be even more deadly and more widespread than perhaps it really was. His dread and fear of any form of violence, his horror of any lightness in the holding of life, his abhorrence of bloodshed under any provocation, grew with this morbid brooding through sad and lonely years, until they imperceptibly went beyond the bounds of perfect sanity, passing into the fixed idea which much lonely thinking brings into many sad lives.

And John Stanley's life was still lonely, notwithstanding his late marriage. Miss Judy felt this to be true, although she could not have told how she knew. It always had been a source of distress to her that she could know nothing of his wife, the beautiful, brilliant woman of fashion whom he had married only a few years before. Miss Judy thought wistfully that she would know why John seemed still so sad and lonely if she could only see his wife. But the judge's fine-lady wife apparently found no inducement to come to Oldfield; so that Miss Judy was compelled to be content with asking how she was, whenever John came, and with hearing him say every time that she was well—and nothing more.

But Miss Judy was not thinking about the judge's wife on that midsummer night. It was enough for her perfect happiness merely to have him there, settled for the evening in her father's arm-chair, which was fetched out of the parlor for him and never for any one else. It was delight only to look at him, smiling at her across the passage—wherein they sat because it was cooler than the room—quite like old times. He was a very handsome, very tall man, of slender but muscular build, stooping slightly from his great height through much bending over books. His head was fine, with a noble width of brow; his thick hair, once very dark, was now silvered about the temples; but his eyes were as dark as ever, and undimmed in their clear, steady brightness. His face was sensitive in its clean-shaven delicacy, and pale with the pallor of the student. It was not so sad though on that night as usual, nor nearly so grave. He was rested and soothed and cheered—this famous man of large affairs—by listening to Miss Judy's gentle twittering, so kind, so loving. It pleased him to see the little things that she had done in preparation for his coming. He smiled at the sight of the small basket of rosy peaches daintily set about with maidenhair fern. He did not know that in order to get the fruit Miss Judy had made a hard bargain with the thrifty Mrs. Beauchamp, who had the only early peaches,—a very hard bargain whereby the little lady went without butter on her bread for a good many days. Nor did he suspect that she had climbed to the top of the steepest hillside trying to reach the woods, regardless of the fluttering of her heart; or that she had ventured bravely even into the shadiest dell, heedless of her fear of snakes, in order to get his favorite fern to wreathe his favorite fruit. Perhaps no man ever knows what the pleasing of him costs a loving woman; certainly no loving woman ever takes the cost into account.

But then, on the other hand, perhaps no woman, however loving, ever can fully realize how much unstinted tenderness may mean to the greatest, the gravest, the most reserved of men, when he has never found it in his own home or anywhere else in all the cold world, which he has conquered by giving up the warmth and sweetness of life—as they must be given up by every conqueror of the region of perpetual ice. Miss Judy's gentle love now enfolded him like a soft, warm mantle, so that the chill at his heart melted away. It was then very sweet on that fragrant midsummer night, to this sad and weary man, to hear Miss Judy babbling gently on. He did not always listen to what she said; but the sound of her soft voice seemed for the moment to take away all weariness and pain, as she talked to him of the people and the things that he had known in his youth. She said about the same over and over, to be sure, almost every time he came, but that made no difference whatever; it was the sweetness of her spirit, the peace of her presence, that the great judge craved and loved and rested upon.

"And now, John, here are a few peaches—just the kind you like," Miss Judy said, in her artlessly artful little way, as if the pretty basket had only that moment fallen from the clouds—as she always said when he had sat a certain length of time in her father's chair in the coolest corner of the passage.