Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks

Nothing could have been more like her, more entirely characteristic of her whole life, than that this question, which would have been the first with many, should have been the last with her. Yet now that it had occurred to her, she held her breath with fear. If it should be more than the amount of the whole pension,—more than she had or ever hoped to have in the wide world,—what should she do then?

"It was drawn for a hundred dollars. I have not yet calculated the interest," the judge answered reluctantly.

Miss Judy gasped and turned white; the earth seemed suddenly sliding beneath her feet. Then in another instant a scarlet tide swept the paleness from her alarmed face. The blood in her gentle veins was, after all, the blood of a soldier, and she fought on to the last trench.

"It must be paid, as soon as possible," she said formally, as if speaking to a stranger; but she laid her trembling little hand in John Stanley's warm, firm clasp with a look of perfect love and trust before she turned from him and went on her troubled way homeward.

He stood still for a moment when she had left him, gazing after the little figure in black fluttering against the warm wind. Then he turned slowly and went back to his seat on the bench, and the routine of the court forthwith began to drone throughout the long, hot day. A feeling of foreboding, a vague dread of some unknown calamity, had hung over him when he had first awakened on that morning; as though a formless warning had come through the mists of unremembered dreams. He was not able to cast off the depression which it caused, and the feeling deepened with the dragging of the heavy hours. But it wavered still without distinct form. It had nothing to do with his hourly, momentary expectation of seeing the Spaniard's threatening face and wild eyes confronting him through the gloom of the low-ceiled court-room. He was used to the sight and he never had feared it, save as he always feared himself and the enforced shedding of blood. The only unusual thing was that Alvarado should not be in his accustomed place that day, as he invariably had been heretofore, whenever the judge had been on the bench; but this fact gave the judge no uneasiness, he hardly thought of it at all, for his mind was filled with other things. He leaned his aching head on his hand as the business of the court droned dully along and the heat grew steadily greater. He thought, vaguely, that it must be the heat and the scent of the catalpa flowers which weighed so heavily upon him. For a few large, white bells swung uncommonly late amongst the heavy, dusty foliage of the catalpa trees, crowding close to the deep windows, darkening the court-room and shutting out every breath of the fitful, sultry breeze.

He left the court-house as soon as he could get away, and strolled slowly toward the farthest, highest hillside, whither he often went at the close of a tiring day. The warm wind had died out of the valley, but the air would, so he thought, be cooler on the hilltop; a cool breeze nearly always stirred the tall cedars of the graveyard, as if with the chill air of the tomb. He found the gate open, as it always was. There was never any need for closing it. Within were no gilded bones to be stolen: without were no inhuman robbers of graves. So that here those who rested within had nothing more to fear; and those who strove without could not be barred when they also came to stay.

Leaning on the fence, he turned and looked down upon the drowsing village; at the men, white and black, who were going homeward with the unhasting pace of the country; at the black women with milk-pails, crossing the back lots whence the cows were calling; at the farmers, already far in the distance, riding away from court; at the great road wagons, with their mighty teams of four and six horses. These great wagons were the huge ships of this vast inland sea of wheat and corn and tobacco, and now but lately launched, heavy-laden, with the newly garnered grain.

And then, as his wandering, absent gaze fell near by, upon the path from the village leading up the hillside, he saw that Lynn and Doris were slowly climbing it after him toward the graveyard. He had met the young man at the tavern on the previous day, and he had known his father. He had always known Doris in the distant way in which he knew all the people of Oldfield, with the sole exception of Miss Judy. He therefore greeted them with the formal courtesy that he gave to every one; and he talked with them for a few moments, in his grave, impersonal way, but he was disappointed in his wish for solitude, and he lingered no longer than good breeding required. He did not stay to go over to an isolated corner of the graveyard as he had intended, to see if the tangle of weeds and briers, which makes the desolation of neglected burial-grounds, had been taken away from one solitary grave, as it always was when he came and never at any other time. He could not do this in the presence of any one, so that, lifting his hat with a faint smile, he now turned his face toward the village and the tavern.

At the foot of the hill he happened upon the little Frenchman, who sat groaning by the roadside, unable to walk because he had wrenched his ankle, spraining it very badly, in getting over the fence.

"But it is not that I do care for the pain. Bah!" cried monsieur, with a Gallic gesture and an inflection that belonged to no nation and was wholly his own. "It is—hélas!—the ploughing for the spring wheat. A man may not hobble after the plough, neither may he follow with crutches."