Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 115, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 May 1910 — THE QUICKENING [ARTICLE]

THE QUICKENING

FRANCIS LYNDE

CHAPTER 111. (Continued.) Thomas Jefferson, awe-struck and gaping, found himself foot-loose for a time in the Marlboro rotunda while his father talked with a man who wanted to bargain for the entire output of the Paradise furnace by the year. The commercial transaction touched him lightly; but the moving groups, the imported bell-boys, the-tesseTated floors, fres- ’ t*?ed celling furnittire—these bit this be South Tredegar, the place that had - hitherto figured chiefly to him as “courj-day” town and the residence of his preacher uncle? It seemed hugely incredible. After the conference with the iron buyer they crossed the street to the railway station; and again Thomas Jefferson was footloose while his father was closeted with some one in the manager’s office. An express train, with hissing airbrakes, Solomon-magnificent sleepingcars, and a locomotive large enough to •wallow whole the small affair that used to bring the once-a-day train from Atlanta, had just backed in, and the boy took its royal measure with eager and curious eyes, walking slowly up one side of it and down the' other.. At the rear of the string of Pullmans was a private car, with a deep observation platform, much polished brass railing, and sundry other luxurious appointments, apparent even to the eye of unsophistication. Thomas Jefferson spelled the name in the medallion, “Psyche”— spelled it without trying to pronounce it —and then turned his ’attention to the people who were descending the rubber-carpeted steps and grouping themselves under the direction of a tall man who reminded Thomas Jefferson of his Uncle Silas with an indescribable something left out of his face. “As I was about to say, General, thit •tation building is one of the relics. You mustn’t judge South Tredegar—our new South Tredegar—by this. Eh? I beg your pardon, Mrs. Vanadam? Oh, the hotel? It is just across the •treet, and a very good house; remarkably good, indeed, all things considered. In fast, we’re quite proud of the Marlboro.” -- < , One of the younger women smiled. “How enthusiastic you are, Mr. Farley. I thought we had outgrown all that —\\e moderns.” "But, nty dear Miss Elleroy, if you could know what we have to be enthusiastic about down here! Why, these mountains we’ve been passing through for the last six hours are simply so many vast treasure-houses; coal at the top, iron at the bottom, and enough of both to keep the world’s industries going for ages! There’s millions in them!” Thomas Jefferson overheard without understanding, but his eyes served a better purpose. Away back in the line of the Scottish Gordons there must have been an ancestor with the seer’s gift of insight, and some drop or two of his blood had come down to this •ober-faced country boy searching the faces of the excursionists for his cue of fellowship or antipathy. For the sweet-voiced young woman called Miss Elleroy there was love at first sight. For a severe, beskliked Mrs Vanadam there was awe. .For the portly General with mutton-chop whiskers, overlooking eyes and the air if a dictator, there was awe, also, not unmingled with envy. For the tall man in the frock-coat, whose face reminded him of his Uncle Silas, there had been shrinking antagonism at the first glance—which keen first impression was presently dulled and all but effaced by the enthusiasm, the suave tongue, and the benignant manner. Which proves that insight, like the film of a recording camera, should have the dark shutter snapped on it if the picture is to be preserved. Thomas Jefferson made way when the party, marshaled by the enthusiast, prepared for fts descent on the Marlboro. Afterward, the royalties having departed and a good-natured porter giving him- leave, he was at liberty to examine the wheeled palace -it near-hand, and even to climb into the vestibule for a peep inside. Therewith, castles in the air began to rear themselves, tower on wall. -Here was the very sky-reaching summit of all things desirable; to have one’s own brass-bound hotel on wheels; to come and go at will; to give curt orders to a respectful and uniformed porter, as the awe-inspiring gentleman with the mutton-chop whiskers had done. At the highest point on the hunched shoulder of the mountain Thomus Jefferson twisted himself in the buggy •eat for a final backward look into the valley of new marvels. The summer day was graying to its twilight, and a light base was stealing out of the wooded ravines and across the river. From the tall chimneys of a rollingmill a dense column of smoke was ascending, and at the psychological moment the slag flare from an iron-fur-nace changed the overhanging cloud Into a fiery aegis. Having no symbolism save that of Holy Writ, Thomas Jefferson’s mind seized, instantly on the figure, building far better than ft knew. It was a new Exodus, with its pillar of cloud by day and its pillar of fire by night. And its Moses—though this, we may , suppose, was beyond a boy’s imagining—was the frenzied,ruthless spirit of commercialism, named otherwise, by the multitude. Modem Progress. CHAPTER IV. If you have never had the pleasure of meeting a Southern gentleman of the patriarchal school, I despair of bringing you well acquainted with Major Caspar Dabney until jrou have summered and wintered him. But tho Dabneys of Deer Trace 'figure so large-

ly in Thomas Jefferson’s boyhood and youth as to be well-nigh elemental in these retrospective glimpses. It was about the time when Thomas Jefferson was beginning to reconsider his ideals, with a leaning toward brass-bound palaces on wheels and dictatorial authority over uniformed lackeys and other of his fellow creatures, that fate dealt the Major its final stab and prepared to pour wine and oil into the wound—though of the. balm-pouring, none could guess at the moment of wounding. It was not inCaspar Dabney to be patient under a blow, and for a time his ragings threatened to shake even Mammy Ju- V liet’s loyalty—than which nothing more convincing can be said. “Mistuh Scipio,” she tyouid say, “I’se jus’ erbout wo’ed out! I done been knowin’ Mawstuh Caspah ebber senee I was OF Mistls’ tlah-’ooman, and I ain’t nev’ seen him so fractious ez he been sence dat letter come tellin’ him come get"dat po’ li’l gal-child o’ Mawstuh Louis’s. Seems lak he jus’ gwine r’ar round twel he hu’t somebody!” etoainshrdlu etoian shrdlu etoain et Scipio, the Major’s body-servant, had grown gray in the Dabney service, and he was well used to the master’s storm periods. “Doan’ you trouble yo’se’f none erbout dat, Mis’ Juliet. Mawstuh Majuh tekkin’ hit mighty hawd 'cause Maw-' stuh Louis done daid.' But bimeby you gwine see him climm on his hawss an’ ride up yondeh to whah de big steamboats comes in an’fotch dat li’l galchild home; an’, den: uck —ruh-h! look out, niggahs; dar ain’t gwine be nuttin’ on de top side dishyer yearth good ernough for li’l Missy. Yop watch' what' I done tol’ yer erbout dart, now!” Scipio’s prophecy, or as much of it as related to the bringing of the orphaned Ardea to Deer Trace Manor, wrought itself out speedily, as a matter of course. At the close of the war, Captain Louis, the Major’s only son, had become, like many another hothearted young Confederate, a self-ex-patrioted exile* On the eve of his departure for France he had married the Virginia maiden who had nursed him alive after Chancellorsville. Major Caspar had given the bride away—the war had spared no kinsman of hers to stand in this when the God-speeds were said," had ■ himself turned buck to the weed-grown fields of Deer Trace Manor, embittered and hostile, swearing never to set ’foot outside of his home acres again while the Union shouM stand. For more than twenty years he kept this vow almost literally. A few of the older negroes, a mere handful of the six score slaves of the old patriarchal days, cast in their lot with their former master, and with these the Major made shift thriftily, farming a little, stock-raising a little, and, unlike most of the war-broken plantation owners, clinging tenaciously to every rood of land covered by the original Dabney title-deeds.

In this cenobitic interval, if you wanted a Dabney colt or a Dabney cow, you went, or sent, to Beer Trace Manor on your own initiative, and you, or your deputy, never met the Major: your business was transacted with lean, lantern-jawed Japheth Pettigrass, the Major’s stock-and-farm foreman. And although the Dabney stock was pedigreed, you kept your wits about you; else Pettigrass got much the better of you in the trade, like the shrewd, calculating Alabama Yankee that he was. w / Ardea was born in Paris in the twelfth year of the exile; and the Virginia mother, pining always for the home land, died In the fifteenth year. Afterward Captain Louis fought a long-drawn, losing battle, figuring bravely In his Infrequent letters to h’s father as a rising miniature painter. He had his little girl back and forth between his lodgings and the studio where he painted pictures that nobody would buy, and eking out a miserable existence by giving lessons in English when he was happy enough to find a pupil. The brave letters imposed on the Major, as they were meant to do; and Ardea, the loyal, happening on one oi' them in her first Deer Trace summer, read it through with childish sobs and never thereafter opened her lips on the •tory of those distressful Paris days. Later she understood her father’s motive better: how he would not be a charge on an old man rich in nothing but ruin; and the memory of the pinched childhood became a thing sacred. How the Major, a second Rip Van Winkle, found his way to New York, and to the pier of the incoming French Line steamer, must always remain a mystery. But he was there, with the fierce old eyes quenched and swimming and the passionate Dabney lips trembling strangely under the great moustaches, when the black-frocked little waif from the Old World ran down the landing stage and into hls‘ arms. Small wonder that they clung to each other, these two at the further extremes of three generations; or that the child opened a door in the heart of the fierce old partisan which was looked and doubly barred against all others. It was all new and very strange to a child whose only outlook oh life had been urban and banal. She had never seen a mountain, and nothing more nearly approaching a forest than the parked groves of the Bols de Boulogne. Would it be permitted that she should sometimes walk in the woods of the first Dabney, she asked, with the quaint French twisting of the phrases that she~was never able fully to overcome. It would certainly be permitted; more, the Major'would make her a deed to as many of the forest acres as she would care to include In her promenade. x '

How the* French-bom child fitted Into the haphazard household at Deer Trace Manor, with what struggles she came through the IneVitableSttack of homesickness, and how Mammy Juliet and evegjr one else petted and indulged her, are matters which need not be dwelt on. But we shall gladly believe that she was too sensible, even at the early and tender age of 10, to be easily spoiled. She never forgot a summer day soon after her arrival when she first saw her grandfather transformed Into a frenzied madman. He was sitting on the wide portico directing Japheth Pettigrass, who was training the great crimson-rambler rose that ran well up to the eaves. Ardea, herself, was on the lawn, playing with her grandfather's latest gift, a huge, solemn-eyed Great Dane, so she did not see the man who had dismounted at the gate and walked up the driveway until he was handing his card to her" grandfather. When she did see him, she looked tdwice at him; not because he was trigly clad in brown duck and tightlybuttoned service leggings, but because he wore his beard trimmed to a point, after the manner of the students in the Latin Quarter, and so was reminiscent of things freshly forsaken. Her grandfather was on his feet, towering above, the visitor as if he were about to fall on and crush him. . “Bring youh Yankee railroad through my fields and pastchuhs, suh? Foul the pure ai-ah of this peaceful Gyarden of Eden with youh dust-flingin’, smokepot locomotives? Not a rod, suh! not a foot or an inch oveh the Dabneydands! X>o I make it plain to you, suh?" “But Major Dabney—one moment; this Is purely a matter of business; there Is nothing personal about it. Our company is able and willing to pay liberally for its right of way; and you that the coming of the railroad will treble and quadruple your land values. I am only asking you to consider the matter in a business way, and to name your own price.” Not anotheh word, suh, or you’ll make me lose my tempah! You add insult to Injury, suh, when you offeh me youh contemptible Yankee gold. When I desiah to sell my birthright for youh beggahly mess of send a black boy in town to infawm you, suh!”'" < It is conceivable that the locating engineer of the Great Southwestern Railway Company was younger than he looked; or, at-all events, that his experience hitherto had not brought him in contact with fire-eating gentlemen of the old school. Else he would hardly have said what he did. Of course, it is optional with you, Major Dabney, whether you sell us our right of way peaceably or compel us to acquire it by condemnation proceedings in the courts. As for the rest —is it possible that you don’t know the war is over?” With a roar like that of a maddened lion the Major bowed himself, caught his man in a mighty wrestler’s grip and flung him broadcast jnto the coleus bed. The w'ords that went with the fierce attack made Ardea crouch and shiver and take refuge behind the great dog. Japheth Pettigrass jumped down from his step-ladder and went to help the engineer out of the flower bed. The old firebrand!” the engineer was muttering under his breath when Pettigrass reached him; but the foreman cut him short. “You got mighty little sense, looks like, to me. Stove up any?" “Nothing to hurt, I guess.” “Well, your hawss is waitin’ for ye down yonder at the gate, and I don’t b’lieve the Major is allowin’ to ask ye to stay to supper.” When the engineer had mounted and ridden away down the pike, the foreman straightened himself and faced about. The Major had dropped into his big arm-chair . His hands shook. Pettigrass moved nearer and spoke so that the child should not hear. “If you run me oft the place the nex’ minute, I’m goin’ to tell you you ort to be tolerably ’shamed of yourse’f, Maje’ Dabney. That po’ little gal is scared out of a year’s growin’, right now.” “I know, Japheth; I know. I’m an old heathen! For, insultin’ as he was, the man was for the time bein’ my guest, suh —my guest!” “I’m (talkin' about the little one—not that railroader. So far as I know, he' earned what he got. I allowed they’d make some sort of a swap with you so I didn’t say anything when they was layin’ out their lines throo’ the hawss-lot and across the lower cornfield this mornin’—easy, now; no more farin’ and farin’ with that thar little gal not a-knowln’ which side o’ the earth’s goin’ to cave in next!” “Laid out theyuh lines—across my prope’ty? Japheth, faveh me by riding down to the furnace and askin’ Caleb Gordon if he will do me the honor to come up hear—this evenin’, if he can. I—l—it’s twenty yekhs swid mo’ since I’ve troubled the law counts of ouh po’, Yankee-ridden country with any affaiah of mine; and now—well, I don’t know,” with a despondent shake of the leonine head. (To be continued.)