University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
THE OLD GARRISON.

The autumn twilight was deepening into
night as Beatrice Wansted reached her home,

and paused, before pushing open the swinging
gate, to look at it with a strange distaste.

“How can I go in and sit down as if nothing
had happened? How can I smile, and
talk, and live day after day? How long will
it be before I break out into raving madness,
crazed by the cold monotony of such a life—
such a life for me?”

So whispering, she leaned upon the mossy
fence, and stared at the old house with such
distasteful interest as a trappist, newly hidden
but not divorced from the world, might
feel for the spot where he is bid to dig his
future grave.

And yet the Old Garrison, as Milvor called
it, was no uncheerful dwelling, albeit venerable
and quaint as its origin promised. More
than two hundred years ago—not fifty after
Beatrice Cenci had expiated upon the scaffold
her most righteous crime—a party of Puritans,
straying from the settlement about Plymouth
Bay, had urged their skiff up Milvor Branch,
and at its head had diverged into Millbrook,
following the bright course of its waters, until,
not far from the mouth, they curved in a
sudden bend about a pretty knoll surrounded
by rich meadow-land. Here they halted, and
here one of the party, Peleg Barstow by name,
decided to remain; and being a godly and just
man, bestowed such treasure of beads, gunpowder,
cloth, and, it may be, less innocent
wares, upon the Indian owners, as induced
them to affix their signs-manual to a deed, yet
extant in the old house, by which they made
over to Peleg Barstow and his heirs forever
all right and title to knoll, meadows, upland,
brook, and the herring which crowded its merry
waters, forever and a day.

But—alas! that we should say it—not fifty
years later, Peleg and his sons found themselves
obliged to fortify their dwelling against
the invasion of these same savage allies, now
become their cruel enemies; and so successfully
did they strengthen its defences that the
women and children for miles around flocked
to them for shelter, and the house received the
name it has since retained, and is still known
as the Old Garrison.

But to the few rooms of the original house
with their walls three feet in thickness, and
their leaden casements with tiny diamond-shaped
panes, came to be added, by successive
generations of Barstows, additions of such
style and size as suited the wants or the taste
of the builders, so that the house stood final
ly a sort of hieroglyphic genealogy of the
race, and Beatrice Wansted might have read,
had she been so minded, the story of her ancestors
in the motley architecture of the home
they had bequeathed her.

But Time has power over none but his
own dominion, and though the work of old
Peleg Barstow's hands had well-nigh mingled
with the dust that had once been flesh and
bones of that sturdy old Puritan, the knoll
and the brook, and human nature remained
much as they had been in his day; and this
his fair descendant stood contemplating her
home in the gray twilight, with far less
thought of the past it represented, than of her
own future, linked it might be to those crumbling
walls—it might be to far different scenes.

“But never,” whispered Beatrice again, as
she softly swung open the gate, “never to be
passed at your side, or beneath your feet,
Marston Brent—never—never!”

She murmured the words again and again,
the bitter refrain of a dreary song, as she
lingered up the narrow path whose box-borders,
brushed by her garments, gave out a
faint, melancholy perfume, a perfume of night
and autumn, of dead memories and hopes,
and life slowly lapsing into death, and then decay
and nothingness.

Fine ladies have their fancies, and in after
years it was noted as one of Miss Wansted's
whims to detest the sight or smell of box-plants.

Near the door she paused, and stood looking
in at the unshuttered window, with the
same half-loathing interest that had held her
at the garden-gate.

She saw a room low and large, its ceiling
divided by two heavy beams crossing each
other in the centre. Other beams stood sentry
in the corners, and ran like a low bench
around the side of the room. To one of these
a descendant of Peleg Barstow, crazed through
religious fanaticism, had been chained by his
family, and then had dragged out the twenty
weary years lying between such strange imprisonment
and death. The scar worn by his
chain still stared from the heavy beam—a
character, and a significant one, in the hieroglyphic
history unconsciously left behind by
the successive occupants of the Old Garrison.

At one end of the room yawned a fireplace
so wide that the bright copper andirons, with
their load of three-foot maple logs, were
quite at one end of it, while at the other end

and in the back of the chimney was the door
of a great brick oven, and below it a bench
where Beatrice, a little rebellious imp, had
often been set to recover from the effects of
too long a ramble in the winter woods, or an
involuntary immersion in the icy waters of
the brook.

In one of the deep recesses of the windows
lay an enormous tortoise-shell cat, her fore
paws curled under her breast, her yellow
eyes half closed, and winking slowly at the
fire. Beyond her in the corner stood a clock,
reaching from floor to ceiling, sedate and
grave, in spite of the glittering brass ornaments
which it wore as meekly as an old
lady wears the gold beads she retains from
habit, although the vanities of youth have long
been laid aside.

Above the high mantle-shelf was fastened
the head and branching antlers of a deer,
and as the firelight rose and fell, its shadow,
changing in every fantastic fashion, danced
upon the ceiling—now spreading to its farthest
limit, in semblance of a tangled arabesque,
now shrinking to such narrow limits and so
defined a shape that it might have been the
ghost of the murdered stag peering down
into the room and demanding restitution of
his stolen honors.

All alone in his deep arm-chair, before the
fire, sat an old man—a man so old that his
hair, long and thick and soft, had not one
dark thread left in its creamy masses; that
his face was not lined, but grained with
wrinkles; that his toothless jaws met in a
straight, deep line, hiding in great measure
the expression of the mouth; and his form
was bowed and trembling, even as he sat motionless
before the fire. His eyes, shrewd and
kindly, even through the dimness of age,
were fixed upon the blaze, and his white and
shapely hands were folded meditatively upon
his knee. A charming picture of serene old
age, but Beatrice regarded it with a shiver.

“Ninety-four years old!” murmured she,
“and I but twenty. If I should live till
then!”

She meaned impatiently, and twisted her
fingers within each other in a gesture of fierce
protest.

A door opened in the back of the room, and
two women entered—one of them nearly as
old as the dreamer before the fire, the other
perhaps fifty years younger, but claiming
neither the beauty of youth nor age; for while
losing the bloom of one, she had not yet acquired
the serenity of the other; and with her
tall and angular figure, sharp features, abundant
red hair, and quick gray eyes, contrasted
unfavorably enough with the placid patriarch
and his cheery, active wife.

Beatrice looked at her, and made a little
mutinous gesture, full of deflant expression.

“And to live with Aunt Rachel all my
days, or until I come to be just like her!”
muttered she; and slowly raising the latch,
she passed through a square passage into the
room where the family were collected. All
looked up at her entrance, and saluted her
variously.

“Well, daughter,” said the old man. “So
you have finished your wanderings for one
day more. Night brings the stray lambs
home, but they go out with the sun again.”

“You shouldn't linger out in the night-dews
so, child,” chimed in his wife. “It's
dreadful unwholesome to breathe the air at
this time of day. I declare, you're as pale as
a ghost—and no wonder. Sit to the fire and
heat the soles of your feet. Won't you drink
a little balm-tea if I make it for you? It's
proper good with sugar in it; or you can have
some tansy if you like it better.”

“Just look at that dress round the bottom,
and then your skirt, Beatrice! Where have
you been trailing them? I can tell you,
miss, if you had the washing or the starching
or the ironing to do, you wouldn't be quite
so careless of your things. You put them on
clean this afternoon, didn't you? And where
is Marston?”

Beatrice stooped and kissed the hand her
grandfather held out to detain her, smiled
coaxingly at her grandmother, while she said:

“Please not any balm-tea, grandma. I
will be good without it.” And to her aunt:

“I have been on Moloch Mountain, and I
did put the dress and skirt on clean, and I do
not know where Mr. Brent is at this moment.”

Then she passed on to her own little chair
in the farther corner of the fireplace, and
pushing it deeper into the shadow, sat down,
and obediently dried her feet and garments,
drenched with the heavy dew.