 | CHAPTER II. The wigwam and the cabin |  |
2. CHAPTER II.
The sketch which I propose will scarcely justify this long digression;
and its character will be still less likely to correspond with
the somewhat poetic texture of the introduction. It is simply a
strange narrative of frontier life; one of those narratives in which
a fact will appear very doubtful, unless the artist shall exhibit
such sufficient skill in his elaborations, as to keep its rude points
from offending too greatly the suspicious judgment of the reader.
This is the task before me. The circumstances were picked up,
when, a lad of eighteen, I first wandered over the then dreary and
dangerous wastes of the Mississippi border. Noble, indeed, though
wild and savage, was the aspect of that green forest country, as
yet only slightly smitten by the sharp edges of the ranger's axe.
I travelled along the great Yazoo wilderness, in frequent proximity
with the Choctaw warriors. Most frequently I rode alone.
Sometimes, a wayfarer from the East, solitary with myself, turned
his horse's head, for a few days' space, on the same track with
mine; but, in most cases, my only companion was some sullen
Choctaw, or some still more sullen half-breed, who, emerging suddenly
from some little foot-path, would leave me half in doubt
whether his introduction would be made first with the tomahawk
or the tongue. Very few white men were then settled in the
country; still fewer were stationary. I rode forty and fifty miles
without sign of human habitation, and found my bed and supper
at night most generally in the cabin of the half-breed. But there
was one, and that a remarkable exception to this universal necessity;
and in this exception my story takes its rise. I had at
length reached the borders of the nation, and the turbid waters
of the Mississippi, at no great distance, flowed down towards the
Gulf. The appearances of the white settler, some doubtful
glimmerings of a more civilized region, were beginning to display
themselves. Evening was at hand. The sun was fast waning
along the mellow heights of heaven; and my heart was beginning
setting is apt to inspire in the bosom of the youthful wanderer.
It was also a question with me, where I should find my pillow for
the night. My host of the night before, a low, dark-looking white
squatter, either was, or professed to be, too ignorant to give me
any information on this head, which would render the matter one
of reasonable certainty. In this doubtful and somewhat desolate
state of mind, I began to prick my steed forward at a more rapid
pace, to cast my eyes up more frequently to the fading light
among the tree-tops, and, occasionally, to send a furtive glance on
either hand, not altogether assured that my road was as safe as it
was lonely. The question “where shall I find my bed to-night?”
was beginning to be one of serious uncertainty, when I
suddenly caught a glimpse of an opening on my right, a sort of
wagon-path, avenue like, and which reminded me of those dear,
dim passages in my own Carolina, which always promised the
traveller a hot supper and happy conclusion to his wanderings of
the day. Warmed with the notion, and without a farther doubt
or thought, I wheeled my sorrel into the passage, and pressed him
forward with a keener spur. A cheery blast of the horn ahead,
and the dull heavy stroke of an axe immediately after, were so
many urgent entreaties to proceed; and now the bellow of a cow,
and next the smoke above the cottage roof-trees, assured me that
my apprehensions were at an end. In a few seconds I stood before
one of the snuggest little habitations which ever kindled
hope and satisfied hunger.
This was one of those small log-cabins which are common to
the country. Beyond its snug, trim and tidy appearance, there
was nothing about it to distinguish it from its class. The clearing
was small, just sufficient, perhaps, for a full supply of corn
and provisions. But the area in front of the dwelling was cleanly
swept, and the trees were trimmed, and those which had been
left were evergreens, and so like favourite domestics, with such
an air of grace, and good-nature, and venerableness about them,
that one's heart warmed to see them, as at sight of one of “the
old familiar faces.” The aspect of the dwelling within consisted
happily with that without. Every thing was so neat, and snug,
and comfortable.
The windows were sashed and glassed, and hung with the
whitest curtains of cotton, with fringes fully a foot deep. The
floors were neatly sanded, the hearth was freshly brightened with
the red ochrous clay of the country, and chairs and tables,
though made of the plainest stuffs, and by a very rude mechanic,
were yet so clean, neat and well-arranged, that the eye involuntarily
surveyed them again and again with a very pleased sensation.
Nor was this all in the shape of unwonted comforts. Some
other matters were considered in this cottage, which are scarcely
even dreamed of in the great majority. In one corner of the
hall stood a hat-stand; in another there were pins for cloaks;
above the fire-place hung a formidable rifle, suspended upon
tenter-hooks made of three monstrous antlers, probably those of
gigantic bucks which had fallen beneath the weapon which they
were now made to sustain. Directly under this instrument, and
the only object beside which had been honoured with a place so
conspicuous, was a pack of ordinary playing cards—not hung or
suspended against the wall, but nailed to it;—driven through and
through with a tenpenny nail, and so fastened to the solid log, the
black head of the nail showing with particular prominence in
contrast with the red spot of the ace of hearts, through which it
had been driven. Of this hereafter. On this pack of cards
hangs my story. It is enough, in this place, to add, that it was
only after supper was fairly over, that my eyes were drawn to
this very unusual sort of chimney decoration.
At the door of the cottage sat a very venerable old man, between
seventy and eighty. His hair was all white, but still thick,
betraying the strength of his constitution and the excellence of
his health. His skin was florid, glowing through his white beard,
which might have been three days old, and his face bore the burden
of very few wrinkles. He had a lively, clear blue eye, and
good-humour played about his mouth in every movement of his
lips. He was evidently one of those fortunate men, whose winters,
if frosty, had always proved kindly. A strong man in his
youth, he was now but little bent with years; and when he stood
up, I was quite ashamed to find he was rather more erect than
myself, and quite as tall. This was the patriarch of the family,
which consisted of three members besides himself. The first of
of whom it will be quite explicit enough to say, that the old man,
in his youth, must very nearly have resembled him. Then, there
was the wife of the son, and her son, a lad now ten years old, a
smart-looking lad enough, but in no wise resembling his male
parent. Instead of the lively, twinkling blue eye of his father, he
had the dark, deep, oriental sad ones of the mother; and his
cheeks were rather pale than rosy, rather thin than full; and his
hair was long, black and silky, in all respects the counterpart of
his mother's. A brief description of this lady may assist us in
our effort to awaken the interest of the reader.
Conducted into the house by the son, and warmly welcomed by
the old man as well as himself, I was about to advance with the
bold dashing self-possession of a young cavalier, confident in his
course, and accustomed to win “golden opinions of all sorts of
people.” But my bold carriage and sanguine temper were suddenly
checked, not chilled, by the appearance of the lady in front
of whom I suddenly stood. She sat beside the fireplace, and was
so very different a looking person from any I had expected to see
in such a region, that the usual audacity of my temperament was
all at once abashed. In place of the good, cheerful, buxom, plain
country housewife whom I looked to see, mending Jacky's breeches,
or knitting the good-man's hose, I found myself confronted by
a dame whose aristocratic, high-bred, highly composed, easy and
placid demeanour, utterly confounded me. Her person was
small, her complexion darkly oriental, her eye flashing with all
the spiritual fires of that region; habitually bright and searching,
even while the expression of her features would have made her
seem utterly emotionless. Never did features, indeed, appear so
thoroughly inflexible. Her beauty,—for she was all beauty,—was
not, however, the result of any regularity of feature. Beauties of her
order, brunette and piquant, are most usually wanting in preciseness,
and mutual dependance and sympathy of outline. They
are beautiful in spite of irregularity, and in consequence of the
paramount exquisiteness of some particular feature. The charm
of the face before me grew out of the piercing, deep-set, and singularly
black eye, and the wonderful vitality about the lips. Never
was mouth so small, or so admirably delineated. There was
But I speak like the boy I was then, and am no longer.
Let me not be understood to mean that there was any levity,
any lightness of character betrayed in the expression of those lips.
Very far otherwise. While soft, sweet, beautiful, and full of
life, they were the most sacred and sad-looking forms,—drooping
blossoms of beauty, mourning, as it would seem, because beauty
does not imply immortality; and this expression led me to observe
more closely the character of the eye, the glance of which,
at first, had only seemed to denote the brilliance of the diamond,
shining through an atmosphere of jet. I now discerned that its
intense blaze was not its only character. It was marked with the
weight of tears, that, freezing as they had birth, maintained their
place in defiance of the light to which they were constantly exposed.
It was the brightness of the ice palace, in the Northern
Saga, which, in reflecting the bright glances of Balder, the God
of Day, still gives defiance to the fervour of his beams.
But a truce to these frigid comparisons, which suit any age
but ours. Enough to say that the lady was of a rare and singular
beauty, with a character of face and feature not common
to our country, and with a deportment seldom found in the homely
cabin of the woodman or the squatter. The deep and unequivocal
sadness which marked her looks, intense as it was, did not
affect or impair the heightened aristocratic dignity of her subdued
and perfectly assured manner. To this manner did she seem to
have been born; and, being habitual, it is easy to understand that
she could not be divested of it, except in a very small degree, by
the pressure of any form of affliction. You could see that there
had been affliction, but its effect was simply to confirm that elevated
social tone, familiar to all mental superiority, which seems,
however it may feel, to regard the confession of its griefs as perhaps
something too merely human to be altogether becoming in a
confessedly superior caste. Whether the stream was only frozen
over, or most effectually crystallized, it does not suit our purpose
to inquire. It is, at all events, beyond my present ability to determine
the doubt.
She was introduced to me, by the husband, as Mrs. Rayner. I
afterwards discovered that her Christian name was Rachel; a
that she might be of Jewish parents. That she was a Christian
herself, I had reason to believe, from her joining freely and devoutly,
and on bended knee, in the devotions of the night. She
spoke seldom, yet looked intelligence throughout the conversation,
which was carried on freely between the old man, the husband,
and myself. When she spoke, her words and accents were
marked by the most singular propriety. There was nothing in
her utterance to lessen the conviction that she was familiar with
the most select circles of city life; and I could see that the husband
listened to her with a marked deference, and, though himself,
evidently, a rough honest backwoodsman, I detected him, in
one or two instances, checking the rude phrase upon his lips, and
substituting for it some other, more natural to the ear of civilization
and society. There was a touching something in the meekness
and quiet deportment of the boy who sat by his mother's
knee in silence, her fingers turning in his hair, while he diligently
pored over some little trophy of juvenile literature, looking
up timidly at moments, and smiling sadly, when he met the deep
earnest gaze of the mother's eyes, as she seemed to forget all
around in the glance at the one object. I need not say that there
was something in this family picture so entirely out of the common
run of my woodland experience in the Southwest, at that
early day, that I felt my curiosity equally excited with my pleasure.
I felt assured that there was something of a story to be
learned, which would amply recompense the listener. The old
patriarch was himself a study—the husband a very noble specimen
of the sturdy, frank, elastic frontier-man—a race too often
confounded with the miserable runagates by whom the first explorations
of the country are begun, but who seldom make the
real axe-marks of the wilderness. You could see at a glance
that he was just the man whom a friend could rely upon and a
foe most fear—frank, ardent, firm, resolute in endurance, patient,
perhaps, and slow to anger, as are all noble-minded persons who
have a just confidence in their own strength; but unyielding
when the field is to be fought, and as cheerful in the moment
of danger as he was good-humoured in that of peace. Every
thing in his look, language and bearing, answered to this description;
familiar and as much at my ease as if we had jumped together
from the first moment of existence.
I pass over much of the conversation preceding, and at the
evening repast; for, though interesting enough at the time, particularly
to me, it would only delay us still longer in the approach
to our story. It was after the table had been withdrawn, when
the family were all snugly huddled about the fireplace, and the
dialogue, which had been rather brisk before, had begun to flag,
that I casually looked up over the chimney-place, and discovered,
for the first time, the singular ornament of which I have already
spoken. Doubtful of what I saw, I rose to my feet, and
grasped the object with my fingers. I fancied that some eccentric
forest genius, choosing for his subject one of the great agents
of popular pastime in the West, might have succeeded in a delineation
sufficiently felicitous, as, at a short distance, to baffle
any vision. But, palpable, the real—I had almost said, the living—things
were there, unlike the dagger of Macbeth, as “sensible
to feeling as to sight.” A complete pack of cards, none of
the cleanest, driven through with a tenpenny nail, the ace of
hearts, as before said, being the top card, and very fairly covering
the retinue of its own and the three rival houses. The corners
of the cards were curled, and the ends smoked to partial
blackness. They had evidently been in that situation for several
years. I turned inquiringly to my hosts—
“You have a very singular ornament for your mantleplace,
Mr. Rayner;” was my natural remark, the expression of curiosity
in my face being coupled with an apologetic sort of smile.
But it met with no answering smiles from any of the family.
On the contrary, every face was grave to sadness, and in a moment
more Mrs. Rayner rose and left the room. As soon as she
was gone, her husband remarked as follows:
“Why, yes, sir, it is uncommon; but there's a reason why
it's there, which I'll explain to you after we've gone through prayers.”
By this time the wife had returned, bringing with her the family
Bible, which she now laid upon a stand beside the venerable
elder. He, good old man, with an action that seemed to be perfectly
where they seemed to have been left from the previous evening,
and commenced reading the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, beginning,
“Hear me, your father, O children! and do thereafter, that
ye may be safe.” Then, this being read, we all sunk devoutly
upon our knees, and the patriarch put up as sweet and fervent a
prayer as I should ever wish to listen to. The conceited whipster
of the school might have found his pronunciation vulgar, and
his sentences sometimes deficient in grammatical nicety; but the
thought was there, and the heart, and the ears of perfect wisdom
might well be satisfied with the good sense and the true morality
of all that was spoken. We rose refreshed, and, after a lapse of
a very few moments which were passed in silence, the wife, leading
the little boy by the hand, with a kind nod and courtesy took
her leave, and retired to her chamber. Sweetness and dignity were
most happily blended in her parting movements; but I fancied,
as I caught the glance of her eye, that there had been a freshening
and overflowing there of the deep and still gathering fountains.
Her departure was followed by that of the old man, and
the husband and myself were left alone. It was not long after
this, before he, himself, without waiting for any suggestion of mine,
brought up the subject of the cards, which had been so conspicuously
elevated into a mantel ornament.
| CHAPTER II. The wigwam and the cabin | |