University of Virginia Library

23. CHAPTER XXIII.

What blessed restoration there is in the
sleep and in the health of youth! Palaces
of hope and happiness which had tumbled
to ruin at eventide are rebuilded ere morning
by these beneficent magicians.

When Kate came to breakfast, after the
refreshing slumber which even troubled
hearts know at nineteen, she had forgotten
the bodings of the night before, or remembered
them only to scout them. All went
aright to her eyes in the Armitage dwelling
that day and the day following and for
many days after. Good, sincere, amiable,
unsuspecting of evil, anxious to think well
of others, she was the easy and contented
dupe of a skilful though wayward enchanter.

On certain holy festivals good Mahometans
turn their jackets inside out, and go all
in green, the color of the prophet. In like
manner Randolph Armitage had a garment
of deportment which he could turn according
to the circumstances of time or company,
the one side being of the color of the
Devil and his angels, while the other might
please the eyes of saints, or pure women.
The silver lining of this sable cloud it was
now his pleasure to wear outward. Kate
was young and beautiful, and it was one of
his amusements to charm young and beautiful
women; moreover, the girl might be
expected to bear witness of him among the
Beaumonts, should be misbehave during
her visit; and if he feared anybody on
earth, it was his puissant relatives by marriage.
So for weeks he controlled, the
seven capital devils who inhabited his soul,
suffering none of them to issue forth and
disport himself in her presence. He was
a fond father, a gentle husband, an amiable
brother-in-law, and a merciful master
to his slaves. He astonished his wife, and
almost rewon her heart. He fascinated
Kate.

It was not a difficult matter for him to be
thus delightful. He possessed that mighty
glamour of excelling beauty which sheds
attractiveness over even indifferent, even
misbecoming behavior. So sweet and so
fair to look upon was his smile, that mere
young girls, mere rude boys, mere untutored
crackers, were glad at winning one from
him, and never forgot the pleasant sight all
their lives after. Hundreds of people who
knew him not had stared wonderingly in
his face as he met them, turned to look at
him after he had passed, and eagerly inquired
his name. All through Saxonburg
District, and in the rough surrounding
region, he was known as Handsome Armitage.
A mountaineer from East Tennessee
had once stopped him in the street, and
said: “Stranger, excuse me; but you be
certainly the puttiest man I've seen sence
I come to Sou' Carline. Mought I ask what
you call yourself?”

But, in addition to his beauty, Randolph
had the charm of a flexible character, apt to
take the bent of his society. It was his
nature to be hail fellow well met with Satan
or with the archangel Ithuriel, according
as he found himself in the company of
either. He had intelligence to perceive at
once, and to the full, both the purity of
Kate Beaumont and the innate grossness
of the vilest low-down harridan in the district.
He was as much in place, so far as his
behavior went, with the one as with the
other. The result was, that, as Nellie
divulged nothing concerning her husband,
Kate believed him to be good, and knew
him to be charming. She walked with him,
rode with him, tried her hand at fishing
under his guidance, learned games of cards
of him, read him the letters which she
received from home, talked with him about
the feud, and made him little less than a
confidant. Of course he agreed with her in
all things; caring little about the family
quarrel, it was easy for him to condemn it;
despising politics, it was easy for him to
bemoan the election difficulty. He had the
coinciding amiability of indifference and
hypocrisy. Thus it was that this stainless
and unsuspicious girl found in this thoroughly
corrupt man a friend whom she valued
and almost reverenced.

“You don't half appreciate your husband,”
she reproached her sister.

“Yes, I do,” replied Nellie, making an
effort of repression which was truly sublime,
and withholding her ready tongue from all
confession or complaint.

“You should be very sweet to him, if
only on my account,” added Kate, with a
smile of perfect incomprehension and innocence.
“How kind he is to me!”

“I am obliged to him, on your account,”
said the martyr-like wife. “I have told him
so.”

“I don't believe it,” laughed Kate. “I
want you to tell him so in my presence.”

Just then Randolph entered the room.
It was one of his handsomest moments; his
cheeks were flushed, his eyes bright, his air
elated; moreover, he had dressed himself
carefully and becomingly. His wife settled
her eyes upon him with such an expression
as if she were dazzled against her will.

“Randolph,” she said, her voice wavering
a little, perhaps with recollection of
the tenderness of other days, “Kate wants
me to thank you again for your kindness to
her. I do so with all my heart.”

In this speech, so set and ceremonious as
between husband and wife, there was of
course a hidden meaning. It was as much
as to say, I thank you for restraining yourself,
especially in the presence of my sister.

Armitage smiled, that smile that said so
much; he just moved his lips, those lips
that were so eloquent without speaking;
then lightly and gracefully he advanced to
Nellie, lifted her hand, and kissed it. For
a moment the wife was much moved; she
drew his hand to her and pressed it against
her heart. Kate rose, in her eyes a glistening
of tears, in her heart one of the high-blooded
impulses of her father's race, and
stepping quickly up to her brother-in-law,
kissed his cheek.

“Thank you, my dear, good child,” he
said, turning upon her with a flush of sincere
gratification. “You almost tempt me,
you two, to stay at home this evening.
But,” he added, without the least difficulty,
and in the same breath, “I have an engagement.
Don't sit up for me.”

After he had gone Kate said to Nellie,
“I must tell you. You have delighted me.
When I came here, — when I first came, —
I thought that you two were — indifferent.
I beg your pardon, both of you.”

“Ah, Kate!” replied Nellie, “you are
capable of falling in love. If you were not
you would not care for these things so.
You can love, and I am sorry for it.”

Hours passed after this scene, and Armitage
did not return. As the evening wore
on towards midnight, Nellie's brow grew
darker and darker with an expression which
was not so much anxiety as something
sterner. She looked at last like one who is
receiving blows, not in a spirit of angry retaliation,
but with sullen defiance. Her air
was so gloomy and hard that it disturbed
her sister.

“Had you not better send out for him?”
asked Kate. “Do you know where he has
gone?”

“He sometimes stays out in this way,”
said Nellie, calmly. “We won't sit up
longer for him.”

“But had n't we better?” urged the
younger woman.

“No, no,” replied Nellie, almost imperiously.
I would rather you would not. I
wish you to go to bed.”

Leaving the two to find such sleep as is
the lot of anxious women, let us follow Randolph
Armitage and see how he was passing
the night. On the morning of that day
this “high-strung” gentleman had risen to
find himself under the spell of a mighty
impulse; an impulse which had come to
him he knew not how, which he could not
account for, nor analyze, nor control; an
impulse common with men of dissolute lives,
and forming the main-spring of their characteristic
actions. He must break bounds, he
must run away, he must go wild, he must
have a spree. He was no more capable of
philosophizing upon the possession than a
horse is able to state why he snorts, flings
out his heels, and dashes headlong over his
pastures. His brain, his stomach, his arterial
structure, or some other physical organ,
had gone mad, either with boisterous health
or with inflammation, and demanded the relief
of violent activity; whether noble or
vicious was indifferent, only that his habits
of life almost necessarily directed the outburst
towards immorality. In the horsy
language of his favorite companions, lewd
fellows of the baser sort, and mostly of low-down
birth, “he had got his head up for a
spree.”

While in this state of mind he met Jim
Saxon, widely and unfavorably known as
Redhead Saxon, a “low-flung” descendant
of the rude family which had first settled
the district of Saxonburg, and served as the
mean origin of its name. It was with this
coarse, gaunt, long-legged, hideous desperado
and sycophant in homespun that he had
made the engagement which took him from
his home during the evening. He had gone
straight from the exquisite scene with his
wife and Kate Beaumont to a cracker ball.

Three miles from his house, in a region
of sand and pines and scrub-oaks, there
was a clearing which had once supported a
settler's family, and which, as the soil became
exhausted, had degenerated into an
oldfield, overgrown with bushes and long
weeds. In the centre of the oldfield was a
log-cabin, the clay fallen from its chinks,
the boards on its roof warped and awry, its
windows without glass, and closed by rude
shutters, the chimney a ruinous, unshapely
mass of stones and mud, the outer air free
to enter at numberless crannies. This cabin
was the residence of two “lone women,”
who held it rent free of its charitable owner,
a wealthy physician of the village. The
eldest was Nancy Gile, thirty years old, but
looking thirty-five, yellow-haired, white-faced,
freckled, red-eyed, dirty, ragged,
shiftless, idle, a beggar, and otherwise of
questionable life. The youngest was Sally
Huggs, a small, square-built, rosy-cheeked,
black-eyed girl of not more than seventeen,
who had run away from her mother to secure
larger liberty of flirtation. Nancy
Gile had two illegitimate children, and Sally
Huggs was herself an illegitimate child.
The reader can guess at the kind of morality
that adorned the household existence.

There are no outcasts. People who are
not in “our society,” and not in the circle
below that, and not in any circle that we
deem society, have still a surrounding of
more or less sympathetic humanity, and
even perhaps a following of admirers. Nancy
Gile and Sally Huggs, poor and ignorant
and degraded as they were, had an environment
of friends whom they wished to hold
fast, and of enemies whom they desired to
propitiate. Consequently, when they one

day came into unexpected, almost miraculous
possession of five dollars more than
was necessary to buy bacon and hominy for
the morrow, they resolved to raise their
standing and enlarge their popularity by
“giving a treat.”

A pound of tallow candles for illumination,
and three gallons of white raw whiskey
for refreshment, summed up their purchases.
As for supper, they trusted, as any other
host of the oldfields would have done, that
each guest would provide his or her own,
and eat it before coming. For music there
was Sam Tony, a youth of piny woods extraction,
as lean and yellow as his own fiddle,
and a gratuitous scraper on such occasions.
The invitations had been spread by
word of mouth at the previous “sale-day”
in the village, and had gathered in every
young Saxonburg loafer or cracker who was
not in open hostility with the household.
Even those tramps, the Bibbs, who had no
abiding habitation, but slept sometimes in
brush cabins, and sometimes in the sheltering
corners of warm fences, had sent one
representative in the shape of a ragged,
dirty girl of eighteen, trim and slender and
graceful in figure, but yellow and ghastly
with exposure and lack of proper nourishment.
When handsome Armitage and hideous
Redhead Saxon rode into the benighted
tangle of the oldfield, Nancy Gile's cabin
was humming like a huge beehive with the
noise of dancing and laughing low-downers,
and flaming from every door and window
and chink with tallow-dip splendor.

“It looks like a storming old blow-out,”
said Armitage, as he tied his horse's bridle
to the drooping branch of a tree. “Quash,”
he added, addressing a negro whom he had
brought along, also mounted, “stay by these
beasts. Come on, Redhead.”

He was already heated with liquor. His
manner and voice had become strangely
degraded since that pretty scene at his
home. In place of his make-believe, yet
gracious gentility and tenderness there was
a wild, reckless, animal-like excitement.
Perhaps it was more than animal; it may
be doubted whether any beast is ever a
rowdy; we have heard that even a drunken
ape has decorum.

The one room of the cabin, eighteen feet
or so by twenty-five, was crammed. In the
centre eight couples were jostling and elbowing
through a sort of country dance.
Squeezing close up to them, and squeezing
against the log walls, and filling the two
doorways, and covering the shaky stairs
which led to the loft, was a mass of young
men and girls, applauding, yelling, chattering,
laughing, or staring with vacant eyes
and mouth. Even the wide-open doors and
windows and chinks and the gaping chimney
could not carry off all the mephitic
steam generated by this mob of unclean
people. As a perfume, an uproar, and a
spectacle, the crowd was vigorously, one
might almost say nauseously, interesting.

To a New-Englander or a Pennsylvania
Quaker fresh from the pacific, temperate,
educated faces of his birth-land, it would
not have seemed possible that these visages
were American. The general cast of countenance
was a lean and hardened wildness,
like that of Albanian mountaineers or Calabrian
brigands. There were no stolid,
square, bull-dog “mugs”; everywhere you
saw cleverness, or liveliness, or at least cunning;
but it was cleverness of a wolfish or
foxy nature. The forms, too, were agile,
most of them tall, slender, and bony, the
outlines showing sharply through the calico
gowns or homespun suits. Four or five
plump and rosy girls, looking all the plumper
because of sunburn, were exceptions to the
general rule of muscle and sinew. All the
men, through early use of tobacco, and constant
exposure to hardship, were figures of
displeasing lankness.

The stinted, graceless costumes increased
the general ungainliness. Some of the
girls were in calico, limp with dirt; others
in narrow-chested, ill-fitted, scant-skirted
gowns of the coarsest white cotton, such as
was commonly issued to field-hands; others
in the cast-off finery of charity, worn just
as it was received, without remaking. Nearly
all the men had straight, tight trousers,
insufficient vests, and short-bodied, long-tailed
frock-coats of gray or butternut homespun.

Scarcely one of these crowding faces had
been illuminated or softened by the touch
of civilization. If they were less stolid
than the countenances of so many Indians,
they were not much less savage. Not that
the savagery was perfectly frank and open:
there was an air of slyness about it and
even of sycophancy; it was the ferocity of
a bloodhound, waiting to be set on. While
these people knew how to commit deeds of
blood, they could go about them best at the
command of a “high-tone gentleman.” But
even to their masters they must have looked
a little untrustworthy. It was evident that
human life, no matter of what dignity and
descent, would be held by them in light esteem.
After all, valuing their own lives
little, they were not despicable. In spite
of law-abiding prejudices, it is impossible
not to accord some respect to a hearty willingness
to give and take hard knocks.
The best intentioned members of society
cannot look down with unmixed contempt
upon a man who fights like the Devil, although
they may find him inconvenient and
proper for suppression. Born to be proud
of my countrymen, reposing a loving confidence
in their pugnacity and their knack

at firearms, I would adventure the population
of this hive in any part of the Abruzzi,
sure that they would make their frontiers
respected and perhaps lay Fra Diavolo under
contribution. In fact, I should rejoice
to colonize them in those regions, trusting
that the drama of the Kilkenny cats might
be re-enacted.

Into this genial mob bounced Handsome
Armitage with a sense of satisfied sympathy
and without the slightest consciousness
that it was his presence which turned mere
vulgarity into vice and gave the scene its
finishing touch of degradation.

“Hurrah, Nancy!” he shouted, seizing
the mistress of the house and whirling
her round in an extemporized waltz, much
to the confusion of the country-dancers.
“Bully for you, old girl! This is a glorious
blow-out.”

“Square, I 'm right glad to see ye,” returned
Nancy Gile, her white face reddening
with pride and pleasure. “I said you
mought come. Sally said you would n't.”

“Where is she?” asked Armitage.

“Thar she is, Square, dancin' along with
Sam Hicks.”

“Sally, come here,” called the high-toned
gentleman. “Come here, and let 's have a
look at your cheeks.”

“Can't,” laughed Sally, hot and gay
with exercise and attentions, for she was
the belle of the ball. “Got to dance this
through. Then I 'll come.”

“Who the deuce is Sam Hicks?” demanded
Armitage.

“He 's a Dark Corner man,” explained
Nancy. “He met up with her last sale-day,
an' took an awful shine to her. Talks
like he was goin' to marry her. Mebbe he
will.”

“Mebbe he won't,” laughed Armitage.
“Well, give us some whiskey. I have n't
had a drink for half an hour. Redhead,
try it.”

“After you, Square,” returned the respectful
Redhead, filling a glass for his
superior. “It 's the same old spring I
reckon. Pickens whiskey, fresh from the
mill, clar as water, an' strong as pizen.
Reckon that 'll warm you, Square, to the
toes of yer boots.”

Armitage took the little tumbler, half
full of pure spirit, put its sticky brim to his
handsome mouth, and sipped at the contents.

“Nasty,” he said. “But never mind; it
does its work. Redhead, this is what kills
us, and we love it. We are good Christians;
we love our worst enemy.” Then, a
recollection of his college reading coming
upon him, he raised the glass on high and
invoked it in the words of the gladiators,
“Ave Cæsar! morituri te salutant.”

“That 's tall talk, Square,” grinned the
admiring Redhead.

“Taller than you could understand if I
should tell you what it means, you cursed
ignoramus,” returned Armitage, as he tossed
off the poison.

At this moment the country dance ended,
and the dancers made a rush toward the
whiskey. Sam Hicks sought to keep possession
of his rosy-cheeked little partner by
passing one butternut-clothed arm around
her waist while he poured out for her a
half-tumbler of the Pickens District nectar.

“Ladies first,” said Armitage, pushing
him back with a jocose, contemptuous roughness.

“I was gwine to help a lady,” replied
Hicks, sulkily. “Sally here wants a drink.”

“I 'll give her one myself,” persisted the
high-flung gentleman. “Do you mean to
keep her all the evening? Stand out of
the way!”

“Let go, my boy,” counselled Redhead
Saxon, gliding behind the mountaineer and
whispering over his shoulder. “Mought
get a welt acrost yer snoot. Let go to
catch a better holt.”

Sam cast a pleading look at his girl, then
an angry though cowed one at his imposing
rival, and gave back grumbling.
Armitage mixed a drink for Sally, insisted
upon her swallowing the whole of it, took
her roughly under his arm and marched her
away.

“You little wretch, why did n't you come
to me at first?” he scolded, half in jest
and half in alcoholic earnest. “What do
you stick to that booby for? Why don't
you stick to me?”

Sally looked up in his face with an expression
which might be described as vulgar
shyness or low-bred modesty. She was
dazzled and awed by the handsome, fine
gentleman who had taken possession of her;
and at the same time she hankered after
plain homespun Sam Hicks, who wanted to
marry her.

“I don't know jest what you 're up to,”
she blurted out spunkily and yet timorously.

“And what the deuce is he up to? Going
to marry you, is he?”

Sally made no reply, but she colored a
coarse blush, and threw a glance at the
faithful pursuing Hicks.

“You can't go to him,” said Armitage.
“You must dance the next set with me.”

And dance he did, playing pranks which
raised shouts of laughter in the rough crowd,
throwing fondling grimaces at his partner
and threatening ones at his rival. The
dance ended, he let Sally go back to Hicks,
only to claim her again as soon as he had
taken another glass of whiskey. A couple
of hours passed much in this way. Armitage
seemed possessed to get drunk, to

pay a rude courtship to Sally Huggs, and
to torment Sam Hicks. That he could enjoy
the coarse farce seems incredible; and
yet the stupid, low-lived fact is that he did
enjoy it. It was a monotonous, uninteresting,
diragreeable, degrading exhibition; and
we only describe it because it dramatizes in
brief the character of the man when in his
cups. Intoxication had turned him into an
insolent, quarrelsome savage; and when we
add that it always affected him thus, we can
understand the habitual expression of his
wife's face; we know how she came to have
that strange air of half pleading, half standing
at bay.

Let us hurry. About midnight, Armitage,
wild as a madman with drink, tore
Sally Huggs away from her lover for perhaps
the tenth time, and gave the latter a
blow which laid him prostrate.

“Quit that, Sam!” shouted Redhead
Saxon, rushing upon Hicks and stopping
his hand as it sought the inside of his homespun
coat. “Now get out of here, Sam,
before mischief is done,” continued the faithful
henchman of Armitage. “Don't go to
fightin' with high-tone gentlemen. They 're
too hefty for you, my boy.”

Sam Hicks was not an ordinary low-downer,
educated in the depressing vicinity
of great estates, and subservient to the
planting chivalry. He was a mountaineer,
as independent and fierce and lithe as a
wild-cat, and disposed to fight any man
who trespassed upon his rights or person.
He tried to get at Armitage, and struggled
violently with Saxon and three or four
others who held him, his long yellow hair
thrown back from his thin and sunburnt
visage, a fine though coarse figure of virile
indignation. But at last, overcome by
numbers, he became sullenly quiet, and suffered
himself to be led out of the cabin.
Tranquillity was the more easily restored
because Armitage was too drunk to care
for the raving of the mountaineer, or even
to notice that Sally Huggs soon slipped out
of the revelry in pursuit of her betrothed.

Half an hour after this “unpleasantness,”
Saxon succeeded in persuading his intoxicated
patron to mount and set out for home.
The path led the length of the oldfield, then
through a wood of young pines and stunted
cedars, then across other oldfields and
some natural barrens, and then down a lane
lined by forests, at the end of which it
touched the high road. For a time the party
moved slowly, there being only starlight,
the ground uneven and tangled with vines,
and Armitage reeling in his saddle. As
they entered the lane Saxon fell back alongside
of the negro, and muttered, “Quash,
when we strike the road, we 'll try a gallop.
You keep on one side of him, an' I 'll keep
on the other.”

At this moment there was a pistol-shot
from the dense underwood of the forest
which overhung the lane.

“Sam Hicks, by thunder!” growled
Saxon, feeling for his revolver. “Bile
ahead, Square!”

Instead of pushing onward as directed,
Armitage turned his horse toward the spot
where the flash had showed, and put him
straight at the fence which separated the
narrow path from the wood. But the animal
floundered in a swampy drain, and, unable
to rise to the obstacle, pitched against
it.

“Hold on, Square,” called Saxon, dismounting
and taking post behind his horse
as behind a breastwork. “Don't go in thar.
He 'll pop you, sure.”

But the warning was useless; the crazy
man, shouting with rage, dismounted and
began to climb the fence; in a moment,
drunk as he was, he had reached the top of
it. Just then there was another report,
coming from the black recesses of the wood;
and in the same breath Armitage toppled
over the fence and fell to the ground; there
was a single groan, followed by silence.

“O Mars Ranney! Mars Ranney!” presently
whispered the negro, shaking with grief
as well as terror.

“Guess your boss has gone up,” muttered
Redhead Saxon, after a moment of
listening.

“O, I 'se feared so, I 'se feared so,” whimpered
Quash. “O Mars Saxon, what 'll
we do?”

“Dunno, though,” continued Redhead.
“That last ball whistled by like it had n't
hit nothin'. So did the first one perhaps,
though I did n't notice.”

After further hearkening he resumed:
“We must git him out of thar. Quash, I 'll
hold the hosses. You sneak in an' feel for
him.”

The negro trembled and hesitated, fearing
another shot from the hidden assassin;
for life is dear to slaves.

“Start in, you black cuss,” commanded
Redhead, turning his revolver on Quash.

“I 'se gwine,” quavered the demoralized
chattel. “Wait till I catch my bref. I 'se
gwine.”

Crawling on his hands and knees through
the mud and water of the drain, Quash
slowly approached the fence, displaced a
rail, and slid through the aperture.