University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
GOING TO MEETING.

EVERY history has one quality in common with
eternity. Begin where you will, there is always a
beginning back of the beginning. And, for that matter,
there is always a shadowy ending beyond the ending.
Only because we may not always begin, like
Knickerbocker, at the foundation of the world, is it
that we get courage to break somewhere into the interlaced
web of human histories — of loves and marriages,
of births and deaths, of hopes and fears, of
successes and disappointments, of gettings and havings,
and spendings and losings. Yet, break in where we
may, there is always just a little behind the beginning,
something that needs to be told.

I find it necessary that the reader should understand
how from childhood Morton had rather worshiped
than loved Patty Lumsden. When the long spelling-class,
at the close of school, counted off its numbers,
to enable each scholar to remember his relative
standing, Patty was always “one,” and Morton “two.”
On one memorable occasion, when the all but infallible
Patty misspelled a word, the all but infallible
Morton, disliking to “turn her down,” missed also, and
went down with her. When she afterward regained
her place, he took pains to stand always “next to
head.” Bulwer calls first love a great “purifier of

youth,” and, despite his fondness for hunting, horseracing,
gaming, and the other wild excitements that
were prevalent among the young men of that day,
Morton was kept from worse vices by his devotion to
Patty, and by a certain ingrained manliness.

Had he worshiped her less, he might long since
have proposed to her, and thus have ended his suspense;
but he had an awful sense of Patty's nobility,
and of his own unworthiness. Moreover, there was a
lion in the way. Morton trembled before the face of
Captain Lumsden.

Lumsden was one of the earliest settlers, and was
by far the largest land-owner in the settlement. In
that day of long credit, he had managed to place himself
in such a way that he could make his power felt,
directly or indirectly, by nearly every man within
twenty miles of him. The very judges on the bench
were in debt to him. On those rare occasions when
he had been opposed, Captain Lumsden had struck so
ruthlessly, and with such regardlessness of means or
consequences, that he had become a terror to everybody.
Two or three families had been compelled
to leave the settlement by his vindictive persecutions,
so that his name had come to carry a sort of royal
authority. Morton Goodwin's father was but a small
farmer on the hill, a man naturally unthrifty, who had
lost the greater part of a considerable patrimony.
How could Morton, therefore, make direct advances to
so proud a girl as Patty, with the chances in favor of
refusal by her, and the certainty of rejection by her
father? Illusion is not the dreadfulest thing, but disillusion

— Morton preferred to cherish his hopeless
hope, living in vain expectation of some improbable
change that should place him at better advantage in
his addresses to Patty.

At first, Lumsden had left him in no uncertainty in
regard to his own disposition in the matter. He had
frowned upon Goodwin's advances by treating him
with that sort of repellant patronage which is so aggravating,
because it affords one no good excuse for
knocking down the author of the insult. But of late,
having observed the growing force and independence
of Morton's character, and his ascendancy over the
men of his own age, the Captain appreciated the necessity
of attaching such a person to himself, particularly
for the election which was to take place in the
autumn. Not that he had any intention of suffering
Patty to marry Morton. He only meant to play fast
and loose a while. Had he even intended to give his
approval to the marriage at last, he would have played
fast and loose all the same, for the sake of making
Patty and her lover feel his power as long as possible.
At present, he meant to hold out just enough of hope
to bind the ardent young man to his interest. Morton,
on his part, reasoned that if Lumsden's kindness
should continue to increase in the future as it had
in the three weeks past, it would become even cordial,
after a while. To young men in love, all good
things are progressive.

On the Sunday morning following the shucking,
Morton rose early, and went to the stable. Did you
ever have the happiness to see a quiet autumn Sunday

in the backwoods? Did you ever observe the
stillness, the solitude, the softness of sunshine, the gentleness
of wind, the chip-chip-chlurr-r-r of great flocks
of blackbirds getting ready for migration, the lazy
cawing of crows, softened by distance, the half-laughing
bark of cunning squirrel, nibbling his prism-shaped
beech-nut, and twinkling his jolly, child-like eye at
you the while, as if to say, “Don't you wish you
might guess?”

Not that Morton saw aught of these things. He
never heard voices, or saw sights, out of the common,
and that very October Sunday had been set apart for
a horse-race down at “The Forks.” The one piece
of property which our young friend had acquired during
his minority was a thorough-bred filley, and he
felt certain that she — being a horse of the first families—would
be able to “lay out” anything that could
be brought against her. He was very anxious about
the race, and therefore rose early, and went out into
the morning light that he might look at his mare, and
feel of her perfect legs, to make sure that she was in
good condition.

“All right, Dolly?” he said—“all right this morning,
old lady? eh? You'll beat all the scrubs; won't
you?”

In this exhilarating state of anxiety and expectation,
Morton came to breakfast, only to have his
breath taken away. His mother asked him to ride to
meeting with her, and it was almost as hard to deny
her as it was to give up the race at “The Forks.”

Rough associations had made young Goodwin a

rough man. His was a nature buoyant, generous, and
complaisant, very likely to take the color of his surroundings.
The catalogue of his bad habits is sufficiently
shocking to us who live in this better day of
Sunday-school morality. He often swore in a way
that might have edified the army in Flanders. He
spent his Sundays in hunting, fishing, and riding horseraces,
except when he was needed to escort his mother
to meeting. He bet on cards, and I am afraid he
drank to intoxication sometimes. Though he was too
proud and manly to lie, and too pure to be unchaste,
he was not a promising young man. The chances
that he would make a fairly successful trip through
life did not preponderate over the chances that he
would wreck himself by intemperance and gambling.
But his roughness was strangely veined by nobleness.
This rude, rollicking, swearing young fellow
had a chivalrous loyalty to his mother, which held
him always ready to devote himself in any way to her
service.

On her part, she was, indeed, a woman worthy of
reverence. Her father had been one of those fine old
Irish gentlemen, with grand manners, extravagant habits,
generous impulses, brilliant wit, a ruddy nose, and
final bankruptcy. His daughter, Jane Morton, had
married Job Goodwin, a returned soldier of the Revolution
— a man who was “a poor manager.” He lost
his patrimony, and, what is worse, lost heart. Upon
his wife, therefore, had devolved heavy burdens. But
her face was yet fresh, and her hair, even when anchored
back to a great tuck-comb, showed an errant,

Irish tendency to curl. Morton's hung in waves about
his neck, and he cherished his curls, proud of the resemblance
to his mother, whom he considered a very
queen, to be served right royally.

But it was hard — when he had been training the
filley from a colt — when he had looked forward for
months to this race as a time of triumph—to have so
severe a strain put upon his devotion to his mother.
When she made the request, he did not reply. He
went to the barn and stroked the filley's legs — how
perfect they were! — and gave vent to some very old
and wicked oaths. He was just making up his mind
to throw the saddle on Dolly and be off to the Forks,
when his decision was curiously turned by a word from
his brother Henry, a lad of twelve, who had followed
Morton to the stable, and now stood in the door.

“Mort,” said he, “I'd go anyhow, if I was you.
I wouldn't stand it. You go and run Doll, and lick
Bill Conkey's bay fer him. He'll think you're afeard,
ef you don't. The old lady hain't got no right to
make you set and listen to old Donaldson on sech a
purty day as this.”

“Looky here, Hen!” broke out Morton, looking up
from the meditative scratching of Dolly's fetlocks,
“don't you talk that away about mother. She's every
inch a lady, and it's a blamed hard life she's had to
foller, between pappy's mopin' and the girls all a-dyin'
and Lew's bad end — and you and me not promisin'
much better. It's mighty little I kin do to make
things kind of easy for her, and I'll go to meetin' every
day in the week, ef she says so.”

[ILLUSTRATION]

IN THE STABLE.

[Description: 554EAF. Page 036. In-line engraving of bent man beside white horse talking to boy in a straw hat.]

“She'll make a Persbyterian outen you, Mort; see
ef she don't.”

“Nary Presbyterian. They's no Presbyterian in
me. I'm a hard nut. I would like to be a elder, or
a minister, if it was in me, though, just to see the
smile spread all over her face whenever she'd think
about it. Looky here, Hen! I'll tell you something.
Mother's about forty times too good for us. When I
had the scarlet fever, and was cross, she used to set
on the side of the bed, and tell me stories, about
knights and such like, that she'd read about in grandfather's
books when she was a girl — jam up good
stories, too, you better believe. I liked the knights,

because they rode fine horses, and was always ready
to fight anything that come along, but always fair and
square, you know. And she told me how the knights
fit fer their religion, and fer ladies, and fer everybody
that had got tromped down by somebody else. I
wished I'd been a knight myself. I 'lowed it would be
some to fight for somebody in trouble, or somethin'
good. But then it seemed as if I couldn't find nothin'
worth the fightin' fer. One day I lay a-thinkin',
and a-lookin' at mother's white lady hands, and face
fit fer a queen's. And in them days she let her hair
hang down in long curls, and her black eyes was
bright like as if they had a light inside of 'em, you
know. She was a queen, I tell you! And all at wunst
it come right acrost me, like a flash, that I mout as
well be mother's knight through thick and thin; and
I've been at it ever since. I 'low I've give her a
sight of trouble, with my plaguey wild ways, and I
come mighty blamed nigh runnin' this mornin', dogged
ef I didn't. But here goes.”

And with that he proceeded to saddle the restless
Dolly, while Henry put the side-saddle on old Blaze,
saying, as he drew the surcingle tight, “For my part,
I don't want to fight for nobody. I want to do as I
dog-on please.” He was meditating the fun he would
have catching a certain ground-hog, when once his
mother should be safely off to meeting.

Morton led old Blaze up to the stile and helped
his mother to mount, gallantly put her foot in the stirrup,
arranged her long riding-skirt, and then mounted
his own mare. Dolly sprang forward prancing and

dashing, and chafing against the bit in a way highly
pleasing to Morton, who thought that going to meeting
would be a dull affair, if it were not for the fun of
letting Dolly know who was her master. The ride
to church was a long one, for there had never been
preaching nearer to the Hissawachee settlement than
ten miles away. Morton found the sermon rather
more interesting than usual. There still lingered in
the West at this time the remains of the controversy
between “Old-side” and “New-side” Presbyterians,
that dated its origin before the Revolution. Parson
Donaldson belonged to the Old side. With square,
combative face, and hard, combative voice, he made
war upon the laxity of New-side Presbyterians, and
the grievous heresies of the Arminians, and in particular
upon the exciting meetings of the Methodists.
The great Cane Ridge Camp-meeting was yet fresh in
the memories of the people, and for the hundredth
time Mr. Donaldson inveighed against the Presbyterian
ministers who had originated this first of camp-meetings,
and set agoing the wild excitements now
fostered by the Methodists. He said that Presbyterians
who had anything to do with this fanaticism
were led astray of the devil, and the Synod did right
in driving some of them out. As for Methodists, they
denied “the Decrees.” What was that but a denial
of salvation by grace? And this involved the overthrow
of the great Protestant doctrine of Justification
by Faith. This is rather the mental process by which
the parson landed himself at his conclusions, than his
way of stating them to his hearers. In preaching, he
did not find it necessary to say that a denial of the
decrees logically involved the rest. He translated his
conclusions into a statement of fact, and boldly asserted
that these crazy, illiterate, noisy, vagabond circuit
riders were traitors to Protestantism, denying the doctrine
of Justification, and teaching salvation by the
merit of works. There were many divines, on both
sides, in that day who thought zeal for their creed justified
any amount of unfairness. (But all that is past!)

Morton's combativeness was greatly tickled by this
discourse, and when they were again in the saddle to
ride the ten miles home, he assured his mother that
he wouldn't mind coming to meeting often, rain or
shine, if the preacher would only pitch into somebody
every time. He thought it wouldn't be hard to be
good, if a body could only have something bad to
fight. “Don't you remember, mother, how you used
to read to me out of that old “Pilgrim's Progress,”
and show me the picture of Christian thrashing Apollyon
till his hide wouldn't hold shucks? If I could fight
the devil that way, I wouldn't mind being a Christian.”

Morton felt especially pleased with the minister to-day,
for Mr. Donaldson delighted to have the young
men come so far to meeting; and imagining that he
might be in a “hopeful state of mind,” had hospitably
urged Morton and his mother to take some refreshment
before starting on their homeward journey. It
is barely possible that the stimulus of the good parson's
cherry-bounce had quite as much to do with
Morton's valiant impulses as the stirring effect of his
discourse.