Part 8

“Wow, man,--what fearsome looking worriecows be thae medicine-men,--thae cheerataghe! But Moy Toy was kind and helpful, though fine he liked to get rid of ye! That was what made me jaloose that mebbe you were meddlin’ wi’ the trade.” Lesly recurred to the subject.

“How do thae Injuns come by sic prodigious fine horses?” demanded Callum MacIlvesty, effecting a diversion with more delicate tact than might have been anticipated from his lowly station and coarse garb as a common soldier. Laroche began to understand that the Highlander, despite his position and rude dialect, was of a higher social grade in his own country than these compatriots of his, and that their “far awa” connection with his family was a source of pride to them, albeit the relation of wooer and wooed had compassed a certain reversal of the natural order of precedence. It occurred to his quick mind immediately that one of the many individual disasters involved in the national calamities of the Scotch rebellions of 1715 and 1745 was represented in the impoverishment and exile of this scion of a family of degree, perhaps even of high birth, for the young man used their vernacular evidently by reason of association and lack of education rather than station. He had sundry unmistakable marks of a highly bred gentleman, despite his evident poverty. Laroche knew that certain such, serving as soldiers of fortune, held commissions in the foreign armies of Europe, while a few others, more destitute of money and influence, could be found as “private men” in those Highland regiments recruited by the British government for service in America against the French and Indians, and officered in several instances, strangely enough, by men who had recently themselves been arrayed in arms against the dynasty they now supported.

“Their horses come frae the Spanish barbs that De Soty an’ his men left amang them--an’ I wuss we had naething waur frae the dooms meddlin’ Spanish than their cattle. Lord, sir, the lies they tell the puir Injuns!--that the British are determinate to sweep them aff the face o’ the warld!”

“The Spaniards are na sae kittle as the French,” said Callum MacIlvesty.

“The French,” rejoined Jock Lesly, bringing his clenched fist down on the table,--“the French are the deevil! Did ye notice, lad, how mony o’ the Cherokees can speak a little French,--nae mair than a ‘polly voo’ or sic like,--but sae mony!”

Laroche was conscious and out of countenance. So weak he was he could ill resist the strain of anxiety. “I did not notice--I was there at Tellico so short a time--what am I saying?--I do not know how long I was there nor how you happened to find me!” But he could not divert his host from the subject.

“As sure as you are an unsanctified sinner thae gabbling, blackguard French bodies hae been again meddlin’ wi’ the Cherokees an’ their trade,” declared Lesly solemnly. “Moy Toy was too polite by half,--onything to be rid o’ me,--dry-scratchin’ the weans that kilt my sheep till their screechings wad hae melted a heart o’ stane! An’ when I begged him to let me ha’ the loan o’ ye for a while, he happed ye in a’ his fine furs. I had to be gey carefu’ in returnin’ them a’.”

So they were within reach of Moy Toy and the town of Great Tellico by an hour’s travel, perhaps, or two. Laroche felt his heart sink. He had not counted on this possibility nor on the capacity of the Indians to keep his secret. Nay, so capricious was the temper of the Cherokees that he could not be sure of their will to conceal the fact of his nationality and his connection with the Franco-Choctaw embassy. Even his own mission, the confidential and private assurances of the French government which he had conveyed to Great Tellico, might now be maliciously divulged as a means of currying favor with the British,--since the utility of the promises he had made seemed a thing of the past and the prospect which they had presented had faded like a mirage into thin air. His face, with these thoughts in his mind, showed so sharp a change that Lilias, alarmed, rose with a protest. Even Jock Lesly permitted himself to be convinced that the session of breakfast should not be unduly prolonged, and Callum MacIlvesty shook up the pillows and drew the curtains, and the Frenchman sank down in silence--not to sleep, he stipulated within himself, but to ponder, to devise, to plot.

He slept unaware, unadvisedly, peacefully as a three years’ child. And he dreamed placidly and in satisfaction. Moy Toy came and drew the curtains, he thought, and looked at him with keen and friendly eyes, and with a significant finger on his lips. When he woke at length, so far had the bodily man got the better of the intellectual entity which led together a dual existence that he felt scant care for aught,--his detention, the French interest, Moy Toy’s possible disclosures,--if but he had a sup of that mutton broth, the enticing odors of which permeated the whole house. As he himself, with his thin hand, pulled aside the curtain that he might call to Callum MacIlvesty to beseech a share in that delectable burden of the family board, he burnt his wasted fingers against the hot bowl which Lilias was in the act of bringing to the bedside, and he hardly could wait to join in the laugh which the two Scotchmen set up in triumph on the recovery of his appetite.

If it could make them happy to see another man eat, he ministered lavishly to their felicity in the days that ensued.

At first he was unsteady enough on his feet when he was permitted to quit the haven of the bed. He could only make short voyages, as it were, from one chair to another, catching at everything that came in his way for support. But although of no great strength or stature he was of a good, compact physique, and once “on the mend,” as Jock Lesly expressed it, he progressed rapidly. He developed to his surprise a sort of luxurious inertia; he would fall asleep after dinner on the shady porch, his head against the doorpost. Naught in Ioco Town was so lazy save an old collie sleeping at his feet in the sun. His inaction extended to his mental processes,--he revolted from thought. He would not address himself to consider his plight, his jeopardy, the future of his mission. In fact all his faculties were instinctively quiescent, facilitating recovery. He felt even that he had joyfully dispensed with his old troublous identity. As Tam Wilson he was a new man, with no plans, no past, no obligations, no imperative military duty. The pioneer garb of buckskin, with its many fringes and leather belt and coonskin cap, that he was constrained to wear aided his release from himself. It was like being in some new world, this freedom of the ways of the household, this transition into the identity of a man who had no past, no secrets, no duties, no future. A joyous, kindly fellow he was, too, and all who looked on him liked him.

“This is what I should have been, uninfluenced, unhindered; Tam Wilson is really I,--unhampered by circumstance,” he said to himself.

His haunts were chiefly about the dwelling, which was situated near the trading-house and in the very centre of the Indian town. The traders--of whom there had been but very few in the whole region, each always in great isolation, none of whom had now returned except Jock Lesly--were allowed by the Indian municipal authorities, so to speak, the “second men,” the choice of erecting dwellings at a little distance from the towns or in their midst, if this were deemed to conduce to the greater safety of the white inmates of the house, thus under the immediate protection of the headmen of the village, for whose behoof the trader was licensed. The Indians being often at war with other tribes, especially the northern savages, this method of hovering under the wing of the Cherokee strength, both civil and martial, commended itself to the prudence of the trading folk. But the aspect of the little Scotch home, with all its suggestions of exile, devoid of a loophole within or a palisade outside, with no defense save the uncertain faith of the red savages who swarmed through the surrounding village, was pathetic in its isolation, its unique dissimilarity, its effect of captivity.

A vine, only a trumpet vine, hung luxuriant over the eaves and sent tendrils astir above the lintels of doors and windows. Shining pans were suspended to take the air and the sun against the posts of the porch. Piggins, crocks--blue, brown, and yellow--ranged themselves in vaunting cleanliness on a window shelf outside the sill. Motherly hens pecked about the steps, and a coop of slats, built in the form of a peak, restrained the activities of one who might have led too far a brood of the newly hatched, mere balls of fluffy brown and yellow down, endowed with motion, that flickered in and out of the crevices. Often in her gray-green dress the golden haired Lilias sat here at her homely flax wheel, while in the “beloved square” a company of braves were marshaling for a northern expedition against the Shawnees, singing their war-songs, painted for the war-path, the fullest expression of the terrible upon which the eye might rest. Sometimes there would be races or exhibitions of strength in the game of “ball play,” when hundreds would assemble from other towns to witness these diversions. The visitors, lured by the report of something uncommon at the trader’s dwelling, would come after the more exciting events of the day and stand outside and gaze upon her with insatiable curiosity. They would watch the revolutions of the whirling wheel and the flying thread. Her deft white hand, her unfamiliar, smiling face, her strange, golden hair were all points of interest. They would listen to the whir of the spinning and the vague sound of her voice, as she hummed low a weird old song which she often sang about a “gyre-carline” and her witchlike doings of “lang syne.” The men expressed no surprise, it being a point of honor with the Indians to have known all things always. They would invariably turn away without a word or a sign. Not so the women! The fashion of attire it was that served in an instant to denationalize them. From silent amazement they passed to whispered comments as they stood in buzzing groups; then to open questions; to shrill exclamations; to an unmannerly yet kindly frenzy of inquisitiveness. Sometimes a girl would step gingerly forward, touch the slipper and the stocking on the slender foot,--then fall back with a hysterical twitter of mingled delight and ridicule. The vagaries of the mode, as it was understood in Charlestown, the fashion of the white kerchief about the shoulders of Lilias, the pleated folds of her dress, were of endless interest to the young Cherokee coquettes, and kept them grouped long about the porch, and Lilias’s pink and white dimples continually playing in her cheek.

Somehow this curiosity concerning her was displeasing to Laroche. He wished Lilias were at home in Carolina. This was no place for the rooftree and the ingleside. He always distrusted the savages’ protestations of peace and professions of friendship. He was happier when they were all gone and the little spinning wheel with its tuft of flax stood close by the window in the “spence,” as the Scotch household called the living-room. There the puncheon benches and the “creepies,” as the stools of blocks of wood were dignified, had a gossiping way of clustering around the hearth of flagstones, where an ember was always kept alive in the great chimney place, being renewed night and morning, as a fire was deemed salutary for the invalid. Its glamour held gay Tam Wilson loitering there as long as the little wheel whirled and the green shadows of the newly leaved trees without flickered across the sunshine of her hair. Sometimes her knitting needles clicked and shimmered in the firelight. Sometimes she compounded and stirred with a long spoon and a burning red cheek the contents of saucepans for his behoof, then laughed with frolicsome scoffings at the celerity with which he disposed of them. He and the two Scotchmen exchanged experiences and argued on political or religious themes, and throughout Tam Wilson supported his character with a verisimilitude that would have won him credit in the histrionic profession, and like the others took in good part the trenchant remarks having a personal application with which she saw fit to comment. He fell into the habit of holding the skeins of yarn while she wound the thread for her knitting. So adroit and persistent was he in thrusting himself forward for this duty that he almost supplanted the young Highlander whose coveted boon it had been. Indeed Callum MacIlvesty openly sulked, taking no blame that he was the slower or the more inexpert swain of the two in the proffer of assistance. And so far had the identity of Tam Wilson submerged that of the diplomat, the soldier, the ambassador, that he felt a great and irrelevant joy in the sight of the young Highlander, thrown back on the opposite settle, each arm extended at full length along its back, his eyes fixed dully, blankly, on the rafters, that he might meet no glance of Lilias to win him from his just displeasure, his long, muscular legs stretched out to the fire, his plaid, his sporran, his belt, his kilt,--mentally designated “ses jupons” by Laroche,--all in unpicturesque and careless disarray. So painful to Callum was the spectacle of the dual industry that one day, unable to endure it longer, he sprang up to leave the house, encountering Jock Lesly at the door, where his horse stood saddled.

“Are ye gaen aff enow?” he interrogated Callum. “I am na willin’ to leave the house wi’ Lilias.”

“Oh, Tam is there,” replied Callum impatiently. “An’ I am na goin’ further than the spring,”--which was scarcely ten steps from the door.

“Sae lang as there’s twa men about,” said her father, and he rode off on his errand.

But Lilias had overheard Callum’s first phrase and no more, and Tam Wilson’s quick ears were hardly less alert. Her face turned crimson. The young Scotchman had won much sincere gratitude and a very tender appreciation of his interest in her by his instant expedition to join her in her journey hither to her father’s rescue from the smallpox, a disease then so dreaded, his adequate, thoughtful measures for her safety and protection, and yet the swift forwarding of the succor she brought. Odd that a thoughtless phrase could work such wreck! It was but a fancy, a freak that had taken him, she said to herself. She had thought too much of it, rated its significance too high. As for the distance, the danger, the fatigue--were the men not all and always louping hither and thither through this wild country, like the ranting, gangrel chiels they were, where five hundred miles seemed a less journey to them than fifty at hame in the gude po’ shay. He came wi’ her because he maun aye be ganging--and now he was content to commend her to the protection o’ Tam Wilson. She wad na gainsay him. She was not seeking Callum MacIlvesty or his help, good sooth! Tam Wilson was a welcome substitute for his presence and guard.

She held her head high and proud on her delicate, white neck. Her eyes, half cast down on the skeins as she disentangled the thread, glowed and flashed, and Tam Wilson, the personification of demure mischief, gazed discerningly at close quarters at them. Her sensitiveness was the keener for the fact that Callum on his father’s side, the MacIlvestys, was kin to “gret folk,” and the relationship of Jock Lesly and his daughter to the young Highlander’s mother was so distant as to baffle any ordinary computation, despite their pride in the fact and its frequent mention. At that time in the colonies women were few and much in the ascendant, and Lilias Lesly felt all the importance of her position and the strength of her power to make Callum rue the slight if he really cared aught for her, and to show him her own indifference if he cared naught.

Tam Wilson, in his idleness, his enforced inactivity, had developed a domestic proclivity. He was seldom out of the house, and as the days wore on the desire to go vanished. He was promoted to many domestic duties. He was permitted to stem the wild strawberries that graced the evening meal, and felt a stealthy joy to be berated that he should be so slow, and to be accused of taking toll of the fruit too heartily to solace his labor. It was he who went back and forth in pride to the spring with the pail, who was set to guard the bannocks that they did not burn, and when all was done who lounged on the settle and idly watched her smilingly lay the cloth that he might dine. It was he who beguiled the tedium of the sudden storms in the spring evenings when the clouds shut out the stars and the door shut out the mists and the roof rang with the marshaling of the hosts of the rain and the wind sang like a trump. Then Tam Wilson would stir the fire and tell wonderful stories and sing songs--military songs, gay clashes of the cannikin, and stories of the camp and the field, showing a knowledge so intimate as to cause the lowering Highlander to ask suddenly one night,--

“Ye hae seen service, sir?”

“Aye, sir,” answered Tam Wilson, instantly on his guard. “Foreign service, sir, some years ago. I was at Hastenbeck in ’57, sir, fighting with the Duke of Cumberland.”

Which was true, but as one of the victorious French, and not, as the phrase implied, among the defeated allied forces of the famous English commander.

“And two years later,” Tam Wilson continued with less animation, “I was at the battle of Minden. I have participated in several campaigns.”

Having thus unwittingly enhanced his rival’s consequence, the young Highlander asked no more, but fell back to lower savagely and bite his lips, as perhaps an outward figure of how he was eating his own heart within.

But it was the glamour of the clear vernal moon that bewitched the unstable Tam Wilson, himself with as many phases. He would fall suddenly silent, as under a spell, when its rays aslant, just discerned, would drop down through the window from the west, where it hung little more than a crescent in a pink haze, and draw the outline of a leaf of a chestnut oak, an acorn half developed, and a bare twig upon the rugged puncheon floor of the spence. The girl’s fair face would be vague, ethereal; her hair dimly a-glimmer; her white homespun dress of linen a poetic suggestion in the gloom; her rich voice full of undreamed-of vibrations that he could study with a quickened perception lacking in the bold light of day. The ember faded to ashes; the candles, with the canny Scotch thrift, were not lighted, since the moon lent a torch; the sense of home, of simple, domestic habitudes, was in abeyance with the eclipse of the visible exponents. With its sights and sounds annulled, the abstract interpretations prevailed. The mind rose to loftier conceits. One felt the forces of life--not merely living; the endowment of absolute entity--not sheer individuality, with its limitations, its crippled past, its doubtful, hampered, anxious future. The wind stirred the foliage without and reminded one of the wilderness, the vastness of the world that was made for man; the spring floods of the Tennessee River lifted a voice into the air and thundered primeval truths.

Through this window they could see the mountains--far, near, always in massive majesty. Now a pearly, opalescent mist would glimmer among the domes with the witchery of the moon, and again after it had sunk the skies would be clear and densely instarred. Once a planet, so brilliant as to annul all lesser glories, showed through a great chasm, whose rugged, craggy slopes seemed illuminated in the surrounding gloom with a weird, unaccustomed luster, so different from the familiar light of the moon was the quality of the radiance shed by a star alone. Poetry was in the night--no lyric, no vague, murmurous rune, but with a splendid majesty of rhythm, with an epic grandeur and a meaning of awe that might be felt by the pulses of the heart and suggested to the brain--baffling language, never to be set forth in the paltry medium of mere words.

In differing degrees they all felt its influence, perhaps. Jock Lesly, smoking his pipe with an assiduity which he had learned from the Indians, talked, it is true, but casually, fragmentarily; and Callum heeded enough to respond in kind, with sedulous care for the respect he always maintained toward his host and far awa’ kinsman, but often the matter and manner of his replies showed that thought and heart were not in them. For the others they were silent, save now and again at long intervals a murmur of assent or negation,--a dangerous silence, instinct with a meaning no words might adequately interpret. As one night succeeded another and the moon waxed to fuller splendors and all the woods without were pervaded with that magic sheen which showed such silvery vistas in the dark umbrageous forest, which idealized the aboriginal architecture of Ioco, which made the feathered head and straight form of an Indian passing now and again adown the bosky ways of the woodland town so meet, so apt an incident of the picture, even the Europeans felt an irking in walls and restraint and longed for the freer air, a moonlight stroll, to stand unbonneted beneath the zenith.

“Eh--the wearying wa’s!” exclaimed Lilias one evening, her elbow on the sill of the window and the moonlight in her upturned eyes, with all the wistfulness of a prisoner in their sweet longing. “How thae flowers scent the air!”

“Whist--whist--bairn; oh fie! Ye maun bide here,” said her father in gentle reproof. “The moon will last our time. They’ll hae the moon yet in the lift at Charlestoun, an’ gowans to pu’, I’se warrant, by the time we get there.”

What was this pang in Tam Wilson’s unmannerly heart! He dared not, even in his most remote consciousness, attribute its pain to the French officer, the Sieur de Laroche. And even as the Virginia drover and herdsman he affected to be, did he expect Jock Lesly to keep his daughter here indefinitely? He was almost stunned by the discovery of the sentimental anguish occasioned him by the mere idea of her withdrawal from his sight. He wondered now, however, since his mind was drawn to the subject, that as the object of her wild-goose chase--her father’s supposed illness--was removed she had not already returned. So vital an interest he felt that he was moved to steady his voice, which--oh, how preposterously--trembled in the first words, to ask of her father a definite question concerning her departure, albeit his inquisitiveness in his host’s family affairs ill accorded with his position as a guest laden with many favors. And in fact the query gave rise to some embarrassment.