The Roof Tree. Charles Buck

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СКАЧАТЬ to glimpse some of these ancient treasures but memory was vague as to their character.

      Both father and mother were shadowy and half-mythical beings of hearsay to her, because just before her birth her father had been murdered from ambush. The mother had survived him only long enough to bring her baby into the world and then die broken-hearted because the child was not a boy whom she might suckle from the hatred in her own breast and rear as a zealot dedicated to avenging his father.

      The chest had always held for this girl intriguing possibilities of exploration which had never been satisfied. The gentle grandfather had withheld the key until she should be old enough to treat with respect those sentimental odds and ends which his women-folk had held sacred, and when the girl herself had "grown up" – she was eighteen now – some whimsey of clinging to the illusions and delights of anticipation had stayed her and held the curb upon her curiosity. Once opened the old trunk would no longer beckon with its mystery, and in this isolated life mysteries must not be lightly wasted.

      But this morning old Caleb Harper had prosaically settled the question for her. He had put that paper into her hand before he went over the ridge to the cornfield with his mule and plow.

      "Thet thar paper's right p'intedly valuable, leetle gal," he had told her. "I wants ye ter put hit away safe somewhars." He had paused there and then added reflectively, "I reckon ther handiest place would be in ther old horsehide chist thet our fore-parents fetched over ther mountings from Virginny."

      She had asked no questions about the paper itself because, to her, the opening of the trunk was more important, but she heard the old man explaining, unasked:

      "I've done paid off what I owes Bas Rowlett an' thet paper's a full receipt. I knows right well he's my trusty friend, an' hit's my notion thet he's got his hopes of bein' even more'n thet ter you– but still a debt sets mighty heavy on me, be hit ter friend or foe, an' hit pleasures me thet hit's sottled."

      The girl passed diplomatically over the allusion to herself and the elder's expression of favour for a particular suitor, but without words she had made the mental reservation: "Bas Rowlett's brash and uppety enough withouten us bein' beholden ter him fer no money debt. Like as not he'll be more humble-like a'tter this when he comes a-sparkin'."

      Now she sat on a heavy cross-beam and looked down upon the packed contents while into her nostrils crept subtly the odour of old herbs and spicy defences against moth and mould which had been renewed from time to time through the lagging decades until her own day.

      First, there came out a soft package wrapped in a threadbare shawl and carefully bound with home-twisted twine and this she deposited on her knees and began to unfasten with trembling fingers of expectancy. When she had opened up the thing she rose eagerly and shook out a gown that was as brittle and sere as a leaf in autumn and that rustled frigidly as the stiffened folds straightened.

      "I'll wager now, hit war a weddin' dress," she exclaimed as she held it excitedly up to the light and appraised the fineness of the ancient silk with eyes more accustomed to homespun.

      Then came something flat that fell rustling to the floor and spread into a sheaf of paper bound between home-made covers of cloth, but when the girl opened the improvised book, with the presentiment that here was the message out of the past that would explain the rest, she knitted her brows and sat studying it in perplexed engrossment.

      The ink had rusted, in the six score years and more since its inscribing, to a reddish faintness which shrank dimly and without contrast into the darkened background, yet difficulties only whetted her discoverer's appetite, so that when, after an hour, she had studied out the beginning of the document, she was deep in a world of romance-freighted history. Here was a journal written by a woman in the brave and tragic days of the nation's birth.

      That part which she was now reading seemed to be a sort of preamble to the rest, and before the girl had progressed far she found a sentence which, for her, infused life and the warmth of intimacy into the document.

      "It may be that God in His goodenesse will call me to His house which is in Heaven before I have fully written ye matters which I would sett downe in this journall," began the record. "Since I can not tell whether or not I shall survive ye cominge of that new life upon which all my thoughtes are sett and shoulde such judgement be His Wille, I want that ye deare childe shall have this recorde of ye days its father and I spent here in these forest hills so remote from ye sea and ye rivers of our deare Virginia, and ye gentle refinements we put behind us to become pioneers."

      There was something else there that she could not make out because of its blurring, and she wondered if the blotted pages had been moistened by tears as well as ink, but soon she deciphered this unusual statement.

      "Much will be founde in this journall, touching ye tree which I planted in ye first dayes and which we have named ye roofe tree after a fancy of my owne. I have ye strong faithe that whilst that tree stands and growes stronge and weathers ye thunder and wind and is revered, ye stem and branches of our family also will waxe stronge and robust, but that when it falls, likewise will disaster fall upon our house."

      One thing became at once outstandingly certain to the unsophisticated reader.

      This place in the days of its founding had been an abode of love unshaken by perils, for of the man who had been its head she found such a portrait as love alone could have painted. He was described as to the modelling of his features, the light and expression of his eyes; the way his dark hair fell over his "broade browe" – even the cleft of his chin was mentioned.

      That fondly inspired pen paused in its narrative of incredible adventures and more than Spartan hardships to assure the future reader that, "ye peale of his laugh was as clear and tuneful as ye fox horn with which our Virginia gentry were wont to go afield with horse and hound." There had possibly been a touch of wistfulness in that mention of a renounced life of greater affluence and pleasure for hard upon it followed the observation:

      "Here, where our faces are graven with anxieties that besette our waking and sleeping, it seemeth that most men have forgotten ye very fashion of laughter. Joy seemes killed out of them, as by a bitter frost, yet he hath ever kept ye clear peale of merriment in his voice and its flash in his eye and ye smile that showes his white teeth."

      Somehow the girl seemed to see that face as though it had a more direct presentment before her eyes than this faded portraiture of words penned by a hand long ago dead.

      He must have been, she romantically reflected, a handsome figure of a man. Then naïvely the writer had passed on to a second description: "If I have any favour of comeliness it can matter naught to me save as it giveth pleasure to my deare husbande, yet I shall endeavour to sette downe truly my own appearance alsoe."

      The girl read and re-read the description of this ancestress, then gasped.

      "Why, hit mout be me she was a-writin' erbout," she murmured, "save only I hain't purty."

      In that demure assertion she failed of justice to herself, but her eyes were sparkling. She knew that hereabout in this rude world of hers her people were accounted both godly and worthy of respect, but after all it was a drab and poverty-ridden world with slow and torpid pulses of being. Here, she found, in indisputable proof, the record of her "fore-parents". Once they, too, had been ladies and gentlemen familiar with elegant ways and circumstances as vague to her as fable. Henceforth when she boasted that hers were "ther best folk in ther world" she would speak not in empty defiance but in full confidence!

      But as she rose at length from her revery she wondered if after all she had not been actually dreaming, because a sound had come to her ears that was unfamiliar and that seemed of a piece with her reading. It was the laugh of a man, and its peal was as clear and as merry СКАЧАТЬ