Chapter XV Hickories and Old Hickory
June, and June as it breaks only over the Middle Basin.
There had been great rains, saturating the leaves and grasses until they were almost blackened in their deep greenness. There had followed, flushing the grass on all the hills around the Hermitage, the mauve tints of coming dandelions, followed by the red, white, and blue flags of the clovers, until across deep valleys and on distant slopes there was a pale light much like moonlight.
I had been very busy. There was much for me to do, and I sought it eagerly, for I wished to forget and not to see. It is what we fail to forget that hurts. And so I worked.
Colonel Goff, as was his race, had acted straight-forwardly in the matter of his marriage to Eloise. Over a month ago he had sought out Aunt Lucretia and told her frankly that he sought the hand of her ward in marriage, that he wished to marry her and take her at once to England. He said that his brother, the Earl of Carfax, had died without heirs, and that he inherited the estate. The family name, he told her, was Goff, and he had kept it while in America. In the early fall his attorneys would have every legal provision complete for his return, and for immediate occupation of his estate. And he told her with equal frankness why it could not be done sooner, that in his younger days he had married out of his class, and had been blacklisted by his family for it, especially by his elder brother; that they had had not only hot words but a stand-up fight in which he had all but killed, and had really maimed the older brother for life. “I had to get out,” he said brusquely, “and get out quick. As it was they tried to disinherit me, but England’s laws are greater than England’s men. My wife was to follow, but she died.”
My Aunt was a woman of great sense and said nothing. But I noticed that she thought much, because she was very silent, and that she grew suddenly very tender to me. When Eloise had gone to Washington my Aunt went with her. Two things happened before they left, which I remember quite distinctly.
My Aunt’s admiration for the character and achievements of Andrew Jackson bordered on the idolatrous. As a boy she would take me often to the Hermitage, and tell me of the wilderness giant who lived there. She knew more about him than anyone I ever met. She understood the thousand sides of this man’s great nature, from his horse-racing to his religion. In the spot where he had lived so long there was, of course, a world of tradition. It came down from lip to lip. Of these stories my Aunt remembered all. A few days after Goff had talked with her as my Aunt and I were going over the grounds she stopped before the log-cabin in the pasture near the great spring where Jackson lived before he built the present Hermitage.
“Jack,” said she, “Andrew Jackson was the gamest thing God ever gave to humanity, and the gentlest. It is staggering to think what he had to overcome to do his life’s work. The fights, the sicknesses, the suffering, the slander, the insults, the lies, the butcheries they called battles, starvation, mutinies of his own men, all met and overcome by one tall, slim, sallow, pain-wracked man, on one thoroughbred horse, with a gun in his hand, and two in his eyes. Talk of Indian fights—Mills, and Cooks and Custers—they were child’s play to the great Creek Nation Jackson had to fight. And England behind them—selfish always and forever wanting that of others.”
She looked at me quickly, and went on: “But he waited and then hit them hard. No one, from Hannibal to Cæsar and Bonaparte, would ever have attacked Keane and his troops, just landed and in an open plain with New Orleans at their mercy before them, in the night-time as did Jackson and his ragged, half-armed militia. No one would ever have risked it but Jackson; he was greater than them all! For that seemingly foolhardy night attack saved him. He cut the very vitals out of them in the dark. He hacked them as a game cock does when he sticks his gaffs into the very heart of his foe. That was why on January eighth they could not go over his breastworks, even with the combined force of Packenham and Gibbs and the troops that afterwards won Waterloo. He had gaffed them in the ditch in the dark. He cut them into giblets. It was hell with the lid on. They say it was a useless battle, but they lie, Jack. If Jackson hadn’t stopped them, they would never have given up the Louisiana Purchase until we drove them out with another war. There are two kinds of men, Jack—talkers and doers. The talkers are all orators—they are all liars. They began with Aaron, whom God made a mouthpiece to Moses. Moses was the doer, but he could not talk. Aaron, the orator, talked for him, but it is Moses who lives. Jackson was a Moses, Clay an Aaron, a dead one, Jack, as all Aarons are, and growing deader every year. All orators, being liars, fool people while they live. Dead, they do not even fool themselves.
It was Clay and Crawford who let the British make that treaty of December twenty-fourth in which they said that they would not be bound by Bonaparte’s constructions. At that time Lord Castlereagh had every reason to believe that Packenham, sent out November twenty-fourth, with the best army and navy that ever left Portsmouth for a foreign shore, had taken the ‘crown colony of Louisiana,’ as they called it. And under that treaty they would have held it. It was Jackson who stopped them, just one day before that treaty was signed.
“Yes, Clay is dead,” she said laconically; “he ought to be.
“They wanted New Orleans, and they wanted it bad. ‘Booty and Beauty’ was the word they passed down the line when they landed and started across the Chalmette plain, to take the fair Creole City. They were going to take her and then rape her as they did the cities of Spain, and they would if Jackson had not gaffed their very vitals out in that night attack of December twenty-third.”
She turned suddenly on me, her eyes ablaze. “Do you think, Jack, if he had loved a girl and an Englishman wanted her bad enough to take her right out of his arms that he would have given her up?”
I looked up quickly and her face flushed with fighting fire.
“And he was the tenderest, Jack,” she went on calmly. “Old Parton tells a pretty story about him. One bitter, sleeting March day, an early lamb had all but died in the field here, and his little adopted grandchild, a tot of four, found the lamb and cried for it; and so Jackson brought them both to the house, and by the fire; and to comfort the child he took them both into his arms and so sat here, before this great hearth, holding them both in his arms.
“He, who had killed bad men as he had dogs, who had cut to death the pick of the army that later won Waterloo, he sat coddling a lamb and a child and thinking of his dead wife, and she,—oh, Jack, I all but shed tears when I think of it! The night she died, and he would not have it so, but lay all night beside her, holding her in his arms, and trying to get her warm again, with the great love of his own great heart.”
There were tears in Aunt Lucretia’s eyes. Oh, the depths of her stern heart! It is like the mountain capped with snow. But when the snow melts and the flowers come up among the crannied rocks there are no flowers in the valleys below that equal them.
The other recollection was of Eloise. It was the night before she left for Washington. Colonel Goff, who had spent the evening with her, had ridden off. I, pretending to work, was really listening for her footstep, as she came back to her room up the great steps.
“Jack,” she said, standing just outside the window, “come.” And she beckoned to me.
We sat down under the wisteria vine, which grew over the porch.
“Jack,” she said, “I want you to do me one favor. No one loves Satan here but you and me. Won’t you take care of him while I am gone? Ride him whenever you can, the harder the better, for he is made of iron and needs it.”
“He and I are good friends,” I said. “I have ridden him daily. We understand each other,” I added softly; “we both love you.”
“And Jack,” her hand was instantly in mine in the old way, “in after years you won’t think evil of me for selling myself this way, will you?”
“Why, no,” I said seriously. “I have been thinking of it, and all life is just a barter and trade.”
I saw her face in the starlight.
“I’ve no right to make you wretched like this, Jack,” she said, rising. “I am going in; and when I return do you be gone Jack, somewhere—anywhere.” Her voice trembled. She stood quiet, and I by her, dazed and helpless.
“There is one thing I am going to take to England with me, Jack,” and she pulled out from beneath her gown yoke, a little token I had forgotten. I recognized the locket and the chain I had given her years ago. “And this little picture in it is you, Jack. You gave them both to me the day I helped you lick Braxton Bragg.”
Then she turned quickly and left me.
“Jack,” said my Aunt, as we parted the next day at the station, “I am afraid things are all against us. Father, I see, is going to will The Home Stretch to Braxton Bragg. If I were you—”
“I have already done it,” I said. “I am going to move to-day to Dr. Gottlieb’s; there I shall work out my plans.”
My Aunt smiled grimly. “I want you to remember one thing when I am gone. Don’t give up—remember Old Hickory.”
I looked up at her quickly. I saw something in her eye that gave me heart again. I bade her good-by. I dared not say it to Eloise. I slipped away, but I watched the train of cars die away behind the trail of smoke in the distance as I rode back home, and it seemed as if my whole afterlife lay clouded in that path of smoke. It was hard to give up my home, the old home, every tree I knew, and with them Eloise and my life-dream....
One’s dream and one’s home—what else is there which grips so the very tendrils of one’s soul. To give up one cuts deeply into the roots of the heart, but when the blow is doubled, there is only one thing that can make one stand upright and not fall, and that is the Spirit Within. People have different ideas of God as their souls reveal. It runs all the way from the pitiable, crude, faint conception which comes to the savage in cloud, a sun, or star or image of stone, to the higher mind which perceives Him in the Great Spirit of the Universe. None of these is my idea of God. I have never been able to dissociate God from my own self. I have never been able to conceive of Him as apart from me.... And not always the same, but always there.... In my meaner self so little of Him is there, so tiny a spot of the divine light... so faint, so seemingly nothing. And this is the greatest of it—this is the test—the very divinest evidence. He is always there; and when a blow comes, humbling the material, the meaner of me, then He claims His own—my nobler self—taking it unto His care, flooding it with His presence. It is then, searching yourself and your own heart that you find Him—that you know that you are a part of God because He is there!
Riding home it all swept over me so. In my innermost soul I knew it: like a flash came the inspiration of it, the old Prophet of Deuteronomy: “As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings.” Did God mean in this, the wrecking of my nest, that I should fly—even as a young eagle?
“And remember Satan, Jack, to keep him fit,” I heard Eloise’s voice say.