that you are to go into the Shirley House as proprietor I suppose Cloverdale will take it as a dispensation of Providence in their favor, and you can live like a gentleman.”
“But, father, I’ve always liked the country best. Don’t you remember how Jim Shirley was always out here instead of my going down town when we were boys?”
“You are only a boy, now, Asher, and this is all I’ll hear to your doing. You ought to be thankful for having such a chance open to you. I have leased the farm for five years and you don’t want to be a hired man at twenty dollars a month, I reckon. Of course, the farm will be yours some day, unless you take a notion to run off to Virginia and marry a Thaine.”
The last words were said jokingly, but Asher’s mother saw a sudden hardening of the lines of his face as he sat looking out at the darkening landscape.
There was only a faint glow in the west now. The fields toward Cloverdale were wrapped in twilight shadows. Behind the eastern treetops the red disk of the rising moon was half revealed. Asher Aydelot waited long before he spoke. At length, he turned toward his father with a certain stiffening of his form, and each felt a space widening gulf-wise between them.
“You stayed at home and grew rich, Father.”
“Well?”
The father’s voice cut like a steel edge. He saw only opposition to his will here, but the mother forecasted the end from that moment.
“Father, war gives us to see bigger things than hatred between two sections of the country. There is education in it, too. That is a part of the compensation. Once, when our regiment was captured and starving, the Fifty-fourth Virginia boys saved our lives by feeding us the best supper I ever tasted. And a Rebel girl – ” he broke off suddenly.
“Well, what of all this? What are you trying to say?” queried the older man.
“I’m trying to show you that I cannot sit down here in the Shirley House and play mine host any more than I could – ” hesitatingly – “marry a Cloverdale girl on demand. No Cloverdale girl would have me so. I’ve seen too much of the country for such a position, Father. Let the men who staid at home do the little jobs.”
He had not meant to say all this, but the stretch of boundless green prairies was before his eyes, the memory of heroic action where men utterly forget themselves was in his mind, making life in that little Ohio settlement seem only a boy’s pastime, to be put away with other childish things. While night and day, in the battle clamor, in the little college class room, on boundless prairie billows, among lonely sand dunes – everywhere, he carried the memory of the gentle touch of the hand of a rebel girl, who had visited him when he was sick and in prison. And withal, he resented dictation, as all the Aydelots and Penningtons before him had done.
“What do you propose to do?” his father asked.
“I don’t know yet what I can do. I only know what I cannot do.”
“And that is – ?”
“Just what I have said. I cannot be a tavern keeper here the rest of my days with nothing to do half of the time except to watch the men pitch horseshoes behind the blacksmith shop, and listen to the flies buzz in the windows on summer afternoons; and everything else so quiet and dead you don’t know whether you are on the street or in the graveyard. If you’d ever crossed the Mississippi River you’d understand why.”
“Well, I haven’t, and I don’t understand. But the only way to stop this roving is to make a home of your own. Will you tell me how you expect to support a Cloverdale girl when you marry one?”
“I don’t expect to marry one.” The smile was winning, but the son’s voice sounded dangerously like the father’s.
“Why not?”
“Because when I marry it will be to a southern girl – ” Asher hesitated a moment. When he went on, his voice was not as son to father, but as man to man.
“It all happened down in Virginia, when I was wounded and in prison. This little girl took care of me. Only a soldier really knows what a woman’s hand means in sickness. But she did more. She risked everything, even her life, to get letters through the lines to you and to get me exchanged. I shiver yet when I think of her, disguised as a man in soldier’s clothes, taking the chance she did for me. And, well, I left my heart down there. That’s all.”
“Why haven’t you ever told us this before, Asher?” his father asked.
Asher stood up where the white moonlight fell full on his face. Somehow the old Huguenot defiance and the old Quaker endurance of his ancestors seemed all expressed in him.
“I wasn’t twenty-one, then, and I have nothing yet to offer a girl by way of support,” he said.
“Why, Asher!” Mrs. Aydelot exclaimed, “you have everything here.”
“Not yet, mother,” he replied. “And I haven’t told you because her name is Virginia Thaine, and she is a descendant of Jerome Thaine. Are the Aydelots big enough to bury old hates?”
Francis Aydelot sat moveless as a statue. When at length he spoke, there was no misunderstanding his meaning.
“You have no means by which to earn a living. You will go down to town and take charge of the Shirley House at once, or go to work as a hired hand here. But remember this: from the day you marry a Thaine of Virginia you are no longer my son. Family ties, family honor, respect for your forefathers forbid it.”
He rose without more words, and went into the house.
Then came the mother’s part.
“Sit down, Asher,” she said, and Asher dropped to his place on the step.
“We don’t seem to see life through the same spectacles,” he said calmly. “Am I wrong, mother? Nobody can choose my life for me, nor my wife, either. Didn’t old grandfather, Jean Aydelot, leave his home in France, and didn’t grandmother, Mercy Pennington, marry to suit her own choice?”
Even in the shadow, his mother noted the patient expression of the gray eyes looking up at her.
“Asher, it is Aydelot tradition to be determined and self-willed, and the bitterness against Jerome Thaine and his descendants has never left the blood – till now.”
She stroked his hair lovingwise, as mothers will ever do.
“Do you suppose father will ever change?”
“I don’t believe he will. We have talked of this many times, and he will listen to nothing else. He grows more set in his notions as we all do with years, unless – ”
“Well, you don’t, mother. Unless what?” Asher asked.
“Unless we think broadly as the years broaden out toward old age. But, Asher, what are your plans?”
“I’m afraid I have none yet. You know I was a farmer boy until I was fifteen, a soldier boy till I was nineteen, a college student for two years, and a Plains scout for two years more. Tell me, mother, what does all this fit me for? Not for a tavern in a town of less than a thousand people.”
He sat waiting, his elbow resting on his knee, his chin supported by his closed hand.
“Asher, when you left school and went out West, I foresaw
