Round Anvil Rock | Page 7

ladies to one another, and the difference in
their relationship to the head of Cedar House, caused much dissension
in the household, and gave rise to certain domestic complications
which always rose when least expected.
The fire had been freshly kindled with small twigs of the sugar maple,
that priceless tree often standing fifty to an acre in the wilderness, and
giving the pioneers their best fire-wood, their coolest shade, and their
sweetest food. Vivid blue sparks were still flashing among the little
white stars of the gray moss on the big backlog. From the blazing ends
of the log there came the soft, airy music and the faint, sweet scent of
bubbling sap. This main room of Cedar House was very large, almost
vast, taking up the whole lower floor. It was the dining room as well as
the sitting room; and when some grand occasion arose, it served even
as a drawing-room, and did it handsomely, too. This great room of
Cedar House always reminded David of the ancient halls in "The
Famous History of Montilion," a romance of chivalry from which most
of his ideas of life were taken, and upon which most of his ideals of
living were formed. Surely, he thought, the castle of the "Knight of the
Oracle" could not be grander than this great room of Cedar House.
The rich dark wood of its walls and floor--all rudely smoothed with the

broadaxe and the whipsaw--hung overhead in massive beams. From
these low, blackened timbers there swung many antique lamps,
splendid enough for a palace and strangely out of place in a log house
of the wilderness. On the rough walls there were also large sconces of
burnished silver but poorly filled with tallow candles. In the bare
spaces between these silver sconces were the heads of wild animals
mingled with many rifles, both old and new, and other arms of the
hunter. Over the tall mantelpiece there were crossed two untarnished
swords which had been worn by the judge's father in the Revolution.
On the red cedar of the floor, polished by wear and rubbing, there lay
the skins of wild beasts, together with costly foreign rugs. The same
strange mixture of rudeness and refinement was to be seen everywhere
throughout the room. The table standing in the centre of the floor, ready
for the evening meal, was made of unplaned boards, rudely put together
by the unskilled hands of the backwoods. Yet it was set with the finest
china, the rarest glass, and the richest silver that the greatest skill of the
old world could supply. The chairs placed around the table were made
of unpainted wood from the forest, with seats woven out of the coarse
rushes from the river. And there, between the front windows, stood
Ruth's piano, the first in that part of the wilderness, and as fine as the
finest of its day anywhere.
It is true that something like the same confusion of luxury and wildness
was becoming more or less common throughout the country. The wain
trains which had lately followed the packhorse trains over the
Alleghanies--with the widening of the Wilderness Road--were already
bringing many comforts and even luxuries to the cabins of the
well-to-do settlers. But nothing like those which were fetched
constantly to Cedar House ever came to any other household; and it
was not the family who caused them to be brought there. For while the
judge was a man of wealth for his time and place, and able to give his
family greater comfort than his poorer neighbors could afford, he was
far from having the means, much less the taste and culture, to gather
such costly, beautiful, and rare things as were gathered together in
Cedar House. It was through Philip Alston that everything of this kind
had come. It was he who had chosen everything and paid for it, and
ordered it fetched over the mountains from Virginia or up the river

from France or Spain--all as gifts from him to Ruth. It was natural
enough that he should give her whatever he wished her to have, and
there was no reason why she should not accept any and everything that
he gave. She was held by him and by every one as his adopted daughter.
He had no children of his own, no relations of any degree so far as any
one knew, and he was known to be generous and believed to be very
rich. Indeed no one thought much about his gifts to Ruth; they had long
since become a matter of course, a part of the everyday life of Cedar
House. They had begun with Ruth's coming more than seventeen years
before. As a baby she had been rocked in a cradle such as never before
had