The Maid-At-Arms | Page 4

"It has."
I unbound the scarlet handkerchief which I wore for a cap, and held it
between my fingers to dry its sweat in the breeze. Watching it flutter, I
said:
"Friend, in my country we never cross the branch till we come to it, nor
leave the hammock till the river-sands are beneath our feet. No
hunting-shirt is sewed till the bullet has done its errand, nor do men fish
for gray mullet with a hook and line. There is always time to pray for
wisdom."
"Friend," replied Mount, "I wear red quills on my moccasins, you wear
bits of sea-shell. That is all the difference between us. Good-bye.
Varick Manor is the first house four miles ahead."
He wheeled his horse, then, as at a second thought, checked him and
looked back at me.
"You will see queer folk yonder at the patroon's," he said. "You are
accustomed to the manners of your peers; you were bred in that land
where hospitality, courtesy, and deference are shown to equals; where
dignity and graciousness are expected from the elders; where duty and
humility are inbred in the young. So is it with us--except where you are
going. The great patroon families, with their vast estates, their patents,
their feudal systems, have stood supreme here for years. Theirs is the
power of life and death over their retainers; they reign absolute in their
manors, they account only to God for their trusts. And they are great

folk, sir, even yet--these Livingstons, these Van Rensselaers, these
Phillipses, lords of their manors still; Dutch of descent, polished,
courtly, proud, bearing the title of patroon as a noble bears his coronet."
He raised his hand, smiling. "It is not so with the Varicks. They are
patroons, too, yet kin to the Johnsons, of Johnson Hall and Guy Park,
and kin to the Ormond-Butlers. But they are different from either
Johnson or Butler--vastly different from the Schuylers or the
Livingstons--"
He shrugged his broad shoulders and dropped his hand: "The Varicks
are all mad, sir. Good-bye."
He struck his horse with his soft leather heels; the animal bounded out
into the western road, and his rider swung around once more towards
me with a gesture partly friendly, partly, perhaps, in menace. "Tell Sir
Lupus to go to the devil!" he cried, gayly, and cantered away through
the golden dust.
I sat my horse to watch him; presently, far away on the hill's crest, the
sun caught his rifle and sparkled for a space, then the point of white fire
went out, and there was nothing on the hill-top save the dust drifting.
Lonelier than I had yet been since that day, three months gone, when I
had set out from our plantation on the shallow Halifax, which the
hammock scarcely separates from the ocean, I gathered bridle with
listless fingers and spoke to my mare. "Isene, we must be moving
eastward--always moving, sweetheart. Come, lass, there's grain
somewhere in this Northern land where you have carried me." And to
myself, muttering aloud as I rode: "A fine name he has given to my
cousins the Varicks, this giant forest-runner, with his boy's face and
limbs of iron! And he was none too cordial concerning the Butlers,
either--cousins, too, but in what degree they must tell me, for I don't
know--"
The road entering the forest, I ceased my prattle by instinct, and again
for the thousandth time I sniffed at odors new to me, and scanned leafy
depths for those familiar trees which stand warden in our Southern

forests. There were pines, but they were not our pines, these feathery,
dark-stemmed trees; there were oaks, but neither our golden water oaks
nor our great, green-and-silver live-oaks. Little, pale flowers bloomed
everywhere, shadows only of our bright blossoms of the South; and the
rare birds I saw were gray and small, and chary of song, as though the
stillness that slept in this Northern forest was a danger not to be
awakened. Loneliness fell on me; my shoulders bent and my head hung
heavily. Isene, my mare, paced the soft forest-road without a sound, so
quietly that the squatting rabbit leaped from between her forelegs, and
the slim, striped, squirrel-like creatures crouched paralyzed as we
passed ere they burst into their shrill chatter of fright or anger, I know
not which.
Had I a night to spend in this wilderness I should not know where to
find a palmetto-fan for a torch, where to seek light-wood for splinter. It
was all new to me; signs read riddles; tracks were sealed books; the east
winds brought rain, where at home they bring heaven's own balm to us
of the Spanish grants on the seaboard; the northwest winds that we
dread turn these Northern skies to sapphire, and set