Part 5 (1/2)
This meant a good long walk with my patron. Sometimes we would go down to Mount Johnson, if Sir William was at home, or to Mr. Butler's, or some other English-speaking house, where I would hear much profitable conversation, and then be encouraged to talk about it during our leisurely homeward stroll. But more often, if the day were fine, we would leave roads and civilization behind us, and climb the gradual elevation to the north of the house, through the woodland to an old Indian trail which led to our favorite haunt--a wonderful ravine.
The place has still a local fame, and picnic parties go there to play at forestry, but it gives scarcely a suggestion now of its ancient wildness.
As my boyish eyes saw it, it was nothing short of awe-inspiring. The creek, then a powerful stream, had cut a deep gorge in its exultant leap over the limestone barrier. On the cliffs above, giant hemlocks seemed to brush the very sky with their black, tufted boughs. Away below, on the shadowed bottomland, which could be reached only by feet trained to difficult descents, strange plants grew rank in the moisture of the waterfall, and misshapen rocks wrapped their nakedness in heavy folds of unknown mosses and nameless fern-growths. Above all was the ceaseless shout of the tumbling waters, which had in my ears ever a barbaric message from the Spirit of the Wilderness.
The older Mohawks told Mr. Stewart that in their childhood this weird spot was held to be sacred to the Great Wolf, the totem of their tribe. Here, for more generations than any could count, their wise men had gathered about the mystic birch flame, in grave council of war. Here the tribe had a.s.sembled to seek strength of arm, hardness of heart, cunning of brain, for its warriors, in solemn incantations and offerings to the Unknown.
Here hostile prisoners had been tortured and burned. Some mishap or omen or s.h.i.+ft of superst.i.tious feeling had led to the abandonment of this council place. Even the trail, winding its tortuous way from the Valley over the hills toward the Adirondack fastnesses, had been deserted for another long before--so long, in fact, that the young brave who chanced to follow the lounging tracks of the black bear down the creek to the gorge, or who turned aside from the stealthy pursuit of the eagle's flight to learn what this m.u.f.fled roar might signify, looked upon the remains of the council fire's circle of stone seats above the cataract, and down into the chasm of mist and foam underneath, with no knowledge that they were a part of his ancestral history.
Mr. Stewart told me that when he first settled in the Valley, a disappointed and angry man, this gulf had much the satisfaction for him that men in great grief or wrath find in breasting a sharp storm. There was something congenial to his ugly unrest in this place, with its violent clamor, its swift das.h.i.+ng of waters, its dismal shadows, and damp chilliness of depths.
But we were fallen now upon calmer, brighter days. He was no longer the discouraged, sullen misanthropist, but had come to be instead a pacific, contented, even happy, gentleman. And lo! the meaning of the wild gorge changed to reflect his mood. There was no stain of savagery upon the delight we had in coming to this spot. As he said, once listened rightly to, the music of the falling waters gave suggestions which, if they were sobering, were still not sad.
This place was all our own, and hither we most frequently bent our steps on Sundays, after the snow-water had left the creek, and the danger of lurking colds had been coaxed from the earth by the May sun. Here he would sit for hours on one of the stones in the great Druid-like circle which some dead generation of savages had toiled to construct. Sometimes I would scour the steep sides of the ravine and the moist bottom for curious plants to fetch to him, and he would tell me of their structure and design. More often I would sit at his feet, and he, between whiffs at his pipe, would discourse to me of the differences between his Old World and this new one, into which I providentially had been born. He talked of his past, of my future, and together with this was put forth an indescribable wealth of reminiscence, reflection, and helpful anecdote.
On this spot, with the gaunt outlines of mammoth primeval trunks and twisted boughs above us, with the sacred memorials of extinct rites about us, and with the waters cras.h.i.+ng down through the solitude beneath us on their way to turn Sir William's mill-wheel, one could get broad, comprehensive ideas of what things really meant. One could see wherein the age of Pitt differed from and advanced upon the age of Colbert, on this new continent, and could as in prophecy dream of the age of Jefferson yet to come. Did I as a lad feel these things? Truly it seems to me that I did.
Half a century before, the medicine-man's fire had blazed in this circle, its smoky incense crackling upward in offering to the G.o.ds of the pagan tribe. Here, too, upon this charred, barren spot, had been heaped the blazing f.a.gots about the limbs of the captive brave, and the victim bound to the stake had nerved himself to show the encircling brutes that not even the horrors of this death could shake his will, or wring a groan from his heaving breast. Here, too, above the unending din of the waterfall and the whisper of these hemlocks overhead, had often risen some such shrill-voiced, defiant deathsong, from the smoke and anguish of the stake, as that chant of the Algonquin son of Alknomuk which my grandchildren still sing at their school. This dead and horrible past of heathendom I saw as in a mirror, looking upon these council-stones.
The children's children of these savages were still in the Valley. Their council fires were still lighted, no further distant than the Salt Springs. In their hearts burned all the old l.u.s.t for torture and ma.s.sacre, and the awful joys of rending enemies limb by limb. But the spell of Europe was upon them, and, in good part or otherwise, they bowed under it.
So much had been gained, and two peaceful white people could come and talk in perfect safety on the ancient site of their sacrifices and cruelties.
Yet this spell of Europe, accomplis.h.i.+ng so much, left much to be desired.
It was still possible to burn a slave to death by legal process, here in our Valley; and it was still within the power of careless, greedy n.o.blemen in London, who did not know the Mohawk from the Mississippi, to sign away great patents of our land, robbing honest settlers of their all. There was to come the spell of America, which should remedy these things. I cannot get it out of my head that I learned to foresee this, to feel and to look for its coming, there in the gorge as a boy.
But there are other reasons why I should remember the place--to be told later on.
The part little Daisy played in all these childhood enjoyments of mine is hardly to be described in words, much less portrayed in incidents. I can recall next to nothing to relate. Her presence as my sister, my comrade, and my pupil seems only an indefinable part of the suns.h.i.+ne which gilds these old memories. We were happy together--that is all.
I taught her to read and write and cipher, and to tell mushrooms from toadstools, to eschew poisonous berries, and to know the weather signs.
For her part, she taught me so much more that it seems effrontery to call her my pupil. It was from her gentle, softening companions.h.i.+p that I learned in turn to be merciful to helpless creatures, and to be honest and cleanly in my thoughts and talk. She would help me to seek for birds'
nests with genuine enthusiasm, but it was her pity which prevented their being plundered afterward. Her pretty love for all living things, her delight in innocent, simple amus.e.m.e.nts, her innate repugnance to coa.r.s.e and cruel actions--all served to make me different from the rough boys about me.
Thus we grew up together, glad in each other's constant company, and holding our common benefactor, Mr. Stewart, in the greatest love and veneration.
Chapter VII.
Through Happy Youth to Man's Estate.
As we two children became slowly transformed into youths, the Valley with no less steadiness developed in activity, population, and wealth. Good roads were built; new settlements sprang up; the sense of being in the hollow of the hand of savagery wore off. Primitive conditions lapsed, disappeared one by one. We came to smile at the uncouth dress and unshaven faces of the ”bush-bauer” Palatines--once so familiar, now well nigh outlandish. Families from Connecticut and the Providence Plantations began to come in numbers, and their English tongue grew more and more to be the common language. People spoke now of the Winchester bushel, instead of the Schoharie spint and skipple. The bounty on wolves' heads went up to a pound sterling. The number of gentlemen who shaved every day, wore ruffles, and even wigs or powder on great occasions, and maintained hunting with hounds and horse-racing, increased yearly--so much so that some innocent people thought England itself could not offer more attractions.
There was much envy when John Johnson, now twenty-three years old, was sent on a visit to England, to learn how still better to play the gentleman--and even more when he came back a knight, with splendid London clothes, and stories of what the King and the princes had said to him.
The Johnsons were a great family now, receiving visits from notable people all over the colony at their new hall, which Sir William had built on the hills back of his new Scotch settlement. Nothing could have better shown how powerful Sir William had become, and how much his favor was to be courted, than the fact that ladies of quality and strict propriety, who fancied themselves very fine folk indeed, the De Lanceys and Phillipses and the like, would come visiting the widower baronet in his hall, and close their eyes to the presence there of Miss Molly and her half-breed children. Sir William's neighbors, indeed, overlooked this from their love for the man, and their reliance in his sense and strength. But the others, the aristocrats, held their tongues from fear of his wrath, and of his influence in London.
They never liked him entirely; he in turn had so little regard for them and their pretensions that, when they came, he would suffer none of them to markedly avoid or affront the Brant squaw, whom indeed they had often to meet as an a.s.sociate and equal. Yet this bold, independent, really great man, so shrewdly strong in his own att.i.tude toward these gilded water-flies, was weak enough to rear his own son to be one of them, to value the baubles they valued, to view men and things through their painted spectacles--and thus to come to grief.
Two years after Johnson Hall was built, Mr. Stewart all at once decided that he too would have a new house; and before snow flew the handsome, s.p.a.cious ”Cedars,” as it was called, proudly fronted the Valley highway.