The Robber Bridegroom (2 page)

"There! And there! If we have left you one whole bone between you, I'm not the bravest

creature in the world and this pretty thing never sprang from a flatboat," he said.

Next, reaching under the tatters of the pillow, he snatched all three bags of gold, like hot johnnycakes from a fire, and lying down and stretching his legs, he went to sleep at once, holding the gold in his two hands against his chest and dreaming about nothing else.

When all was still once more, Clement stretched forth his hand and said, "Are you Jamie Lockhart? I ask your name only in gratitude, and I do not ask you what you may be/'

"I am Jamie Lockhart," said he.

"How can I thank you, sir, for saving my life?"

"Put it off until morning," said Jamie Lock-hart. "For now, as long as we are supposed to be dead, we can sleep in peace."

He and the planter then fell down and slept until cockcrow.

Next morning Clement awoke to see Jamie Lockhart up and in his boots. Jamie gave him a signal, and he hid with him in the wardrobe and watched out through the crack.

So Mike Fink woke up with a belch like the roar of a lion.

"Next day!" announced Mike, and he jumped out of bed. With a rousing clatter the moneybags fell off his chest to the floor. "Gold!" he cried. Then he bent down and counted it, every piece, and then, as if with a sudden recollection, he stirred around in the bed with his finger, although he held his other hand over his eyes and would not look. "Nothing left of the two of them but the juice," said he.

Then Jamie Lockhart gave Clement a sign, and out they marched from the wardrobe, not saying a thing.

The flatboatman fell forward as if the grindstone were hung about his neck.

"Bogeys!" he cried.

"Good morning! Could this be Mike Fink?" inquired Jamie Lockhart politely.

"Holy Mother! Bogeys for sure!" he cried again.

"Don't you remember Jamie Lockhart, or has it been so long ago?"

"Oh, Jamie Lockhart, how do you feel?"

"Fine and fit/'

"Did you sleep well?"

"Yes indeed/' said Jamie, "except for some rats which slapped me with their tails once or twice in the night. Did you notice it, Mr. Mus-grove?"

"Yes/' said Clement, by the plan, "now that I think of it."

"I do believe they were dancing a Natchez Cotillion on my chest," said Jamie.

And at that the flatboatman cried "Bogeys!" for the last time, and jumped out the window. There he had left three sacks of gold behind him, Clement Musgrove's, Jamie Lockhart's and his own.

"Gone for good," said Jamie. "And so we will have to get rid of his gold somehow."

"Please be so kind as to dispose of that yourself," Clement said, "for my own is enough for me, and I have no interest in it."

"Very well," said he, "though it is the talking bird that takes my fancy more."

"You may have that and welcome. And now tell me what thing of mine you will accept, for you saved my life/' said the planter in great earnestness.

Jamie Lockhart smiled and said, '1 stand in need of one thing, it is true, and without it I may even be in danger of arrest."

"What is that?"

"A Spanish passport. It is only a formality, and a small matter, but I am a stranger in the Natchez country. It requires a recommendation to the Governor by a landowner like yourself/'

"I w r ill give it gladly," said Clement. "Before you go, I will write it out. But tell me—will you settle hereabouts?"

"Perhaps," said Jamie, making ready to go. "That is yet to be seen. Yet we shall surely meet again," he said, knotting the sleeves of his coat about his shoulders and taking up the bird on his left forefinger. It said at once, as though there it belonged,

"Turn back, my bonny, Turn away home."

Clement decided then and there to invite this man to dine with him that very Sunday night. But first, being a gullible man, one given to trusting all listening people, Clement sat Jamie Lock-hart down in the Rodney inn, looked him kindly in the face, and told him the story of his life.

"I was once married to a beautiful woman of Virginia/' he said, "her name was Amalie. We lived in the peaceful hills. The first year, she bore me two blissful twins, a son and a daughter, the son named for me and the daughter named Rosamond. And it was not long before we set out with a few of the others, and were on our way down the river. That was the beginning of it all/' said Clement, "the journey down. On the flatboat around our fire we crouched and looked at one another—I, my first wife Amalie, Kentucky Thomas and his wife Salome, and the little twins like cubs in their wrappings. The reason I ever came is forgotten now/' he said. "I know I am not a seeker after anything, and ambition in this world never stirred my heart once. Yet it

seemed as if I was caught up by what came over the others, and they were the same. There was a great tug at the whole world, to go down over the edge, and one and all we were changed into pioneers, and our hearts and our own lonely wills may have had nothing to do with it."

"Don't go fretting over the reason," said Jamie kindly, "for it may have been the stars."

"The stars shone down on all our possessions," said Clement, "as if they were being counted and found a small number. The stars shone brightly—too brightly. We could see too well then not to drift onward, too well to tie up and keep the proper vigil. At some point under the stars, the Indians lured us to shore."

"How did they do it?" asked Jamie. "What trick did they use? The savages are so clever they are liable to last out, no matter how we stamp upon them."

"The Indians know their time has come," said Clement. "They are sure of the future growing smaller always, and that lets them be infinitely gay and cruel. They showed their pleasure and

their lack of surprise well enough, when we climbed and crept up to them as they waited on all fours, disguised in their bearskins and looking as fat as they could look, out from the head of the bluff."

"They took all your money, of course/' said Jamie. "And I wonder how much it was you would have had to give. Only yesterday I heard of a case where travelers captured in the wilderness gave up three hundred doubloons, seventy-five bars of gold in six-by-eights, five hundred French guineas, and any number of odd pieces, the value of which you could not tell without weighing them—all together about fifteen thousand dollars/'

But if he spoke a hint, Clement did not hear it. "The money was a little part/' he said. "In their camp where we were taken—a clear-swept, devious, aromatic place under flowering trees— we were encircled and made to perform and go naked like slaves. We had to go whirling and dizzied in a dance we had never suspected lay in our limbs. We had to be humiliated and tor-

tured and enjoyed, and finally, with the most precise formality, to be decreed upon. All of them put on their blazing feathers and stood looking us down as if we were little mice."

"This must have been long ago/' said Jamie. "For they are not so fine now, and cannot do so much to prisoners as that/'

"The son named after me was dropped into a pot of burning oil," said Clement, "and my wife Amalie fell dead out of the Indians' arms before the sight. This made the Indians shiver with scorn; they thought she should have lived on where she stood. In their contempt they turned me free, and put a sort of mark upon me. There is nothing that you can see, but something came out of their eyes. Kentucky Thomas was put to death. Then I, who had shed tears, and my child, that was a girl, and Salome, the ugly woman they were all afraid of, were turned into the wilderness, bound together. They beat us out with their drums."

"The Indians wanted you to be left with less than nothing," said Jamie.

"Like other devices tried upon a man's life, this could have compelled love/' Clement said. "I walked tied beside this woman Salome, carrying my child, hungry and exhausted and in hiding for longer than I remember/'

"And now she is your second wife/' said Jamie, "and you have prospered, have you not?" "From the first, Salome turned her eyes upon me with less question than demand, and that is the most impoverished gaze in the world. There was no longer anything but ambition left in her destroyed heart. We scarcely spoke to each other, but each of us spoke to the child. As I grew weaker, she grew stronger, and flourished by the struggle. She could have taken her two hands and broken our bonds apart, but she did not. I never knew her in any of her days of gentleness, which must have been left behind in Kentucky. The child cried, and she hushed it in her own way. One morning I said to myself, If we find a river, let that be a sign, and I will marry this woman/ but I did not think we w T ould ever find a river. Then almost at once we came upon it—

the whole Mississippi. A priest coming down from Tennessee on a flatboat to sell his whisky stopped when he saw us, cut us loose from each other, then married us. He fed us meat, blessed us, gave us a gallon of corn whisky, and left us where we were/'

"And you turned into a planter on the spot," said Jamie, "and I wonder how much you are worth now!"

"There on the land which the King of Spain granted to me," said Clement, bent to tell his full story now or burst, "I built a little hut to begin with. But when my first tobacco was sold at the market, Salome, my new wife, entreated me in the night to build a better house, like the nearest settler's, and so I did. There was added the fine bedroom with a mirror to hang on the wall, and after the bedroom a separate larder, and behind the house a kitchen with a great oven. And behind the kitchen in a little pen was a brand-new pig, and tied beyond him to a tree was a fresh cow. A big black dog barked in the dooryard to keep anybody out, and a cock

jumped on the roof of the house every morning and crowed loud enough to alarm the whole country.

" 'How is this, wife?' said I.

" 'We shall see/ Salome said. Tor it is impossible not to grow rich here/ "

"And she was right/' said Jamie.

"Yes, she was right/' Clement said. "She would stand inflexible and tireless, casting long black shadows from the candle she would be always carrying about the halls at night. She was never certain that we lived unmolested, and examined the rooms without satisfaction. Often she carried a rifle in the house, and she still does. You would see her eyes turn toward any open door, as true as a wheel. I brought her many gifts, more and more, that she would take out of their wrappings without a word and lay away in a chest/'

"A woman to reckon with, your second wife/* said Jamie with a musing smile.

Clement closed his lips then, but he remembered how in her times of love Salome was im-

measurably calculating and just so, almost clock-like, in the way of the great Spanish automaton in the iron skirt in the New Orleans bazaar, which could play and beat a man at chess.

"As soon as possible," said Clement aloud, "I would bring her another present, to stop the guilt in my heart."

''Guilt is a burdensome thing to carry about in the heart," said Jamie. "I would never bother with it."

''Then you are a man of action," said Clement, "a man of the times, a pioneer and a free agent. There is no one to come to you saying 'I want' what you do not want. 'Clement/ Salome would say, 1 want a gig to drive in to Rodney/ 'Let us wait another year/ said L 'Nonsense!' So there would be a gig. Next, 'Clement, I want a row of silver dishes to stand on the shelf/ 'But my dear wife, how can we be sure of the food to go in them?' And the merchants, you know, have us at their mercy. Nevertheless, my next purchase off the Liverpool ship was not a new wrought-iron plow, but the silver dishes. And it did seem

that whatever I asked of the land I planted on, I would be given, when she told me to ask, and there was no limit to its favors/'

"How is your fortune now?" asked Jamie, leaning forward on his two elbows.

"Well, before long a little gallery with four posts appeared across the front of my house, and we were sitting there in the evening; and new slaves sent out with axes were felling more trees, and indigo and tobacco were growing nearer and nearer to the river there under the black shadow of the forest. Then in one of the years she made me try cotton, and my fortune was made. I suppose that at the moment/' said Clement in conclusion, but with no show of confidence (for to tell the truth, he was not sure exactly what he was worth), "I may be worth thousands upon thousands of gold pieces/*

"You are a successful man/' said Jamie, "willy-nilly/'

"But on some of the mornings as I ride out/' said Clement, "my daughter Rosamond runs and stops me on the path and says, 'Father, why was

it you shouted out so loudly in the night?' And I tell her that I had a dream. What was your dream?' says she. In the dream, whenever I lie down, then it is the past. When I climb to my feet, then it is the present. And I keep up a struggle not to fall/ And Rosamond says, 'It is my own mother you love, swear it is so/ And Salome listens at the doors and I hear her say to herself, 'I had better wake him each morning just before his dream, which comes at dawn, and declare my rights/ " Clement sighed and said, "It is want that does the world's arousing, and if it were not for that, who knows what might not be interrupted?"

But Jamie said he must go, and reminded him of the passport that was needed.

"You have interested me very much/' said Clement, when he had written it out; for the poor man was under the misapprehension that he now knew everything about Jamie, instead of seeing the true fact that Jamie now knew everything about him. "And in order to persuade you to settle near-by, and come and talk more

to me in the evenings, I invite you to dine with me on next Sunday night. It is only three hours' ride away, and I will meet you here to show you the way/'

"And I think I will come," said Jamie, his teeth flashing in a smile. But his look was strange indeed.

"I wish to introduce you," said Clement, nevertheless, "to Salome; and to my daughter Rosamond, who is so beautiful that she keeps the memory of my first wife alive and evergreen in my heart."

Then they both rode away—Clement through the wilderness to his plantation, and Jamie on an errand of his own, with the raven perched on his shoulder.