Westways: A Village Chronicle

  WESTWAYS

  A Village Chronicle

  by

  S. WEIR MITCHELL, M.D., LL.D.

  Author of _Hugh Wynne_, _The Adventures of Francois_, _ConstanceTrescot_, etc., etc.

  1913

  I DEDICATE THIS BOOK WHICH RECALLS CERTAIN SCENES OF THE CIVIL WAR TO THEMEMORY OF MY THREE BROTHERS

  R.W.M.N.C.M.E.K.M.

  ALL OF WHOM SERVED IN THE ARMIES OF THEIR COUNTRY

  PREFACE

  There will be many people in this book; some will be important, otherswill come on the scene for a time and return no more. The life-lines ofthese persons will cross and recross, to meet once or twice and notagain, like the ruts in a much used road. To-day the stage may becrowded, to-morrow empty. The corner novels where only a half dozenpeople are concerned give no impression of the multitudinous contactswhich affect human lives. Even of the limited life of a village this istrue. It was more true of the time of my story, which lacking plot mustrely for interest on the influential relations of social groups, thenmore defined in small communities than they are to-day.

  Long before the Civil War there were in the middle states, near to orremote from great centres, villages where the social division of classeswas tacitly accepted. In or near these towns one or more families werecontinuously important on account of wealth or because of historicposition, generations of social training, and constant relation to thelarger world. They came by degrees to constitute what I may describe asan indistinct caste, for a long time accepted as such by their lessfortune-favoured neighbours. They were, in fact, for many years almost asmuch a class by themselves as are the long-seated county families ofEngland and like these were looked to for helpful aid in sickness and inother of the calamities of life. The democrat time, increasing ease oftravel and the growth of large industries, gradually altered the relationbetween these small communities, and the families who in the smallermatters of life long remained singularly familiar with their poorerneighbours and in the way of closer social intimacies far apart.

  It seemed to me worth while to use the life of one of these groups ofpeople as the background of a story which also deals with the influenceof politics and war on all classes.

  WESTWAYS

  CHAPTER I

  The first Penhallow crossed the Alleghanies long before the War forIndependence and on the frontier of civilisation took up land where theaxe was needed for the forest and the rifle for the Indian. He made aclearing and lived a hard life of peril, wearily waiting for the charredstumps to rot away.

  The younger men of the name in Colonial days and later left the placeearly, and for the most part took to the sea or to the army, if therewere activity in the way of war. In later years, others drifted westwardon the tide of border migration, where adventure was always to be had.This stir of enterprise in a breed tends to extinction in the male lines.Men are thinned out in their wooing of danger--the _belle dame sansmerci_. Thus there were but few Penhallows alive at any one time, andyet for many years they bred in old-fashioned numbers.

  As time ran on, a Penhallow prospered in the cities, and clinging tothe land added fresh acres as new ambitions developed qualities whichare not infrequently found in descendants of long-seated Americanfamilies. It was not then, nor is it now, rare in American life to findfortune-favoured men returning in later days to the homes of their youthto become useful in many ways to the communities they loved. One ofthese, James Penhallow,--and there was always a James,--after greatlyprospering in the ventures of the China trade, was of the many who about1800 bought great tracts of land on the farther slope of the PennsylvaniaAlleghanies. His own purchases lay near and around the few hundred acreshis ancestor took up and where an aged cousin was left in charge of thefarm-house. When this tenant died, the house decayed, and the nextPenhallow weary of being taxed for unproductive land spent a summer onthe property, and with the aid of engineers found iron in plenty and softcoal. He began about 1830 to develop the property, and built a largehouse which he never occupied and which was long known in the county as"Penhallow's Folly." It was considered the more notably foolish becauseof being set, in unAmerican fashion, deep in the woods, and remote fromthe highway. What was believed to be the oldest pine-tree in the countygave to the place the popular name of "Grey Pine" and being accepted bythe family when they came there to live, "Penhallow's Folly" ceased to beconsidered descriptive.

  The able and enterprising discoverer of mines had two sons. One of them,the youngest, married late in life, and dying soon after left a widow anda posthumous son John, of whom more hereafter. The elder brother wasgraduated from West Point, served some years with distinction, andmarrying found himself obliged to resign his captaincy on his father'sdeath to take charge of the iron-mills and mines, which had become farmore important to the family than their extensive forest-holdings on thefoot-hills of the western watershed of the Alleghanies.

  The country had long been well settled. The farmers thrived as the millsand mines needed increasing supplies of food and the railway gave accessto market. The small village of Westways was less fortunate than thecounty. Strung along the side of the road opposite to Penhallow's woods,it had lost the bustling prosperity of a day when the Conestoga wagonsstopped over-night at the "General Wayne Inn" and when as yet no onedreamed that the new railroad would ruin the taverns set at intervalsalong the highway to Pittsburgh. Now that Westways Crossing, two milesaway, had been made the nearest station, Westways was left to live on themill-wages and such profits as farming furnished.

  When Captain James Penhallow repaired the neglected house and kept thetown busy with demands for workmen, the village woke up for a wholesummer. In the autumn he brought to Grey Pine his wife, Ann Grey, of thewell-known Greys of the eastern shore of Maryland. A year or two ofdiscomfort at Western army-posts and a busy-minded, energeticpersonality, made welcome to this little lady a position which providedunaccustomed luxuries and a limitless range of duties, such as were toher what mere social enjoyments are to many women. Grey Pine--the house,the flower and kitchen-gardens, the church to be built--and the schoolsat the mills, all were as she liked it, having been bred up amid thekindly despotism of a great plantation with its many dependent slaves.

  When Ann Penhallow put Grey Pine and the Penhallow crest on hernotepaper, her husband said laughing that women had no rights to crests,and that although the arms were surely his by right of good Cornishdescent, he thought their use in America a folly. This disturbed AnnPenhallow very little, but when they first came to Grey Pine the headingsof her notepaper were matters of considerable curiosity to the stragglingvillage of Westways, where she soon became liked, respected, andmoderately feared. A busy-minded woman, few things in the life of thepeople about her escaped her notice, and she distributed uninvitedcounsel or well-considered charity and did her best to restrain the morelavish, periodical assistance when harvests were now and then bad--whichmade James Penhallow a favourite in the county.

  Late in the summer of 1855, John Penhallow's widow, long a wanderingresident in Europe, acquired the first serious illness of aself-manufactured life of invalidism and promptly died at Vevey. Her onlychild, John, was at once ordered home by his uncle and guardian, JamesPenhallow, and after some delay crossed the sea in charge of his tutor.The dependent little fellow hid under a natural reserve what grief hefelt, and accustomed to being sent here and there by an absent mother,silently submissive, was turned over by the tutor to James Penhallow'sagent in Philadelphia. On the next day, early in November, he was put incharge of a conductor to be left at Westways Crossing, where he was toldthat some one would meet him.

  The day was warm when in the morning he took his seat in the train,but before noon it became clouded, and an early snow-st
orm with suddenfall of temperature made the boy sensible that he was ill-clothed toencounter the change of weather. He had been unfortunate in the factthat his mother had for years used the vigilant tyranny of feeblenessto enforce upon the boy her own sanitary views. Children are easilymade hypochondriac, and under her system of government he becameself-attentive, careful of what he ate and extremely timid. Therehad been many tutors and only twice long residence at schools in Veveyand for a winter in Budapest. The health she too sedulously watched shewas fast destroying, and her son was at the time of her death a thin,pallid, undersized boy, who disliked even the mild sports of French lads,and had been flattered and considered until he had acquired theconviction that he was an important member of an important family. Hisother mother--nature--had given him, happily, better traits. He was anobserver, a born lover of books, intelligent, truthful, and trainedin the gentle, somewhat formal, manners of an older person. Now for thefirst time in his guarded life he was alone on a railway journey incharge of the conductor. A more unhappy, frightened little fellow couldhardly have been found.

  The train paused at many stations; men and women got on or got out of thecars, very common-looking people, surely, he concluded. The day ran by toafternoon. The train had stopped at a station for lunch, but John,although hungry, was afraid of being left and kept the seat which hepresumed to be his own property until a stout man took half of it. Alittle later, a lean old woman said, "Move up, sonny," and sat down.When she asked his name and where he lived, he replied in the coldlycivil manner with which he had heard his mother repress the good-naturedadvances of her wandering countrymen. When again the seat was free, hefell to thinking of the unknown home, Grey Pine, which he had heard hismother talk of to English friends as "our ancestral home," and of thegreat forests, the mines and the iron-works. Her son would, of course,inherit it, as Captain Penhallow had no child. "Really a great estate,my dear," his mother had said. It loomed large in his young imagination.Who would meet him? Probably a carriage with the liveried driver and thegroom immaculate in white-topped boots, a fur cover on his arm. It would,of course, be Captain Penhallow who would make him welcome. Then thecold, which is hostile to imagination, made him shiver as he drew histhin cloak about him and watched the snow squadrons wind-driven and thebig flakes blurring his view as they melted on the panes. By and by, twogiggling young women near by made comments on his looks and dress.Fragments of their talk he overheard. It was not quite pleasant. "Law!ain't he got curly hair, and ain't he just like a girl doll," and so onin the lawless freedom of democratic feminine speech. The flat Moroccocap and large visor of the French schoolboy and the dark blue cloak withthe silver clasp were subjects of comment. One of them offered peanuts orsugar-plums, which he declined with "Much obliged, but I never takethem." Now and then he consulted his watch or felt in his pocket to becertain that his baggage-check was secure, or looked to see if the littlebag of toilet articles at his feet was safe. The kindly attentions ofthose who noticed his evident discomfort were neither mannerless nor, ashe thought, impertinent. A woman said to him that he seemed cold,wouldn't he put around him a shawl she laid on his knees. He declined itcivilly with thanks. In fact, he was thinly and quite too lightly clad,and he not only felt the cold, but was unhappy and utterly unprepared byany previous experience for the mode of travel, the crowded car and therough kindness of the people, who liking his curly hair and refined youngchildlike face would have been of service if he had accepted theiradvances with any pleasure. Presently, after four in the afternoon, thebrakeman called "All out for Westways Crossing."

  John seized his bag and was at the exit-door before the train came to astand. The conductor bade him be careful, as the steps were slippery. Asthe engine snorted and the train moved away, the conductor cried out,"Forgot your cane, sonny," and threw the light gold-mounted bamboo fromthe car. He had a new sense of loneliness as he stood on the rooflessplatform, half a foot deep in gathering snow, which driven by a pitilessgale from the north blew his cloak about as he looked to see that histrunk had been delivered. A man shifted a switch and coming back said,"Gi'me your check." John decided that this was not safe, and to the man'samusement said that he would wait until the carriage of Captain Penhallowarrived. The man went away. John remained angrily expectant looking upthe road. Presently he heard the gay jingle of bells and around a turn ofthe road came a one-horse sleigh. It stopped beside him. He first sawonly the odd face of the driver in a fur cap and earlets. Then, tossingoff the bear skins, bounded on to the platform a young girl and shookherself snow-free as she threw back a wild mane of dark red hair.

  "Halloa! John Penhallow," she cried, "I'm Leila Grey. I'm sent for you.I'm late too. Uncle James has gone to the mills and Aunt Ann is busy.Been here long?"

  "Not very," said John, his teeth chattering with cold.

  "Gracious! you'll freeze. Sorry I was late." She saw at a glance the lowshoes, the blue cloak, the kid gloves, the boy's look of suffering, andat once took possession of him.

  "Get into the sleigh. Oh! leave your check on the trunk or give it tome." She was off and away to the trunk as he climbed in, helpless. Sheundid the counter check, ran across to the guard's house, was back in amoment and tumbled in beside him.

  "But, is it safe? My trunk, I mean," said John.

  "Safe. No one will steal it. Pat will come for it. There he is now. Tuckin the rugs. Put this shawl around you and over your head." She pinned itwith ready fingers.

  "Now, you'll be real comfy." The chilled boy puzzled and amused her.

  As he became warm, John felt better in the hands of this easy despot, butwas somewhat indignant. "To send a chit of a girl for him--JohnPenhallow!"

  "Now," she cried to the driver, "be careful. Why did they send _you_?"

  Billy, a middle-aged man, short-legged and long of body, turned abig-featured head as he replied in an odd boyish voice, "The man was busygiving a ball in the stable."

  "A ball"--said John--"in the stable?"

  "Oh! that is funny," said the girl. "A ball's a big pill for Lucy, mymare. She's sick."

  "Oh! I see." And they were off and away through the wind-driven snow.

  The girl, instinctively aware of the shyness and discomfort of hercompanion, set herself to put him at ease. The lessening snow still fell,but now a brilliant sun lighted the white radiance of field and forest.He was warmer, and the disconnected chat of childhood began.

  "The snow is early. Don't you love it?" said the small maid bent onmaking herself agreeable.

  "No, I do not."

  "But, oh!--see--the sun is out. Now you will like it. I suppose you don'tknow how to walk in snow-shoes, or it would be lovely to go right homeacross country."

  "I never used them. Once I read about them in a book."

  "Oh! you'll learn. I'll teach you."

  John, used to being considered and flattered, as he became morecomfortable began to resent the way in which the girl proposed toinstruct him. He was silent for a time.

  "Tuck in that robe," she said. "How old are you?"

  "This last September, fifteen. How old are you?"

  "Guess."

  "About ten, I think." Now this was malicious.

  "Ten, indeed! I'm thirteen and ten months and--and three days," shereturned, with the accuracy of childhood about age. "Were you at schoolin Europe?"

  "Yes, in France and Hungary."

  "That's queer. In Hungary and France--Oh! then you can speak French."

  "Of course," he replied. "Can't you?"

  "A little, but Aunt Ann says I have a good accent when I read to her--weoften do."

  "You should say 'without accent,'" he felt better after this assertion ofsuperior knowledge. She thought his manners bad, but, though more amusedthan annoyed, felt herself snubbed and was silent for a time. He wasquick to perceive that he had better have held his critical tongue, andsaid pleasantly, "But really it don't matter--only I was told that inFrance."

  She was as quick to reply, "You shouldn't say 'don't matter,' I say thatsome
times, and then Uncle James comes down on me."

  "Why? I am really at a loss--"

  "Oh! you must say 'doesn't'--not 'don't.'" She shook her great mass ofhair and cried merrily, "I guess we are about even now, John Penhallow."

  Then they laughed gaily, as the boy said, "I wasn't very--verycourteous."

  "Now that's pretty, John. Good gracious, Billy!" she cried, punching thebroad back of the driver. "Are you asleep? You are all over the road."

  "Oh! I was thinkin' how Pole, the butcher, sold the Squire a horse that'sspavined--got it sent back--funny, wasn't it?"

  "Look out," said Leila, "you will upset us."

  John looked the uneasiness he felt, as he said, "Do you think it issafe?"

  "No, I don't. Drive on, Billy, but do be careful."

  They came to the little village of Westways. At intervals Billycommunicated bits of village gossip. "Susan McKnight, she's going tomarry Finney--"

  "Bother Susan," cried Leila. "Be careful."

  John alarmed held on to his seat as the sleigh rocked about, while Billywhipped up the mare.

  "This is Westways, our village. It is just a row of houses. Uncle Jameswon't sell land on our side. Look out, Billy! Our rector lives in thatsmall house by the church. His name is Mark Rivers. You'll like him.That's Mr. Grace, the Baptist preacher." She bade him good-day. "Stop,Billy!"

  He pulled up at the sidewalk. "Good afternoon, Mrs. Crocker," she said,as the postmistress came out to the sleigh. "Please mail this. Anyletters for us?"

  "No, Leila." She glanced at the curly locks above the thin face and thewrapped up form in the shawl. "Got a nice little girl with you, Leila."

  John indignant said nothing. "This is a boy--my cousin, John Penhallow,"returned Leila.

  "Law! is that so?"

  "Get on," cried Leila. "Stop at Josiah's."

  Here a tall, strongly built, very black negro came out. "Fine frosty day,missy."

  "Come up to the house to-night. Uncle Jim wants you."

  "I'll come--sure."

  "Now, get along, Billy."

  The black was strange to the boy. He thought the lower orders heredisrespectful.

  "Josiah's our barber," said Leila. "He saved me once from a dreadfulaccident. You'll like him."

  "Will I?" thought John, but merely remarked, "They all seem ratherintimate."

  "Why not?" said the young Republican. "Ah! here's the gate. I'll get outand open it. It's the best gate to swing on in the whole place."

  As she tossed the furs aside, John gasped, "To swing on--"

  "Oh, yes. Aunt Ann says I am too old to swing on gates, but I do. Itshuts with a bang. I'll show you some day."

  "What is swinging on a gate?" said John, as she jumped out and stood inthe snow laughing. Surely this was an amazing kind of boy. "Why, did younever hear the rhyme about it?"

  "No," said John, "I never did."

  "Well, you just get on the gate when it's wide open and give a push, andyou sing--

  "If I was the President of these United States, I'd suck molasses candy and swing upon the gates.

  "There! Then it shuts--bang!" With this bit of child folklore shescampered away through the snow and stood holding the gate open whileBilly drove through. She reflected mischievously that it must have beenthree years since she had swung on a gate.

  John feeling warm and for the first time looking about him with interestbegan to notice the grandeur of the rigid snow-laden pines of anuntouched forest which stood in what was now brilliant sunshine.

  As Leila got into the sleigh, she said, "Now, Billy, go slowly when youmake the short turn at the house. If you upset us, I--I'll kill you."

  "Yes, miss. Guess I'll drive all right." But the ways of drivers areeverywhere the same, and to come to the end of a drive swiftly with crackof whip was an unresisted temptation.

  "_Sang de Dieu!_" cried John, "we will be upset."

  "We are," shouted Leila. The horse was down, the sleigh on its side, andthe cousins disappeared in a huge drift piled high when the road wascleared.