第27章

John turned straight to the Wilkinsons'.His gait was not hurried; whatever his face may have expressed was hidden by the darkness.The tense quietude of his mind was like that of a summer tree, not one of whose thousands of leaves quivers along the edge, but toward which a tempest is rolling in the distance.

The house was set close to the street.The windows were open; long bars of light fell out; as he stepped forward to the threshold, the fiddlers struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley"; the company parted in lines to the right and left, leaving a vacant space down the middle of the room; and into this vacant space he saw Joseph lead Amy and the two begin to dance.

She wore a white muslin dress--a little skillful work had restored its freshness; a blue silk coat of the loveliest hue; a wide white lace tucker caught across her round bosom with a bunch of cinnamon roses; and straw-coloured kid gloves, reaching far up her snow-white arms.Her hair was coiled high on the crown of her head and airily overtopped by a great curiously carved silver-and-tortoise-shell comb; and under her dress played the white mice of her feet.The tints of her skin were pearl and rose; her red lips parted in smiles.She was radiant with excitement, happiness, youth.She culled admiration, visiting all eyes with hers as a bee all flowers.It was not the flowers she cared for.

He did not see her dress; he did not recognize the garments that had hung on the wall of his room.What he did see and continued to see was the fact that she was there and dancing with Joseph.

If he had stepped on a rattlesnake, he could not have been more horribly, more miserably stung.He had the sense of being poisoned, as though actual venom were coursing through his blood.There was one swift backward movement of his mind over the chain of forerunning events.

"She is a venomous little serpent!" he groaned aloud."And I have been crawling in the dust to her, to be stung like this!" He walked quietly into the house.

He sought his hostess first.He found her in the centre of a group of ladies, wearing the toilet of the past Revolutionary period in the capitals of the East.The vision dazzled him, bewildered him.But he swept his eye over them with one feeling of heart-sickness and asked his hostess one question: was Mrs.Falconer there? She was not.

In another room he found his host, and a group of Revolutionary officers and other tried historic men, surrounding the Governor.

They were discussing the letters that had passed between the President and his Excellency for the suppression of a revolution in Kentucky.During this spring of 1795 the news had reached Kentucky that Jay had at last concluded a treaty with England.The ratification of this was to be followed by the surrender of those terrible Northwestern posts that for twenty years had been the source of destruction and despair to the single-handed, maddened, or massacred Kentuckians.Behind those forts had rested the inexhaustible power of the Indian confederacies, of Canada, of England.Out of them, summer after summer, armies that knew no pity had swarmed down upon the doggedly advancing line of the Anglo-Saxon frontiersmen.Against them, sometimes unaided, sometimes with the aid of Virginia or of the National Government, the pioneers hurled their frantic retaliating armies: Clarke and Boone and Kenton often and often; Harmar followed by St.Clair; St.Clair followed by Wayne.It was for the old failure to give aid against these that Kentucky had hated Virginia and resolved to tear herself loose from the mother State and either perish or triumph alone.It was for the failure to give aid against these that Kentucky hated Washington, hated the East, hated the National Government, and plotted to wrest Kentucky away from the Union, and either make her an independent power or ally her with France or Spain.

But over the sea now France--France that had come to the rescue of the colonies in their struggle for independence--this same beautiful, passionate France was fighting all Europe unaided and victorious.The spectacle had amazed the world.In no other spot had sympathy been more fiercely kindled than along that Western border where life was always tense with martial passion.It had passed from station to station, like a torch blazing in the darkness and with a two-forked fire--gratitude to France, hatred of England--hatred rankling in a people who had come out of the very heart of the English stock as you would hew the heart out of a tree.So that when, two years before this, Citizen Genet, the ambassador of the French republic, had landed at Charleston, been driven through the country to New York amid the acclamations of French sympathizers, and disregarding the President'sproclamation of neutrality, had begun to equip privateers and enlist crews to act against the commerce of England and Spain, it was to the backwoodsmen of Kentucky that he sent four agents, to enlist an army, appoint a generalissimo, and descend upon the Spanish settlements at the mouth of the Mississippi--those same hated settlements that had refused to the Kentuckians the right of navigation for their commerce, thus shutting them off from the world by water, as the mountains shut them off from the world by land.

Hence the Jacobin clubs that were formed in Kentucky: one at Lexington, a second at Georgetown, a third at Paris.Hence the liberty poles in the streets of the towns; the tricoloured cockades on the hats of the men; the hot blood between the anti-federal and the federalist parties of the State.

The actions of Citizen Genet had indeed been disavowed by his republic.But the sympathy for France, the hatred of England and of Spain, had but grown meantime; and when therefore in this spring of 1795 the news reached the frontier that Jay had concluded a treaty with England--the very treaty that would bring to the Kentuckians the end of all their troubles with the posts of the Northwest--the flame of revolution blazed out with greater brilliancy.