There was only a faint glow in the west now. The fields toward Cloverdale were wrapped in twilight shadows. Behind the eastern treetops the red disk of the rising moon was half revealed. Asher Aydelot waited long before he spoke. At length, he turned toward his father with a certain stiffening of his form, and each felt a space widening gulf-wise between them.
“You stayed at home and grew rich, Father.”
“Well?”
The father’s voice cut like a steel edge. He saw only opposition to his will here, but the mother forecasted the end from that moment.
“Father, war gives us to see bigger things than hatred between two sections of the country. There is education in it, too. That is a part of the compensation. Once, when our regiment was captured and starving, the Fifty-fourth Virginia boys saved our lives by feeding us the best supper I ever tasted. And a Rebel girl – ” he broke off suddenly.
“Well, what of all this? What are you trying to say?” queried the older man.
“I’m trying to show you that I cannot sit down here in the Shirley House and play mine host any more than I could – ” hesitatingly – “marry a Cloverdale girl on demand. No Cloverdale girl would have me so. I’ve seen too much of the country for such a position, Father. Let the men who staid at home do the little jobs.”
He had not meant to say all this, but the stretch of boundless green prairies was before his eyes, the memory of heroic action where men utterly forget themselves was in his mind, making life in that little Ohio settlement seem only a boy’s pastime, to be put away with other childish things. While night and day, in the battle clamor, in the little college class room, on boundless prairie billows, among lonely sand dunes – everywhere, he carried the memory of the gentle touch of the hand of a rebel girl, who had visited him when he was sick and in prison. And withal, he resented dictation, as all the Aydelots and Penningtons before him had done.
“What do you propose to do?” his father asked.
“I don’t know yet what I can do. I only know what I cannot do.”
“And that is – ?”
“Just what I have said. I cannot be a tavern keeper here the rest of my days with nothing to do half of the time except to watch the men pitch horseshoes behind the blacksmith shop, and listen to the flies buzz in the windows on summer afternoons; and everything else so quiet and dead you don’t know whether you are on the street or in the graveyard. If you’d ever crossed the Mississippi River you’d understand why.”
“Well, I haven’t, and I don’t understand. But the only way to stop this roving is to make a home of your own. Will you tell me how you expect to support a Cloverdale girl when you marry one?”
“I don’t expect to marry one.” The smile was winning, but the son’s voice sounded dangerously like the father’s.
“Why not?”
“Because when I marry it will be to a southern girl – ” Asher hesitated a moment. When he went on, his voice was not as son to father, but as man to man.
“It all happened down in Virginia, when I was wounded and in prison. This little girl took care of me. Only a soldier really knows what a woman’s hand means in sickness. But she did more. She risked everything, even her life, to get letters through the lines to you and to get me exchanged. I shiver yet when I think of her, disguised as a man in soldier’s clothes, taking the chance she did for me. And, well, I left my heart down there. That’s all.”
“Why haven’t you ever told us this before, Asher?” his father asked.
Asher stood up where the white moonlight fell full on his face. Somehow the old Huguenot defiance and the old Quaker endurance of his ancestors seemed all expressed in him.
“I wasn’t twenty-one, then, and I have nothing yet to offer a girl by way of support,” he said.
“Why, Asher!” Mrs. Aydelot exclaimed, “you have everything here.”
“Not yet, mother,” he replied. “And I haven’t told you because her name is Virginia Thaine, and she is a descendant of Jerome Thaine. Are the Aydelots big enough to bury old hates?”
Francis Aydelot sat moveless as a statue. When at length he spoke, there was no misunderstanding his meaning.
“You have no means by which to earn a living. You will go down to town and take charge of the Shirley House at once, or go to work as a hired hand here. But remember this: from the day you marry a Thaine of Virginia you are no longer my son. Family ties, family honor, respect for your forefathers forbid it.”
He rose without more words, and went into the house.
Then came the mother’s part.
“Sit down, Asher,” she said, and Asher dropped to his place on the step.
“We don’t seem to see life through the same spectacles,” he said calmly. “Am I wrong, mother? Nobody can choose my life for me, nor my wife, either. Didn’t old grandfather, Jean Aydelot, leave his home in France, and didn’t grandmother, Mercy Pennington, marry to suit her own choice?”
Even in the shadow, his mother noted the patient expression of the gray eyes looking up at her.
“Asher, it is Aydelot tradition to be determined and self-willed, and the bitterness against Jerome Thaine and his descendants has never left the blood – till now.”
She stroked his hair lovingwise, as mothers will ever do.
“Do you suppose father will ever change?”
“I don’t believe he will. We have talked of this many times, and he will listen to nothing else. He grows more set in his notions as we all do with years, unless – ”
“Well, you don’t, mother. Unless what?” Asher asked.
“Unless we think broadly as the years broaden out toward old age. But, Asher, what are your plans?”
“I’m afraid I have none yet. You know I was a farmer boy until I was fifteen, a soldier boy till I was nineteen, a college student for two years, and a Plains scout for two years more. Tell me, mother, what does all this fit me for? Not for a tavern in a town of less than a thousand people.”
He sat waiting, his elbow resting on his knee, his chin supported by his closed hand.
“Asher, when you left school and went out West, I foresaw what has happened tonight,” Mrs. Aydelot began. “I tried to prepare your father for it, but he would not listen, would not understand. He doesn’t yet. He never will. But I do. You will not stay in Ohio always, because you do not fit in here now. Newer states keep calling you westward, westward. This was frontier when we came here in the thirties; we belong here. But, sooner or later, you will put your life into the building of the West. Something – the War or the Plains, or may be this Virginia Thaine, has left you too big for prejudice. You will go sometime where there is room to think and live as you believe.”
“Mother, may I go? I dream of it night and day. I’m so cramped here. The woods are in my way. I can’t see a mile. I want to see to the edge of the world, as I can on the prairies. A man can win a kingdom out there.”
He was facing her now, his whole countenance aglow with bright anticipation.
“There is only one way to win that kingdom,” Mrs. Aydelot declared. “The man who takes hold of the plow-handles is the man who will really conquer the prairies. His scepter is not the rifle, but the hoe.”
For all his life, Asher Aydelot never forgot his mother’s face, nor the sound of her low prophetic words on that moonlit night on the shadowy veranda of his childhood home.
“You are right, mother. I don’t want to fight any more. It must be the soil that is calling me back to the West, the big, big West! And I mean to go when the time comes. I hope it will come soon, and I know you will give me your blessing then.”
His mother’s hands were pressed lovingly upon his forehead, as he leaned against her knee.
“My