The Inn at the Red Oak.

by Latta Griswold.

PART I

THE OLD MARQUIS

CHAPTER I

THE MARQUIS ARRIVES AT THE INN

By the end of the second decade of the last century Monday Port had pa.s.sed the height of prosperity as one of the princ.i.p.al depots for the West Indian trade. The shipping was rapidly being transferred to New York and Boston, and the old families of the Port, having made their fortunes, in rum and tobacco as often as not, were either moving away to follow the trade or had acquiesced in the changed conditions and were settling down to enjoy the fruit of their labours. The harbour now was frequently deserted, except for an occasional coastwise trader; the streets began to wear that melancholy aspect of a town whose good days are more a memory than a present reality; and the old stage roads to Coventry and Perth Anhault were no longer the arteries of travel they once had been.

To the east of Monday Port, across Deal Great Water, an estuary of the sea that expanded almost to the dignity of a lake, lay a pleasant rolling wooded country known in Caesarea as Deal. It boasted no village, scarcely a hamlet. Dr. Jeremiah Watson, a famous pedagogue and a graduate of Kingsbridge, had started his modest establishment for "the education of the sons of gentlemen" on Deal Hill; there were half-a-dozen prospering farms, Squire Pembroke's Red Farm and Judge Meath's curiously lonely but beautiful House on the Dunes among them; a little Episcopalian chapel on the sh.o.r.es of the Strathsey river, a group of houses at the cross roads north of Level's Woods, and the Inn at the Red Oak,--and that was all.

In its day this inn had been a famous hostelry, much more popular with travellers than the ill-kept provincial hotels in Monday Port; but now for a long time it had scarcely provided a livelihood for old Mrs. Frost, widow of the famous Peter who for so many years had been its popular host. No one knew when the house had been built; though there was an old corner stone on which local antiquarians professed to decipher the figures "1693," and that year was a.s.signed by tradition as the date of its foundation.

It was a long crazy building, with a great sloping roof, a wide porch running its entire length, and attached to its sides and rear in all sorts of unexpected ways and places were numerous out houses and offices.

Behind its high brick chimneys rose the thick growth of Lovel's Woods, crowning the ridge that ran between Beaver Pond and the Strathsey river to the sea. The house faced southwards, and from the cobbled court before it meadow and woodland sloped to the beaches and the long line of sand dunes that straggled out and lost themselves in Strathsey Neck. To the east lay marshes and the dunes and beyond them the Strathsey, two miles wide where its waters met those of the Atlantic; west lay the great curve, known as the Second Beach, the blue surface of Deal Bay, and a line of rocky sh.o.r.e, three miles in length, terminated by Rough Point, near which began the out-lying houses of Monday Port.

The old hostelry took its name from a giant oak which grew at its doorstep just to one side of the maple-lined driveway that led down to the Port Road, a hundred yards or so beyond. This enormous tree spread its branches over the entire width and half the length of the roof.

Ordinarily, of course, its foliage was as green as the leaves on the maples of the avenue or on the neighbouring elms, and the name of the Inn might have seemed to the summer or winter traveller an odd misnomer; but in autumn when the frost came early and the great ma.s.s of green flushed to a deep crimson it could not have been known more appropriately than as the Inn at the Red Oak.

It was a solidly-built house, such as even in the early part of the nineteenth century men were complaining they could no longer obtain; built to weather centuries of biting southeasters, and--the legend ran--to afford protection in its early days against Indians. At the time of the Revolution it had been barricaded, pierced with portholes, and had served, like innumerable other houses from Virginia to Ma.s.sachusetts, as Washington's headquarters. When Tom Pembroke knew it best, its old age and decay had well set in.

Pembroke was the son of the neighbouring squire, whose house, known as the Red Farm, lay In the little valley on the other side of the Woods at the head of Beaver Pond. From the time he had been able to thread his way across the woodland by its devious paths--Tom had been at the Inn almost every day to play with Dan Frost, the landlord's son. They had played in the stables, then stocked with a score of horses, where now there were only two or three; in the great haymows of the old barn in the clearing back of the Inn; in the ramshackle garret under that amazing roof; or, best of all, in the abandoned bowling-alley, where they rolled dilapidated b.a.l.l.s at rickety ten-pins.

When Tom and Dan were eighteen--they were born within a day of each other one bitter February--old Peter died, leaving the Inn to his wife.

Mrs. Frost pretended to carry on the business, but the actual task of doing so soon devolved upon her son. And in this he was subjected to little interference; for the poor lady, kindly inefficient soul that she was, became almost helpless with rheumatism. But indeed it was rather on the farm than to the Inn that more and more they depended for their living. In the social hierarchy of Caesarea the Pembrokes held themselves as vastly superior to the Frosts; but thanks to the easy-going democratic customs of the young republic, more was made of this by the women than the men.

The two boys loved each other devotedly, though love is doubtless the last word they would have chosen to express their relation. Dan was tall, dark, muscular; he had a well-shaped head on his square shoulders; strong well-cut features; a face that the sun had deeply tanned and dark hair that it had burnished with gold. Altogether he was a prepossessing lad, though he looked several years older than he was, and he was commonly treated by his neighbours with a consideration that his years did not merit. Tom Pembroke was fairer; more attractive, perhaps, on first acquaintance; certainly more boyish in appearance and behaviour. He was quicker in his movements and in his mental processes; more aristocratic in his bearing. His blue eyes were more intelligent than Dan's, but no less frank and kindly. Young Frost admired his friend almost as much as he cared for him; for Dan, deprived of schooling, had a reverence for learning, of which Tom had got a smattering at Dr. Watson's establishment for "the sons of gentlemen" on the nearby hill.

One stormy night in early January, the eve of Dan Frost's twenty-second birthday, the two young men had their supper together at the Inn, and afterwards sat for half-an-hour in the hot, stove-heated parlour until Mrs. Frost began to nod over her knitting.

"Off with you, boys," she said at length; "you will be wanting to smoke your dreadful pipes. Nancy will keep me company."

They took instant advantage of this permission and went into the deserted bar, where they made a roaring fire on the great hearth, drew their chairs near, filled their long clay pipes with Virginia tobacco, and fell to talking.

"Think of it!" exclaimed young Frost, as he took a great whiff at his pipe; "here we are--the middle of the winter--and not a guest in the house. Why we used to have a dozen travellers round the bar here, and the whole house bustling. I've known my father to serve a hundred and more with rum on a night like this. Now we do a fine business if we serve as many in a winter. Times have changed since we were boys."

"Aye," Tom agreed, "and it isn't so long ago, either. It seemed to me as if the whole county used to be here on a Sat.u.r.day night."

"I'm thinking," resumed Dan musingly, "of throwing up the business, what's the use of pretending to keep an inn? If it wasn't for mother and for Nancy, I'd clear out, boy; go off and hunt my fortune. As it is, with what I make on the farm and lose on the house, I just pull through the year."

"By gad," exclaimed Tom, "I'd go with you, Dan. I'm tired to my soul with reading law in father's office. Why, you and I haven't been farther than Coventry to the county fair, or to Perth Anhault to make a horse trade.

I'd like to see the world, go to London and Paris. I've wanted to go to France ever since that queer Frenchman was here--remember?--and told us those jolly tales about the Revolution and the great Napoleon. We were hardly more than seven or eight then, I guess."

"I would like to go, hanged if I wouldn't," said Dan. "I'm getting more and more discontented. But there's not much use crying for the moon, and France might as well be the moon, for all of me." He relapsed then into a brooding silence. It was hard for an inn-keeper to be cheerful in midwinter with an empty house. Tom too was silent, dreaming vividly, if vaguely, of the France he longed to see.

"Hark!" exclaimed Dan presently. "How it blows! There must be a big sea outside to-night."

He strode to the window, pushed back the curtains of faded chintz, and stared out into the darkness. The wind was howling in the trees and about the eaves of the old inn, the harsh roar of the surf mingled with the noise of the storm, and the sleet lashed the window-panes in fury.

"You will not be thinking of going home tonight, Tom?"

"Not I," Pembroke answered, for he was as much at home in Dan's enormous chamber as he was in his own little room under the roof at the Red Farm.

As he turned from the window, the door into the parlour opened, and a young girl quietly slipped in and seated herself in the chimney-corner.

"h.e.l.lo, Nance," Dan exclaimed, as she entered; "come close, child; you need to be near the fire on a night like this."

"Mother is asleep," the girl answered briefly, and then, resting her chin upon her hands, she fixed her great dark eyes upon the glowing logs. She was Dan's foster-sister, eighteen years of age, though she looked hardly more than sixteen; a shy, slender, girl, lovely with a wild, unusual charm. To Tom she had always been a silent elfin creature, delightful as their playmate when a child, but now though still so familiar, she seemed in an odd way, to grow more remote.

Apparently she liked to sit with them on these winter evenings in the deserted bar, when Mrs. Frost had gone to bed; and to listen to their conversation, though she took little part in it.

As Dan resumed his seat, he looked at her with evident concern, for she was shivering as she sat so quietly by the fireside.

"Are you cold, Nance?" he asked.

"A little," she replied. "I was afraid in the parlour with Mother asleep, and the wind and the waves roaring so horribly."

"Afraid?" exclaimed Tom, with an incredulous laugh. "I never knew you to be really afraid of anything in the world, Nancy."

She turned her dark eyes upon him for the moment, with a sharp inquisitive glance which caused him to flush unaccountably. An answering crimson showed in her cheeks, and she turned back to the fire. The colour fled almost as quickly as it had come, and left her pale, despite the glow of firelight.

"I was afraid--to-night," she said, after a moment's silence.

Suddenly there came the sound of a tremendous knocking on the door which opened from the bar into the outer porch, and all three started in momentary alarm.

Dan jumped to his feet. "Who's that?" he cried.

Again came the vigorous knocking. He ran across the room, let down the great oaken beam, and opened the door to the night and storm.

"Come in, travellers." A gust of wind and sleet rushed through the opening and stung their faces. With the gust there seemed to blow in the figure of a little old man wrapped in a great black coat, bouncing into their midst as if he were an India rubber ball thrown by a gigantic hand.

Behind him strode in Manners, the liveryman of Monday Port.

"Here's a guest for you, Mr. Frost. I confess I did my best to keep him in town till morning, but nothing 'd do; he must get to the Inn at the Red Oak to-night. We had a h.e.l.lish time getting here too, begging the lady's pardon; but here we are."

Good-naturedly he had taken hold of his fare and, as he spoke, was helping the stranger unwrap himself from the enveloping cloak.

"He's welcome," said Dan. "Here, sir, let me help you." He put out his hand to steady the curious old gentleman, who, at last, gasping for breath and blinking the sleet out of his eyes, had been unrolled by Manners from the dripping cloak.

He was a strange figure of a man, they thought, as Dan led him to the fire to thaw himself out. He was scarcely more than five and a half feet in height, with tiny hands and feet almost out of proportion even to his diminutive size. He was an old man, they would have said, though his movements were quick and agile as if he were set up on springs. His face, small, sharp-featured and weazened, was seamed with a thousand wrinkles.

His wig was awry, its powder, washed out by the melting sleet, was dripping on his face in pasty streaks; and from beneath it had fallen wisps of thin grey hair, which plastered themselves against his temples and forehead. This last feature was also out of proportion to the rest of his physiognomy, for it was of extraordinary height, and of a polished smoothness, in strange contrast to his wrinkled cheeks. Beneath shone two flashing black eyes, with the fire of youth in them, for all he seemed so old. The lower part of his face was less distinctive. He had a small, Suddenly there came the sound of a tremendous knocking on the door which opened from the bar into the outer porch, and all three started in momentary alarm.

Dan jumped to his feet. "Who's that?" he cried.