Through stained glass

George Agnew Chamberlain

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• Publié par: cunur
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 33
• Langue: English

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Project Gutenberg's Through stained glass, by
George Agnew Chamberlain
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Title: Through stained glass
Author: George Agnew Chamberlain
Release Date: November 14, 2004 [EBook #14039]
Language: English
Character set encoding: Unicode UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG
EBOOK THROUGH STAINED GLASS ***
Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Dorota Sidor and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THROUGH STAINED
GLASS
A novel by
GEORGE AGNEW CHAMBERLAIN
Author of "Home"
New York Grosset & Dunlap Publishers
Copyright, 1915, by
GEORGE AGNEW CHAMBERLAIN
Published March, 1915CHAPTER I
In 1866 the American minister at Rio de Janeiro
turned from the reality of a few incongruous and
trouble-breeding Kentucky colonels, slouched-
hatted and frock-coated, wandering through the
unfamiliar streets of the great South American
capital, and saw a nightmare. There is a touch of
panic in the despatch which he sent to Mr. Seward
at a time when both secretary and public were held
too closely in the throes of reconstruction to take
alarm at so distant a chimera. Agents of the
Southern States, wrote the minister, claimed that
not thousands of families, but a hundred thousand
families, would come to Brazil.
As a matter of fact, this exodus, when it took
place, was so small that it failed to raise a ripple on
the social pool of the Western Hemisphere. But to
the self-chosen few who suffered shipwreck and
privation, financial loss from their already depleted
store, disaster to their Utopian dreams, and a great
void in their hearts where once had been love of
country, it became a tragedy—the tragedy of
existence.
The ardor that led a small band of irreconcilables to
gather their households and their household goods
about them and flee from a personal oppression,
as had their ancestors before them, was destined
to be short lived. From the first, fate frowned upon
their enterprise. They looked for calm seas andfavorable winds, but they found storms and
shipwreck. Their scanty resources were calculated
to meet the needs of only the crudest life, but upon
the threshold of their goal they fell into the red-tape
trammels of a civilization older than their own.
Where they looked for a free country, a wilderness
flowing with milk and honey, which in their
ignorance they imagined unpeopled, they found the
squatter had been intrenched since the Jesuit
fathers and their following explored the continent
four centuries before. Finally, they believed
themselves to be the vanguard of a horde, but,
once in the breach, they found there was no
following host.
Most of those who had the means reversed their
flight. Others, with nothing left but their broken
pride, sought aid from the government they
abhorred, and were given a free passage back in
returning men-of-war. But when the reflux had
waned and died, there was still a residue of half a
hundred families, most of whom were so destitute
that they could not reach the coast. With them
stayed a very few who were held by their
premature investments or by a deeper loyalty or a
greater pride. Among the latter was the head of the
divided house of Leighton.
The Reverend Orme Leighton was one of those to
whom the war had brought a double portion of
bitterness, for the Leightons of Leighton, Virginia,
had fought not alone against the North, but against
the North and the Leightons of Leighton,
Massachusetts.To the Reverend Orme Leighton, a schism in the
church would have meant nothing unless it came to
the point of cracking heads; but a schism in
governmental policy, which placed the right to
govern one's self and own black chattel in the
balance, found him taking sides from the first,
thundering out from the pulpit, supported by text
and verse, the divine right of personal dominion by
purchase, and in superb contradiction voicing the
constitutional right to self-government. When the
day of words was past, he did not wait for the
desperate cry of the South in her later need.
Abandoning gown and pulpit for charger and saber,
he was of the first to rally, of the last to muster out.
Nor at the end of the long struggle did he find
solace in the knowledge that he had fought a good
fight. To him more than the South had fallen. God
had withheld his hand from the just cause, and
Leighton had fought against Leighton!
It was characteristic of the Reverend Orme
Leighton that the rancor which came with defeat
was not visited upon those members of his clan
who had fought against him. But for that very
reason it was all the more poignantly directed
against that vague entity, the North. Never, while
life lasted, would he bow to the dominion of a
tyranny, much more, of a tyranny which, by
dividing the Leightons, had in a measure forced
neutrality upon the gods.
Leighton House, Virginia, found a ready and fitting
purchaser in one of the Leightons of
Massachusetts. With the funds thus provided, theReverend Orme Leighton moved, lock, stock, and
barrel, six thousand miles to the south. He settled
at San Paulo, where he bought for a song a
considerable property on the outskirts of the city.
He rented, besides, a large building in the center of
the town, and established therein the Leighton
Academy. Here he labored single handed until his
worth as an instructor became known; then the
sudden prosperity of the venture drove him to
engage an ever-increasing staff. The academy
developed rapidly into a recognized local institution.
The first material revenue from the successful
school was applied to building a fitting home on the
property bought for a song.
The character of this new Leighton House, which
was never known as Leighton House, but acquired
the name of Consolation Cottage by analogy with
the Street of the Consolation near which it stood,
was as different as could well be both from the
prevailing local style of architecture and from the
stately colonial type dear to the heart of every
Virginian. The building was long and low, with
sloping roofs of flat French tiles. A broad veranda
bordered it on three sides. The symmetry of the
whole was saved from ugliness by a large central
gable the overhanging porch of which cast a deep
and friendly shadow over the great front door and
over the wide flights of steps that led down to the
curving driveway.
In that luxuriant clime the new house did not long
remain bare. A clambering wistaria, tree-like
geraniums, a giant fuchsia and trellised rose-vinessoon embowered the verandas, while, on the south
side, English ivy was gradually coaxed up the bare
brick wall. This medley of leaf and bloom gave to
the whole house that air of friendliness and
homeliness that marks the shrine of the Anglo-
Saxon's household gods the world over.
Such was the nest that the Reverend Orme built by
the sweat of his brow to harbor his little family,
which, at the beginning of this history, consisted of
himself; Ann Leighton, his wife; and Mammy, black
as the ace of spades without, white within.CHAPTER II
Ann Sutherland Leighton was one of those rare
religionists that occasionally bloom in a most
unaccountable manner on a family tree having its
roots in the turf rather than clinging to Plymouth
Rock. Isaac Sutherland, her father, had been
knowing in horse-flesh, and would have looked
askance on the Reverend Orme Leighton as a
suitor had he not also been knowing in men. The
truth was that in Leighton the man was bigger than
the parson, and to the conceded fact that all the
world loves a lover he added the prestige of the
less-bandied truth that all the world loves a fighter.
He, also, knew horse-flesh. He finally won Ann's
father over on the day when Ike Sutherland
learned to his cost that the Reverend Orme could
discern through the back of his head that
distension of the capsular ligament of the hock
commonly termed a bog spavin.
Ann did not share her husband's extreme views. It
was a personal loyalty that had brought her
uncomplaining to a far country, unbuoyed by the
Reverend Orme's dreams of a new state, but
seeking with an inward fervidness some scene of
lasting peace wherewith to blot out the memory of
long years of turmoil and wholesale bereavement.
To her those first years in Consolation Cottage
were long—long with the weight of six thousand
miles from home. Then, with the suddeness ofanswered prayer, a light came into her darkness.
He was named Shenton. Mammy's broad,
homesick face broke into an undying smile. "Sho is
mo' lak ole times, Mis' Ann, havin' a young Marster
abeout." And when, two years later, on a
Christmas day, Natalie was born, Mammy mixed
smiles with tears and sobbed, "Oh, Mis' Ann, sho is
mo' an' mo' lak ole times."
She, too, had her clinging memories of halls, now
empty, that echoed once to the cries and gurgling
laughter of a race in full flower.