The Choir Invisible

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.