Chad Wortle

“ For he lay thinking of Caleb Hazel and listening again to the stories he and the cattle-dealer had told him about the wonderful settlements. "God's Country," the dealer always called it, and such it must be, if what he and the master said was true. By and by the steady beat of feet under him, the swift notes of the banjo, the calls of the prompter and the laughter fused, became inarticulate, distant—ceased. And Chad, as he was wont to do, journeyed on to "God's Country" in his dreams. ”

“ Chad—why, boy! How you have grown!" For Chad had grown, and his face was curiously aged and thoughtful. The Major insisted on taking him home, and the school-master, too, who went reluctantly. Miss Lucy was there, looking whiter and more fragile than ever, and she greeted Chad with a sweet kindliness that took the sting from his unjust remembrance of her. And what that failure to understand her must have been Chad better knew when he saw the embarrassed awe, in her presence, of the school-master, for whom all in the mountains had so much reverence. ”

“ I think they are in the tilt yard with Warbel. It is there they are generally to be found in the early hours of the day."
"They be fine, gamesome lads," said the old woman fondly--"chips of the old block, true Chads every one of them;" for the custom with the common people was to call the lord of the manor by the name of his house rather than by his own patronymic, and Sir Oliver was commonly spoken of as "Chad" by his retainers ”

“ My good lord is careful in all things to avoid making ill blood with a jealous neighbour. That he has always cast covetous eyes upon Chad is known throughout the countryside; but I trow he would find it something difficult to make good any claim."
"Why, verily!" cried the nurse, with energy. "He could but come as a foul usurper, against whom would every honest hand be raised. But, good my mistress, what is the truth of the whisper I have heard that the Lord of Mortimer has wed his daughter to one who calls himself of the house of Chad? ”

“ The priests and magistrates are very busy now searching out all those suspected of that vile sin, and those who shelter them are accounted as guilty as those who are proved tainted. Our foe of Mortimer is very zealous in the good cause, and will not scruple to employ against us every weapon in his power. It would be an excellent thing in his eyes to show how mine own children had stood up to defend a Lollard heretic. I would we knew something more anent this man and his views.
"Warbel, didst thou know him? Is he anyone known in and about Chad?" ”

“ Chad had kept smiling, but its effect in Strether was a shade of dryness. “Don’t leave her before. When you’ve got all that can be got—I don’t say,” he added a trifle grimly. “That will be the proper time. But as, for you, from such a woman, there will always be something to be got, my remark’s not a wrong to her.” Chad let him go on, showing every decent deference, showing perhaps also a candid curiosity for this sharper accent. ”

“ The windows of Chad's apartment were open to the balcony—a pair of them lighted; and a figure that had come out and taken up little Bilham's attitude, a figure whose cigarette-spark he could see, leaned on the rail and looked down at him. It denoted, however, no reappearance of his younger friend; it quickly defined itself in the tempered darkness as Chad's more solid shape; so Chad's was the attention that, after he had stepped forward into the street and signalled, he easily engaged: Chad's the voice that, with promptness and seemingly with joy, called him straight up. ”

“ Chad could always take in the easiest way in the world any ingenious suggestion. “I see. But can I help it? I’m too decent.”
“Yes, you’re too decent!” Strether heavily sighed. And he felt for the moment as if it were the preposterous end of his mission.
It ministered for the time to this temporary effect that Chad made no rejoinder. But he spoke again as they came in sight of the station. “Do you mean to introduce her to Miss Gostrey?” ”

“ Chad's, into class, and shut him inside her desk, where he settled down quite comfortably, and slept peacefully through the French lesson. But in the middle of algebra, Honor, who hated mathematics, managed to give him a surreptitious pinch, with the result that a long-drawn, impatient, objecting "miau" suddenly resounded through the room. Miss Farrar gave quite a jump, and looked round, but could see nothing. Honor sat bolt upright, with arms folded and eyes fixed attentively on the blackboard, as if she were sublimely unconscious of any noise in her vicinity. ”

“ It is certain he was an Angle, and a native of Northumbria, and that he flourished in the 7th century, though Dempster wishes to claim him as a Scottish, and Colgan as an Irish, saint. The date 620 A.D. has been suggested as the probable time of Chad's birth.
Bede tells us that S. Chad was a pupil of Aidan. That bishop required the young men who studied with him to spend much time in reading Holy Writ, and to learn by heart large portions of the Psalter, which they would require in their devotions. ”

“ Chad appeared for a little to consider the way he was made; he might for this purpose have measured him up and down. His conclusion favoured the fact. “You have never needed any one to make you better. There has never been any one good enough. They couldn’t,” the young man declared.
His friend hesitated. “I beg your pardon. They have.”
Chad showed, not without amusement, his doubt. “Who then?”
Strether—though a little dimly—smiled at him. “Women—too.”
“‘Two’?”—Chad stared and laughed. “Oh I don’t believe, for such work, in any more than one! So you’re proving too much. ”

“ Chad suggested.
“Precisely. And the tune to which this morning Sarah wasn’t delighted—the tune to which, to adopt your metaphor, she refused to drink—leaves us on that side nothing more to hope.”
Chad had a pause, and then as if consolingly: “It was never of course really the least on the cards that they would be ‘delighted.’”
“Well, I don’t know, after all,” Strether mused. “I’ve had to come as far round. However”—he shook it off—“it’s doubtless my performance that’s absurd.”
“There are certainly moments,” said Chad, “when you seem to me too good to be true. ”

“ This is the sad way with women. After the way of men, Chad proudly marched the old Wilderness Road that led to a big, bright, beautiful world where one had but to do and dare to reach the stars. The men who had trod that road had made that big world beyond, and their life Chad himself had lived so far. Only, where they had lived he had been born—in a log cabin. Their weapons—the axe and the rifle—had been his. He had had the same fight with Nature as they. ”

“ Chad had a mighty admiration for Richard Hunt. Here was a man who knew no fight but to the finish, who would die as gamely in a drawing-room as on a battle-field. To think of him—a brigadier-general at twenty-seven, as undaunted, as unbeaten as when he heard the first bullet of the war whistle, and, at that moment, as good an American as Chadwick Buford or any Unionist who had given his life for his cause! ”

“ Fate had given Chad the early life of one, and like blood with the other; and, curiously enough, in his own short life, he already epitomized the social development of the nation, from its birth in a log cabin to its swift maturity behind the columns of a Greek portico. Against the uncounted generations of gentlepeople that ran behind him to sunny England, how little could the short sleep of three in the hills count! It may take three generations to make a gentleman, but one is enough, if the blood be there, the heart be right, and the brain and hand come early under discipline. ”

“ A man who sat near heard the boy and turned to look at the little fellow, and was hardly able to believe his ears. And so it went on. Each time a horse was put up Chad shouted out:
"Five dollars," and the crowd around him began to smile and laugh and encourage him and wait for his bid. The auctioneer, too, saw him, and entered into the fun himself, addressing himself to Chad at every opening bid.
"Keep it up, little man," said a voice behind him. "You'll get one by and by." Chad looked around. Richard Hunt was smiling to him from his horse on the edge of the crowd. ”

“ He found himself in time on the point of telling her that she was, as Miss Barrace called it, wonderful; but, catching himself up, he said something else instead. “What was it Chad’s idea then that you should say to me?”
“Ah his idea was simply what a man’s idea always is—to put every effort off on the woman.”
“The ‘woman’—?” Strether slowly echoed.
“The woman he likes—and just in proportion as he likes her. In proportion too—for shifting the trouble—as she likes him.”
Strether followed it; then with an abruptness of his own: “How much do you like Chad?” ”

“ Women were thus endlessly absorbent, and to deal with them was to walk on water. What was at bottom the matter with her, embroider as she might and disclaim as she might—what was at bottom the matter with her was simply Chad himself. It was of Chad she was, after all, renewedly afraid; the strange strength of her passion was the very strength of her fear; she clung to him, Lambert Strether, as to a source of safety she had tested, and generous, graceful, truthful as she might try to be, exquisite as she was, she dreaded the term of his being within reach. ”

“ But Chad changed his mind suddenly. If they were in doubt about wanting him—he was in no doubt as to what he would do.
"No, I reckon I'd better git on," he said sturdily, and he turned and limped back up the hill to the road—still wondering, and he remembered that, in the mountains, when people wanted to stay all night, they usually stopped before sundown. Travelling after dark was suspicious in the mountains, and perhaps it was in this land, too. ”

“ And so, returned to the Bluegrass, the midsummer of that year, Chadwick Buford gentleman. A youth of eighteen, with the self-possession of a man, and a pair of level, clear eyes, that looked the world in the face as proudly as ever but with no defiance and no secret sense of shame It was a curious story that Chad brought back and told to the Major, on the porch under the honeysuckle vines, but it seemed to surprise the Major very little: how old Nathan had sent for him to come to his death-bed and had told Chad that he was no foundling ”

“ But Chad shook his head and smiled.
"He won't go back," he shouted, and, indeed, there was Jack squatted on his haunches close by his little master and looking gravely back as though he were looking a last good-by.
"Hi there!" shouted old Joel again. "How am I goin to git along without that dawg? Throw him off, Boy—throw him off, I tell ye!" Chad seized the dog by the shoulders, but Jack braced himself and, like a child, looked up in his master's face. Chad let go and shook his head.
A frantic yell from Tall Tom at the bow oar drew every eye to him. ”

“ Chad was clearly surprised. “Oh not much! Do you think that when I want to go any one will have any power—”
“To keep you”—Strether took him straight up—“from carrying out your wish? Well, our idea has been that somebody has hitherto—or a good many persons perhaps—kept you pretty well from ‘wanting.’ That’s what—if you’re in anybody’s hands—may again happen. You don’t answer my question”—he kept it up; “but if you aren’t in anybody’s hands so much the better. There’s nothing then but what makes for your going.”
Chad turned this over. ”

“ Strether felt his character receive for the instant a smutch from all the wrong things he had suspected or believed. The person to whom Chad owed it that he could positively turn out such a comfort to other persons—such a person was sufficiently raised above any “breath” by the nature of her work and the young man’s steady light. ”

“ She is not very well and she is taking care of Harry."
The very station had tragic memories to Chad. There was the long hill which he had twice climbed—once on a lame foot and once on flying Dixie—past the armory and the graveyard. He had seen enough dead since he peered through those iron gates to fill a dozen graveyards the like in size. Going up in the train, he could see the barn where he had slept in the hayloft the first time he came to the Bluegrass, and the creek-bridge where Major Buford had taken him into his carriage. ”

“ The table at Chad always groaned with good things, except at such seasons as the Church decreed a fast, and then the diet was scrupulously kept within the prescribed bounds. Sir Oliver and his wife were both devout and earnest people, and had every reverence for their spiritual superiors. The Benedictine Priory of Chadwater stood only a mile and a half distant, and the prior was on excellent terms with the owner of Chad. Brother Emmanuel had been an inmate of the priory before he was selected by Sir Oliver for the education of his sons. ”

“ Strether went on after a moment. But he had the next minute an inconsequent question. "How comes Chad so mixed up, anyway?"
"Ah, ah, ah!" and little Bilham fell back on his cushions.
It reminded our friend of Miss Barrace, and he felt again the brush of his sense of moving in a maze of mystic, closed allusions. Yet he kept hold of his thread. "Of course I understand really; only the general transformation makes me occasionally gasp. Chad with such a voice in the settlement of the future of a little countess—no," he declared, "it takes more time! ”