Authors: Gwen Bristow
Jubilee Trail
Jubilee Trail
“Miss Bristow has the true gift of storytelling.” —
Chicago Tribune
“This absorbing story giving a thrilling picture of the foundation on which our West was built is heartily recommended.” —
Library Journal
“An exciting tale of love and war in the tradition of
Gone with the Wind
… The kind of story that keeps readers tingling.” —
Chicago Tribune
“Absorbing and swift-paced, well written … The situations are historically authentic, the characterizations rigorous, well formed and definite. The ‘you-are-thereness’ is complete.” —
The Christian Science Monitor
“Historical romance with all the thrills [and] a vivid sense of the historical personages and events of the time.” —
New York Herald Tribune
“A grand job of storytelling, a story of enthralling swiftness.” —
The New York Times
“Miss Bristow belongs among those Southern novelists who are trying to interpret the South and its past in critical terms. It may be that historians will alter some of the details of her picture. But no doubt life in a small river town in Louisiana during the years 1859-1885 was like the life revealed in
The Handsome Road
.” —
The New York Times
A Novel
Gwen Bristow
FOR BRUCE
ONE
I
N THE SUMMER
OF
1844, Garnet Cameron graduated from Miss Wayne’s Select Academy for Young Ladies. This was a boarding-school on a country estate in upper Manhattan, and Garnet had been a pupil there for four years. On graduation day she was awarded three medals: for music, horsemanship, and politeness.
Garnet was halfway between her eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays. She had black hair, so smooth and shiny that it had blue lights in the sun. Her eyes were gray, fringed with heavy black lashes, and her cheeks were so red that she had sometimes been accused of painting them. In spite of her rich coloring she was not beautiful. Her face was too rugged to meet any ideal of beauty; her forehead was too square and her jaw was too strong and her lips were too full and red. But she had a firm slim body, her waistline was a mere trifle, and the clothes they were wearing just now were admirably designed to show a well-set figure like hers. A daytime dress covered a girl from throat to instep, but the bodice fitted almost as if it had been pasted on, and the skirt flared just enough to emphasize a tiny waistline without being too full for graceful movement. Garnet was very graceful. At Miss Wayne’s Academy part of her daily routine had consisted of walking up and down a circular staircase with a book balanced on her head.
She was perfectly healthy, and looked it, and she took a great interest in living. Garnet would have liked to know all about everything. Her main complaint about the world was that it had given her so little chance to know anything at all. She seldom said any such thing out loud. After years of good breeding, Garnet knew that nobody wanted to hear a young lady speak her opinions.
Garnet lived in Union Square in the city of New York. In Union Square the houses stood around a park, where in summer a fountain played all day. Children rolled their hoops under the trees, and ladies and gentlemen strolled along the gravel walks. Whether in the green of summer, or in winter when the trees were bare and the windows around the park were rosy with firelight, Union Square had an air of well-being. Anybody could have seen that this was a nice neighborhood and the families who lived here were nice people. Garnet’s father was Mr. Horace Cameron, vice-president of a bank in Wall Street. Her mother was a charming woman who had found life agreeable so far and expected it to remain so. Garnet had two younger brothers, named Horace, Jr., and Malcolm, who went to the grammar school that prepared boys for Columbia College. They were a pleasant family, well-bred and well-behaved. On graduation day at Miss Wayne’s, when Garnet received her medals and made a curtsy of respect, her mother’s friends said she looked like an ideal of proper young ladyhood. Or she would have, if only she had not had such violent red-and-black coloring. And it was a pity her features were not more delicate. But at any rate, she was a nice girl and no doubt she would make a good marriage.
When Garnet got home that evening she put the medals into her bureau drawer. As she shut the drawer she gave a sigh of relief. Her schooldays were over. In a few weeks more, as soon as she could get some clothes, she was going to take a holiday with her mother at Rockaway Beach. They were going to stay at a fashionable hotel and meet a lot of people, and she would never have to think about Miss Wayne’s Select Academy any more. Now at last she was grown up, and she had a right to expect that something exciting was going to happen to her.
But at first, nothing happened.
She received two proposals of marriage, both of which she declined as fast as possible. The first offer came from a young gentleman she met that summer, while she and her mother were at Rockaway Beach. He belonged to a good family, but Garnet thought he was so stupid that he ought to be charitably locked up somewhere. As usual she did not say what she thought. Her mother had taught her so well how to do these things that when she refused him the young man got the impression that Garnet was going to remember him wistfully as long as she lived.
The second proposal came in September, after she had come back to New York. The young man’s name was Henry Trellen. Garnet’s parents were disappointed that she would not have him, for he would have been a brilliant match. Henry Trellen was enormously rich, and an only child. He lived with his widowed mother in a darkly magnificent house on Bleecker Street. The house reminded Garnet of a mausoleum, and Henry’s mother reminded her of a marble angel on a tombstone, and Henry himself bored her to the yawning point. She thought she would as soon be locked up in a cemetery for the rest of her life as be married to him. She did not say this. She said that after careful study of her heart, she was sure she did not love him.
Her parents did not insist. They had married for love and they wanted her to do the same. She had plenty of time, and her mother saw to it that she had ample chances to meet eligible young gentlemen.
Garnet loved her parents, for they were sweet and lovable people. She would have liked to please them. But she detested the eligible young gentlemen. They were often handsome and sometimes rich, but they were always dull. They were so stuffy with good manners that they acted as if young ladies were not quite human. To hear them talk, you would have thought there must always be a haze of make-believe between the two sexes, through which men and women must never see each other plainly. Garnet danced with them and flirted with them, and did it rather well, but she could not get excited about it. For Garnet found no relish in saying one thing and meaning another; by nature she was as simple and direct as a shower of rain. The system of whispers and head-tossings and fluttering lashes by which young ladies were supposed to get husbands, seemed to her just plain silly. She could do it, but her heart was not in it and it made her tired.
A girl must have beaus, of course, but Garnet wondered if there was not, anywhere on earth, a young man who would talk to her as if he and she were two reasonable people living in the same world. She told herself there must be such a man. There might even be one in New York.
But though she had lived there all her life, she did not know much about New York. Garnet thought about it often that fall, as she stood at her window and watched the trees of Union Square, red in the crackling October wind. New York, New York—such a gay, thrilling town, and she could have so little of it! There were so many places in New York where she was not allowed to go, so many streets that she had never even walked on.
New York was growing like a morning-glory vine. Now in 1844 it was a town of nearly four hundred thousand people, a hundred thousand more than had lived here ten years ago. They had a railroad to Philadelphia and another to White Plains; they had ferryboats that went every five minutes to Brooklyn; and they had steam-cars that left the City Hall Depot every fifteen minutes for Harlem. They had splendid public baths, where for twenty-five cents you could stand under a shower or lie in a marble bathtub. At Castle Garden, across the bridge from the Battery, they had two swimming pools, one for gentlemen and one for ladies. They had fountains in the parks and fire-hydrants on the streets, for New York had the finest waterworks in the world.
Broadway started at the Battery and ended at Fourteenth Street. If you walked these two brilliant miles you could see all the most famous places in New York. The gayest part of town was City Hall Park. If you were walking up Broadway toward the park, you would pass the Astor House on your left, at the corner of Broadway and Vesey Street. The Astor House was the finest hotel in America. It was five stories high, with white steps leading to an entrance between white columns. Facing it across Broadway you saw Barnum’s Museum. The museum had a big sign showing you mermaids and sea-serpents, to hint at what you could see inside. Just above the museum you came to the park.
Around the park you passed restaurants and theaters, saloons and gambling palaces. If you were rich enough you could dine at John Florence’s, at Broadway and Park Place. Or you could go to the Park Theater and see the greatest stars in the world. If your taste was less refined, you could risk your money in the gambling rooms, or you could see a show offering music and lovely girls. If you were a lovely girl yourself, you could visit the studios of fashionable artists, who would paint your face on ivory and frame it in gold. It would cost you a hundred dollars, but if you were pretty enough it was worth it. Here you also saw Plumbe’s Galleries, where for five dollars they would clamp your head in an iron thing and take your picture. It was great fun, but the pictures always had a scared look; for as soon as they clamped your head in the iron thing you began to wonder what would become of you if the place caught fire.
But there was not much danger of fire. A man was always on duty in the cupola on top of the City Hall, to look for fires. The City Hall was fifty feet high, so the man could see over the whole town. If he saw a fire he rang a bell, the number of strokes telling where it was, and the wagons rushed forth to put it out.