



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan, David Garcia
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










THE INN AT THE RED OAK

BY LATTA GRISWOLD

1917




[Illustration: "It's a treasure right enough!" cried Dan.]




CONTENTS


PART I
THE OLD MARQUIS

I     THE MARQUIS ARRIVES AT THE INN

II    THE LION'S EYE

III   THE MARQUIS AT NIGHT

IV    THE OAK PARLOUR

V     THE WALK THROUGH THE WOODS


PART II
THE TORN SCRAP OF PAPER

VI    THE HALF OF AN OLD SCRAP OF PAPER

VII   A DISAPPEARANCE

VIII  GREEN LIGHTS

IX    RECOLLECTIONS OF A FRENCH EXILE

X     MIDNIGHT VIGILS


PART III
THE SCHOONER IN THE COVE

XI    THE SOUTHERN CROSS

XII   TOM TURNS THE TABLES

XIII  MADAME DE LA FONTAINE

XIV   IN THE FOG

XV    NANCY

XVI   MADAME AT THE INN

XVII  THE MARQUIS LEAVES THE INN


PART IV
THE ATTACK ON THE INN

XVIII THE AVENUE OF MAPLES

XIX   THE ATTACK

XX    THE OAK PARLOUR

XXI   THE TREASURE




The Inn at the Red Oak




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
passed the height of prosperity as one of the principal 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 shores 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 assigned 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 shore, 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 mass 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 Massachusetts, 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 balls 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 Saturday 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.

"Hello, 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 hellish time getting here too, begging the
lady's pardon; but