ACCORDING TO SOLOMON
"And it was by this very pattern, Caroline, I made the dozen I sent Mary
Caroline for you. See the little slips fold over and hold up the
petticoats," and Mrs. Buchanan held up a tiny garment for Caroline Darrah
to admire. They sat by the sunny window in her living-room and both were
sewing on dainty cambric and lace. Caroline Darrah's head bent over the
piece of ruffling in her hand with flower-like grace and the long lines
from her throat suggested decidedly a very lovely Preraphaelite angel.
Her needle moved slowly and unaccustomedly but she had the air of doing
the hemming bravely if fearfully.
"Isn't it darling?" she said as she raised her head for a half-second,
then immediately dropped her eyes and went on printing her stitches
carefully. "What else was in that box, I feel I need to know?" she asked.
"Let me see! The dozen little shirts, they were made out of some of
my own trousseau things because of a scarcity of linen in those days,
and two little embroidered caps and a blue cashmere sack and a set of
crocheted socks and--and the major sent brandy, he always does. I
have the letter she wrote me about it all. And to think she had to
leave--" Mrs. Matilda's eyes misted as she paused to thread her needle.
"She didn't realize--that, and think of what she felt when she opened the
box," said Caroline as she raised her eyes that smiled through a
threatened shower. "Oh, I mustn't let the tears fall on Little Sister's
ruffle!" she added quickly as she took up her work.
"That reminds me of an accident to the shirts I made for Phoebe. They
were being bleached in the sun when a calf took a fancy to them and
chewed two of them entirely up before we discovered him. I was so
provoked, for I had no more linen as fine as I wanted."
"Of course the calf ate up my shirts," came in Phoebe's laughing voice
from the doorway where she had been standing unobserved for several
minutes, watching Mrs. Buchanan and Caroline. "Something is always
chewing at my affairs but Mrs. Matilda shoos them away for me sometimes
still--even _calves_ when it is positively necessary. How very
industrious you do look! At times even I sigh for a needle, though I
wouldn't know what to do with it. There seems to be something in a
woman's soul that nothing but a needle satisfies; morbid craving, that!"
"Phoebe, I want to make something for you. I feel I must as soon as these
petticoats for Little Sister are done. What shall it be?" and Caroline
Darrah beamed upon Phoebe with the warmest of inter-woman glances. The
affection for Phoebe which had possessed the heart of Caroline Darrah had
deepened daily and to its demands, Phoebe, for her, had been most
unusually responsive.
"At your present rate of stitching I will have a year or two to decide,
beautiful," she answered as she settled down on the broad window-seat
near them. "David Kildare and I have come to lunch, Mrs. Matilda, and the
major has sent him over for Andrew. I hope he brings him, but I doubt it.
I have told Tempie and she says she is glad to have us," she added as
Mrs. Buchanan turned and looked in the direction of the kitchen regions.
They all smiled, for the understanding that existed between Phoebe and
Tempie was the subject of continual jest.
"Have you seen the babies to-day?" asked Caroline as she drew a long new
thread through the needle. "Isn't it lovely the way people are making
them presents? Mr. Capers says the men at the mills are going to give
them each a thousand dollar mill bond."
"Well, I doubt seriously if they will live to use the bonds if some one
does not stop David from trying experiments with them," answered Phoebe
with a laugh. "After dinner last night he came in with two little
sleeping hammock machines which he insisted in putting up on the wall for
them. If the pulley catches you have to stand on a chair to extract them;
and if it slips, down they come. Milly was so grateful and let him play
with them for an hour; she's a sweet soul."
"Has he sent any more food?" asked Mrs. Matilda as they all laughed.
"Two more cases of a new kind he saw advertised in a magazine. Somebody
must tell him that--Milly is equal to the situation. Billy Bob _won't_;
and so the cases continue to arrive. The pantry is crowded with them and
they have sent a lot to the Day Nursery," and Phoebe slipped from the
window-seat down on to the rug at Caroline's feet in a perfect ecstasy
of mirth.
"But he is just the dearest boy, Phoebe," said Caroline Darrah as she
paused in her sewing to caress the sleek, black, braided head tipped back
against her knee. There was the shadow of reproach in her voice as she
smiled down into the gray eyes upturned to hers.
"Yes," answered Phoebe, instantly on the defensive, "he is just exactly
that, Caroline Darrah Brown--and he doesn't seem to be able to get over
it. I'm afraid it's chronic with him."
"He's young yet," Mrs. Buchanan remarked as she clipped a thread with her
bright scissors.
"No," said Phoebe slowly, "he is six years older than I am and that makes
him thirty-two. I have earned my living for ten years and a man five
years younger who sits at a desk next to mine at the office is taking
care of his mother and educating two younger brothers on a salary that is
less than mine--but _David_ is a dear! Did you see the little coats Polly
sent the babies?" she asked quickly to close the subject and to cover a
note of pain she had discovered in her own voice.
"They were lovely," answered Mrs. Buchanan. "Now let me show you how to
roll and whip your ruffle, Caroline dear," she added as she bent over
Caroline's completed hem. In a moment they were both immersed in a
scientific discussion of under-and-over stitch.
Phoebe clasped her knees in her arms and gazed into the fire. Her own
involuntary summing up of David Kildare had struck into her inner
consciousness like a blow. And Phoebe could not have explained to even
herself what it was in her that demanded the hewer of wood and drawer of
water in a man--in David. Decidedly Phoebe's demands were for elementals
and she questioned Kildare's right to his leisurely life based on the
Jeffersonian ideals of his forefathers.
And while they sewed and chatted the hour away, over in the library the
major and David were in interested conclave.
"Now, I leave it to you, Major, if he isn't just the limit," said David
on his return from his mission for the purpose of drawing Andrew from his
lair. "I couldn't budge him. He is writing away like all possessed with a
two-apple-and-a-cracker lunch on the table beside him. He seems to enjoy
a death-starve."
"David," said the major as he laid aside the book he had been buried in
and began to polish his glasses, "you make no allowances whatever for the
artistic temperament. When a man is making connection with his solar
plexus he doesn't consider the consumption of food of paramount
importance. Now in this treatise of Aristotle--"
"Well, anyway, I've made up my mind to fix up something between him and
Caroline Darrah. He's got to get a heart interest of his own and let
mine alone. The child is daffy about his poetry and moons at him all the
time out of the corners of her eyes, dandy eyes at that; but the old
ink-swiller acts as if she wasn't there at all. What'll I do to make him
just see her? Just see her--_see her_--that'll be enough!"
"David," said the major quietly as he looked into the fire with his
shaggy brows bent over his keen eyes, "the combination of a man heart and
a woman heart makes a dangerous explosive at the best, but here are
things that make it fatal. The one you are planning would be deadly."
"Why, why in the world shouldn't I touch them off? Perfectly nice girl,
all right man and--"
"Boy, have you forgotten that I told you of the night Andrew Sevier's
father killed himself; yes, that he had sat the night through at the
poker table with Peters Brown? Brown offered some restoration compromise
to the widow but she refused--you know the struggle that she made and
that it killed her. We both know the grit it took for Andrew to chisel
himself into what he is. The first afternoon he met the girl in here,
right by this table, for an instant I was frightened--only _she_ didn't
know, thank God! The Almighty gardens His women-things well and fends off
influences that shrivel; it behooves men to do the same."
"So that's it," exclaimed Kildare, serious in his dismay. "Of course I
remember it, but I had forgotten to connect up the circumstances. It's a
mine all right, Major--and the poor little girl! She reads his poetry
with Phoebe and to me and she admires him and is deferential and--that
girl--the sweetest thing that ever happened! I don't know whether to go
over and smash him or to cry on his collar."
"Dave," answered the major as he folded his hands and looked off across
the housetops glowing in the winter sun, "some snarls in our life-lines
only the Almighty can unravel; He just depends on us to keep hands off.
Andrew is a fine product of disastrous circumstances. A man who can build
a bridge, tunnel a mountain and then sit down by a construction camp-fire
at night and write a poem and a play, must cut deep lines in life and
he'll not cut them in a woman's heart--if he can help it."
"And she must never know, Major, _never_," said David with distress in
his happy eyes; "we must see to that. It ought to be easy to keep. It was
so long ago that nobody remembers it. But wait--that is what Mrs. Cherry
Lawrence meant when she said to Phoebe in Caroline's presence that it was
just as well under the circumstances that the committee had not asked
Andrew to write the poem for the unveiling of the statue. I wondered at
the time why Phoebe dealt her such a knock-out glance that even I
staggered. And she's given her cold-storage attentions ever since. Mrs.
Cherry rather fancies Andy, I gather. Would she dare, do you think?"
"Women," remarked the major dryly, "when man-stalking make very cruel
enemies for the weaker of their kind. Let's be thankful that pursuit is a
perverted instinct in them that happens seldom. We can trust much to
Phoebe. The Almighty puts the instinct for mother guarding all younger or
lesser women into the heart of superbly sexed women like Phoebe Donelson,
and with her aroused we may be able to keep it from the child."
"Ah, but it is sad, Major," said David in a low voice deeply moved with
emotion. "Sad for her who does not know--and for him who does."
"And it was farther reaching than that, Dave," answered the major slowly,
and the hand that held the dying pipe trembled against the table. "Andrew
Sevier was a loss to us all at the time and to you for whom we builded.
The youngest and strongest and best of us had been mowed down before a
four-years' rain of bullets and there were few enough of us left to build
again. And of us all he had the most constructive power. With the same
buoyant courage that he had led our regiment in battle did he lead the
remnant of us in reconstructing our lives. He was gay and optimistic,
laughed at bitterness and worked with infectious spirits and superb
force. We all depended on him and followed him keenly. We loved him and
let ourselves be laughed into his schemes. It was his high spirits and
temperament that led to his gaming and tragedy. Nearly thirty years he's
been dead, the happy Andrew. This boy's like him, very like him."
"I see it--I see it," answered David slowly, "and all of that glad heart
was bred in Andy, Major, and it's there under his sadness. Heavens,
haven't I seen it in the hunting field as he landed over six stiff bars
on a fast horse? It's in some of his writing and sometimes it flashes in
his eyes when he is excited. I've seen it there lately more often than
ever before. God, Major, last night his eyes fairly danced when I plagued
Caroline into asking him to whom he wrote that serenade which I have set
to music and sing for her so often. It hurts me all over--it makes
me weak--"
"It's hunger, David, lunch is almost ready," said Phoebe who had come
into the room in time to catch his last words. "Why, where is Andrew?
Wouldn't he come?"
"No," answered Kildare quickly, covering his emotion with a laugh as he
refused to meet Caroline Darrah's eyes which wistfully asked the same
question that Phoebe had voiced, "he is writing a poem--about---about,"
his eyes roamed the room wildly for he had got into it, and his stock of
original poem-subjects was very short. Finally his music lore yielded
a point, "It's about a girl drinking--only with her eyes you
understand--and--"
"He could save himself that trouble," laughed Phoebe, "for somebody has
already written that; did it some time ago. Run stop him, David."
"No," answered David with recovered spirit, "I'd flag a train for you,
Phoebe, but I don't intend to side-track a poem for anybody. Besides, I'm
hungry and I see Jeff with a tray. Mrs. Matilda, please put Caroline
Darrah by me. She's attentive and Phoebe just diets--me."
And while they laughed and chatted and feasted the hour away, across the
street Andrew sat with his eyes looking over on to the major's red roof
which was shrouded in a mist of yesterdays through which he was watching
a slender boy toil his way. When he was eight he had carried a long route
of the daily paper and he could feel now the chill dark air out into
which he had slipped as his mother stood at the door and watched him down
the street with sad and hungry eyes, the gaunt mother who had never
smiled. He had fought and punched and scuffled in the dawn for his bundle
of papers; and he had fought and scuffled for all he had got of life for
many years. But a result had come--and it was rich. How he had managed an
education he could hardly see himself; only the major had helped. Not
much, but just enough to make it possible. And David had always stood by.
Kildare's fortune had come from some almost forgotten lumber lands that
his father had failed to heave into the Confederate maelstrom. Perhaps it
had come a little soon for the very best upbuilding of the character of
David Kildare, but he had stood shoulder to shoulder with them all in the
fight for the establishment of the new order of things and his generosity
with himself and his wealth had been superb. The delight with which he
made a gift of himself to any cause whatsoever, rather tended to blight
the prospects of what might have been a brilliant career at law. With his
backing Hobson Capers had opened the cotton mills on a margin of no
capital and much grit. Then Tom Cantrell had begun stock manipulations
on a few blocks of gas and water, which his mother and Andrew had put up
the money to buy--and nerve.
It was good to think of them all now in the perspective of the then. Were
there any people on earth who could swing the pendulum like those scions
of the wilderness cavaliers and do it with such dignity? He was tasting
an aftermath and he found it sweet--only the bitterness that had killed
his mother before he was ten. And across the street sat the daughter of
the man who had pressed the cup to her lips--with her father's millions
and her mother's purple eyes.
He dropped his hand on his manuscript and began to write feverishly. Then
in a moment he paused. The Panama campfire, beside which he had written
his first play, that was running in New York now, rose in a vision. Was
it any wonder that the managers had jumped at the chance to produce the
first drama from the country's newly acquired jungle? The lines had been
rife with the struggle and intrigue of the great canal cutting. It really
was a ripping play he told himself with a smile--and this other? He
looked at it a moment in a detached way. This other throbbed.
He gathered the papers together in his hand and walked to the window. The
sun was now aslant through the trees. It was late and they must have all
gone their ways from across the street; only the major would be alone and
appreciative. Andrew smiled quizzically as he regarded the pages in his
hand--but it was all so to the good to read the stuff to the old fellow
with his Immortals ranged round!
"Great company that," he mused to himself as he let himself out of the
apartment. And as he walked slowly across the street and into the
Buchanan house, Fate took up the hand of Andrew Sevier and ranged his
trumps for a new game.
In the moment he parted the curtains and stepped into the library the old
dame played a small signal, for there, in the major's wide chair, sat
Caroline Darrah Brown with her head bent over a large volume spread open
upon the table.
"Oh," she said with a quick smile and a rose signal in her cheeks,
"the major isn't here! They came for him to go out to the farm to see
about--about grinding something up to feed to--to--something or
sheep--or--," she paused in distress as if it were of the utmost
importance that she should inform him of the major's absence.
"Silo for the cows," he prompted in a practical voice. It was well a
practical remark fitted the occasion for the line from old Ben Jonson,
which David had only a few hours ago accused him of plagiarizing, rose to
the surface of his mind. Such deep wells of eyes he had never looked into
in all his life before, and they were as ever, filled to the brim with
reverence, even awe of him. It was a heady draught he quaffed before she
looked down and answered his laconic remark.
"Yes," she said, "that was it. And Mrs. Matilda and Phoebe motored out
with him and David went on his horse. I am making calls, only I didn't. I
stopped to--" and she glanced down with wild confusion, for the book
spread out before her was the major's old family Bible, and the type was
too bold to fail to declare its identity to his quick glance.
"Don't worry," he hastened to say, "I don't mind. I read it myself
sometimes, when I'm in a certain mood."
"It was for David--he wanted to read something to Phoebe," she answered
in ravishing confusion, and pointed to the open page.
Thus Andrew Sevier was forced by old Fate to come near her and bend with
her over the book. The tip of her exquisite finger ran along the lines
that have figured in the woman question for many an age.
"'For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely
trust in her'"--and so on down the page she led him.
"And that was what the trouble was about," she said when they had read
the last word in the last line. She raised her eyes to his with laughter
in their depths. "It was a very dreadful battle and Phoebe won. The major
found this for him to read to her and she said she did not intend to go
into the real estate business for her husband or to rise while it was yet
night to give him his breakfast. Aren't they funny, _funny_?" and she
fairly rippled with delight at her recollection of the vanquishing of the
intrepid David.
"The standards for a wife were a bit strenuous in those days," he
answered, smiling down on her. "I'm afraid Dave will have trouble finding
one on those terms. And yet--" he paused and there was a touch of mockery
in his tone.
"I think that a woman could be very, very happy fulfilling every one of
those conditions if she were woman enough," answered Caroline Darrah
Brown, looking straight into his eyes with her beautiful, disconcerting,
dangerous young seriousness.
Andrew picked up his manuscript with the mental attitude of catching at a
straw.
"Oh," she said quickly, "you were going to read to the major, weren't
you?" And the entreaty in her eyes was as young as her seriousness; as
young as that of a very little girl begging for a wonder tale. The heart
of a man may be of stone but even flint flies a spark.
Andrew Sevier flushed under his pallor and ruffled his pages back to a
serenade he had written, with which the star for whom the play was being
made expected to exploit a deep-timbred voice in a recitative
vocalization. And while he read it to her slowly, Fate finessed on the
third round.
And so the major found them an hour or more later, he standing in the
failing light turning the pages and she looking up at him, listening,
with her cheek upon her interlaced fingers and her elbows resting on the
old book. The old gentleman stood at the door a long time before he
interrupted them and after Andrew had gone down to put Caroline into her
motorcar, which had been waiting for hours, he lingered at the window
looking out into the dusk.
"'For love is as strong as death,'" he quoted to himself as he turned to
the table and slowly closed the book and returned it to its place. "'And
many waters can not quench love, neither can the floods drown it.'"
"Solomon was very great--and human," he further observed.
Then after absorbing an hour or two of communion with some musty old
papers and a tattered volume of uncertain age, the major was interrupted
by Mrs. Matilda as she came in from her drive. She was a vision in her
soft gray reception gown, and her gray hat, with its white velvet rose,
was tipped over her face at an angle that denoted the spirit of
adventure.
"I'm so glad to get back, Major," she said as she stood and regarded him
with affection beaming in her bright eyes. "Sometimes I hurry home to be
sure you are safe here. I don't see you as much as I do out at Seven Oaks
and I'm lonely going places away from you."
"Don't you know it isn't the style any longer for a woman to carry her
husband in her pocket, Matilda," he answered. "What would Mrs. Cherry
Lawrence think of you?"
Mrs. Buchanan laughed as she seated herself by him for the moment.
"I've just come from Milly's," she said. "I left Caroline there. And
Hobson was with her; they had been out motoring on the River Road. Do
you suppose--it looks as if perhaps--?"
"My dear Matilda," answered the major, "I never give or take a tip on a
love race. The Almighty endows women with inscrutable eyes and the smile
of the Sphynx for purposes of self-preservation, I take it, so a man
wastes time trying to solve a woman-riddle. However, Hobson Capers is
running a risk of losing much valuable time is the guess I chance on the
issue in question."
"And Peyton Kendrick and that nice Yankee boy and--"
"All bunched, all bunched at the second post! There's a dark horse
running and he doesn't know it himself. God help him!" he added under his
breath as she turned to speak to Tempie.
"If you don't want her to marry Hobson whom do you choose?" she said
returning to the subject. "I wish--I wish--but of course it is
impossible, and I'm glad, as it is, that Andrew is indifferent."
"Yes," answered the major, "and you'll find that indifference is a hall
mark stamped on most modern emotions."