A week passed, and Jethro did not appear in the village, report having it
that he was cutting his farms on Thousand Acre Hill. When Jethro was
farming,--so it was said,--he would not stop to talk politics even with
the President of the United States were that dignitary to lean over his
pasture fence and beckon to him. On a sultry Friday morning, when William
Wetherell was seated at Jonah Winch's desk in the cool recesses of the
store slowly and painfully going over certain troublesome accounts which
seemed hopeless, he was thrown into a panic by the sight of one staring
at him from the far side of a counter. History sometimes reverses itself.
"What can I do for you--Mr. Bass?" asked the storekeeper, rather weakly.
"Just stepped in--stepped in," he answered. "W-where's Cynthy?"
"She was in the garden--shall I get her?"
"No," he said, parting his coat tails and seating himself on the counter.
"Go on figurin', don't mind me."
The thing was manifestly impossible. Perhaps Wetherell indicated as much
by his answer.
"Like storekeepin'?" Jethro asked presently, perceiving that he did not
continue his work.
"A man must live, Mr. Bass," said Wetherell; "I had to leave the city for
my health. I began life keeping store," he added, "but I little thought I
should end it so."
"Given to book-l'arnin' then, wahn't you?" Jethro remarked. He did not
smile, but stared at the square of light that was the doorway, "Judson's
jewellery store, wahn't it? Judson's?"
"Yes, Judson's," Wetherell answered, as soon as he recovered from his
amazement. There was no telling from Jethro's manner whether he were
enemy or friend; whether he bore the storekeeper a grudge for having
attained to a happiness that had not been his.
"Hain't made a great deal out of life, hev you? N-not a great deal?"
Jethro observed at last.
Wetherell flushed, although Jethro had merely stated a truth which had
often occurred to the storekeeper himself.
"It isn't given to all of us to find Rome in brick and leave it in
marble," he replied a little sadly.
Jethro Bass looked at him quickly.
"Er-what's that?" he demanded. "F-found Rome in brick, left it in marble.
Fine thought." He ruminated a little. "Never writ anything--did
you--never writ anything?"
"Nothing worth publishing," answered poor William Wetherell.
"J-just dreamed'--dreamed and kept store. S--something to have
dreamed--eh--something to have dreamed?"
Wetherell forgot his uneasiness in the unexpected turn the conversation
had taken. It seemed very strange to him that he was at last face to face
again wish the man whom Cynthia Ware had never been able to drive from
her heart. Would, he mention her? Had he continued to love her, in spite
of the woman he had married and adorned? Wetherell asked himself these
questions before he spoke.
"It is more to have accomplished," he said.
"S-something to have dreamed," repeated Jethro, rising slowly from the
counter. He went toward the doorway that led into the garden, and there
he halted and stood listening.
"C-Cynthy!" he said, "C-Cynthy!"
Wetherell dropped his pen at the sound of the name on Jethro's lips. But
it was little Cynthia he was calling little Cynthia in the garden. The
child came at his voice, and stood looking up at him silently.
"H-how old be you, Cynthy?"
"Nine," answered Cynthia, promptly.
"L-like the country, Cynthy--like the country better than the city?"
"Oh, yes," said Cynthia.
"And country folks? L--like country folks better than city folks?"
"I didn't know many city folks," said Cynthia. "I liked the old doctor
who sent Daddy up here ever so much, and I liked Mrs. Darwin."
"Mis' Darwin?"
"She kept the house we lived in. She used to give me cookies," said
Cynthia, "and bread to feed the pigeons."
"Pigeons? F-folks keep pigeons in the city?"
"Oh, no," said Cynthia, laughing at such an idea; "the pigeons came on
the roof under our window, and they used to fly right up on the
window-sill and feed out of my hand. They kept me company while Daddy,
was away, working. On Sundays we used to go into the Common and feed
them, before Daddy got sick. The Common was something like the country,
only not half as nice."
"C-couldn't pick flowers in the Common and go barefoot--e--couldn't go
barefoot, Cynthy?"
"Oh, no," said Cynthia, laughing again at his sober face.
"C-couldn't dig up the Common and plant flowers--could you?"
"Of course you couldn't."
"P-plant 'em out there?" asked Jethro.
"Oh, yes," cried Cynthia; "I'll show you." She hesitated a moment, and
then thrust her hand into his. "Do you want to see?"
"Guess I do," said he, energetically, and she led him into the garden,
pointing out with pride the rows of sweet peas and pansies, which she had
made herself. Impelled by a strange curiosity, William Wetherell went to
the door and watched them. There was a look on the face of Jethro Bass
that was new to it as he listened to the child talk of the wondrous
things around them that summer's day,--the flowers and the bees and the
brook (they must go down and stand on the brink of it), and the songs of
the vireo and the hermit thrush.
"Hain't lonely here, Cynthy--hain't lonely here?" he said.
"Not in the country," said Cynthia. Suddenly she lifted her eyes to his
with a questioning look. "Are you lonely, sometimes?"
He did not answer at once.
"Not with you, Cynthy--not with you."
By all of which it will be seen that the acquaintance was progressing.
They sat down for a while on the old millstone that formed the step, and
there discussed Cynthia's tastes. She was too old for dolls, Jethro
supposed. Yes, Cynthia was too old for dolls. She did not say so, but the
only doll she had ever owned had become insipid when the delight of such
a reality as taking care of a helpless father had been thrust upon her.
Books, suggested Jethro. Books she had known from her earliest infancy:
they had been piled around that bedroom over the roof. Books and book
lore and the command of the English tongue were William Wetherell's only
legacies to his daughter, and many an evening that spring she had read
him to sleep from classic volumes of prose and poetry I hesitate to name,
for fear you will think her precocious. They went across the green to
Cousin Ephraim Prescott's harness shop, where Jethro had tied his horse,
and it was settled that Cynthia liked books.
On the morning following this extraordinary conversation, Jethro Bass and
his wife departed for the state capital. Listy was bedecked in amazing
greens and yellows, and Jethro drove, looking neither to the right nor
left, his coat tails hanging down behind the seat, the reins lying slack
across the plump quarters of his horse--the same fat Tom who, by the way,
had so indignantly spurned the Iced Brook Seedlings. And Jake Wheeler
went along to bring back the team from Brampton. To such base uses are
political lieutenants sometimes put, although fate would have told you it
was an honor, and he came back to the store that evening fairly bristling
with political secrets which he could not be induced to impart.
One evening a fortnight later, while the lieutenant was holding forth in
commendably general terms on the politics of the state to a speechless if
not wholly admiring audience, a bomb burst in their midst. William
Wetherell did not know that it was a periodical bomb, like those flung at
regular intervals from the Union mortars into Vicksburg. These bombs, at
any rate, never failed to cause consternation and fright in Coniston,
although they never did any harm. One thing noticeable, they were always
fired in Jethro's absence. And the bombardier was always Chester Perkins,
son of the most unbending and rigorous of tithing-men, but Chester
resembled his father in no particular save that he, too, was a deacon and
a pillar of the church. Deacon Ira had been tall and gaunt and sunken and
uncommunicative. Chester was stout, and said to perspire even in winter,
apoplectic, irascible, talkative, and still, as has been said, a
Democrat. He drove up to the store this evening to the not inappropriate
rumble of distant thunder, and he stood up in his wagon in front of the
gathering and shook his fist in Jake Wheeler's face.
"This town's tired of puttin' up with a King," he cried. "Yes, King-=I
said it, and I don't care who hears me. It's time to stop this one-man
rule. You kin go and tell him I said it, Jake Wheeler, if you've a mind
to. I guess there's plenty who'll do that."
An uneasy silence followed--the silence which cries treason louder than
any voice. Some shifted uneasily, and spat, and Jake Wheeler thrust his
hands in his pockets and walked away, as much as to say that it was
treason even to listen to such talk. Lem Hallowell seemed unperturbed.
"On the rampage agin, Chet?" he remarked.
"You'd ought to know better, Lem," cried the enraged Chester; "hain't the
hull road by the Four Corners ready to drop into the brook? What be you
a-goin' to do about it?"
"I'll show you when I git to it," answered Lem, quietly. And, show them
he did.
"Git to it!" shouted Chester, scornfully, "I'll git to it. I'll tell you
right now I'm a candidate for the Chairman of the Selectmen, if town
meetin' is eight months away. An', Sam Price, I'll expect the Democrats
to git into line."
With this ultimatum Chester drove away as rapidly as he had come.
"I want to know!" said Sam Price, an exclamation peculiarly suited to his
voice. But nevertheless Sam might be counted on in each of these little
rebellions. He, too, had remained steadfast to Jacksonian principles, and
he had never forgiven Jethro about a little matter of a state office
which he (Sam) had failed to obtain.
Before he went to bed Jake Wheeler had written a letter which he sent off
to the state capital by the stage the next morning. In it he indicted no
less than twenty of his fellow-townsmen for treason; and he also thought
it wise to send over to Clovelly for Bijah Bixby, a lieutenant in that
section, to come and look over the ground and ascertain by his well-known
methods how far the treason had eaten into the body politic. Such was
Jake's ordinary procedure when the bombs were fired, for Mr. Wheeler was
nothing if not cautious.
Three mornings later, a little after seven o'clock, when the storekeeper
and his small daughter were preparing to go to Brampton upon a very
troublesome errand, Chester Perkins appeared again. It is always easy to
stir up dissatisfaction among the ne'er-do-wells (Jethro had once done it
himself), and during the three days which had elapsed since Chester had
flung down the gauntlet there had been more or less of downright treason
heard in the store. William Wetherell, who had perplexities of his own,
had done his best to keep out of the discussions that had raged on his
cracker boxes and barrels, for his head was a jumble of figures which
would not come right. And now as he stood there in the freshness of the
early summer morning, waiting for Lem Hallowell's stage, poor Wetherell's
heart was very heavy.
"Will Wetherell," said Chester, "you be a gentleman and a student, hain't
you? Read history, hain't you?"
"I have read some," said William Wetherell.
"I callate that a man of parts," said Chester, "such as you be, will help
us agin corruption and a dictator. I'm a-countin' on you, Will Wetherell.
You've got the store, and you kin tell the boys the difference between
right and wrong. They'll listen to you, because you're eddicated."
"I don't know anything about politics," answered Wetherell, with an
appealing glance at the silent group,--group that was always there. Rias
Richardson, who had donned the carpet slippers preparatory to tending
store for the day, shuffled inside. Deacon Lysander, his father, would
not have done so.
"You know somethin' about history and the Constitootion, don't ye?"
demanded Chester, truculently. N'Jethro Bass don't hold your mortgage,
does he? Bank in Brampton holds it--hain't that so? You hain't afeard of
Jethro like the rest on 'em, be you?"
"I don't know what right you have to talk to me that way, Mr. Perkins,"
said Wetherell.
"What right? Jethro holds my mortgage--the hull town knows it-and he kin
close me out to-morrow if he's a mind to--"
"See here, Chester Perkins," Lem Hallowell interposed, as he drove up
with the stage, "what kind of free principles be you preachin'? You'd
ought to know better'n coerce."
"What be you a-goin' to do about that Four Corners road?" Chester cried
to the stage driver.
"I give 'em till to-morrow night to fix it," said Lem. "Git in, Will.
Cynthy's over to the harness shop with Eph. We'll stop as we go 'long."
"Give 'em till to-morrow night!" Chester shouted after them. "What you
goin' to do then?"
But Lem did not answer this inquiry. He stopped at the harness shop,
where Ephraim came limping out and lifted Cynthia to the seat beside her
father, and they joggled off to Brampton. The dew still lay in myriad
drops on the red herd's-grass, turning it to lavender in the morning sun,
and the heavy scent of the wet ferns hung in the forest. Lem whistled,
and joked with little Cynthia, and gave her the reins to drive, and of
last they came in sight of Brampton Street, with its terrace-steepled
church and line of wagons hitched to the common rail, for it was market
day. Father and daughter walked up and down, hand in hand, under the
great trees, and then they went to the bank.
It was a brick building on a corner opposite the common, imposing for
Brampton, and very imposing to Wetherell. It seemed like a tomb as he
entered its door, Cynthia clutching his fingers, and never but once in
his life had he been so near to leaving all hope behind. He waited
patiently by the barred windows until the clerk, who was counting bills,
chose to look up at him.
"Want to draw money?" he demanded.
The words seemed charged with irony. William Wetherell told him,
falteringly, his name and business, and he thought the man looked at him
compassionately.
"You'll have to see Mr. Worthington," he said; "he hasn't gone to the
mills yet."
"Dudley Worthington?" exclaimed Wetherell.
The teller smiled.
"Yes. He's the president of this bank."'
He opened a door in the partition, and leaving Cynthia dangling her feet
from a chair, Wetherell was ushered, not without trepidation, into the
great man's office, and found himself at last in the presence of Mr.
Isaac D. Worthington, who used to wander up and down Coniston Water
searching for a mill site.
He sat behind a table covered with green leather, on which papers were
laid with elaborate neatness, and he wore a double-breasted skirted coat
of black, with braided lapels, a dark purple blanket cravat with a large
red cameo pin. And Mr. Worthington's features harmonized perfectly with
this costume--those of a successful, ambitious man who followed custom
and convention blindly; clean-shaven, save for reddish chops, blue eyes
of extreme keenness, and thin-upped mouth which had been tightening year
by year as the output of the Worthington Minx increased.
"Well, sir," he said sharply, "what can I do for you?"
"I am William Wetherell, the storekeeper at Coniston."
"Not the Wetherell who married Cynthia Ware!"
No, Mr. Worthington did not say that. He did not know that Cynthia Ware
was married, or alive or dead, and--let it be confessed at once--he did
not care.
This is what he did say:--
"Wetherell--Wetherell. Oh, yes, you've come about that note--the mortgage
on the store at Coniston." He stared at William Wetherell, drummed with
his fingers on the table, and smiled slightly. "I am happy to say that
the Brampton Bank does not own this note any longer. If we did,--merely
as a matter of business, you understand" (he coughed),--"we should have
had to foreclose."
"Don't own the note!" exclaimed Wetherell. "Who does own it?"
"We sold it a little while ago--since you asked for the extension--to
Jethro Bass."
"Jethro Bass!" Wetherell's feet seemed to give way under him, and he sat
down.
"Mr. Bass is a little quixotic--that is a charitable way to put
it--quixotic. He does--strange things like this once in awhile."
The storekeeper found no words to answer, but sat mutely staring at him.
Mr. Worthington coughed again.
"You appear to be an educated man. Haven't I heard some story of your
giving up other pursuits in Boston to come up here for your health?
Certainly I place you now. I confess to a little interest in literature
myself--in libraries."
In spite of his stupefaction at the news he had just received, Wetherell
thought of Mr. Worthington's beaver hat, and of that gentleman's first
interest in libraries, for Cynthia had told the story to her husband.
"It is perhaps an open secret," continued Mr. Worthington, "that in the
near future I intend to establish a free library in Brampton. I feel it
my duty to do all I can for the town where I have made my success, and
there is nothing which induces more to the popular welfare than a good
library." Whereupon he shot at Wetherell another of his keen looks. "I do
not talk this way ordinarily to my customers, Mr. Wetherell," he began;
"but you interest me, and I am going to tell you something in confidence.
I am sure it will not be betrayed."
"Oh, no," said the bewildered storekeeper, who was in no condition to
listen to confidences.
He went quietly to the door, opened it, looked out, and closed it softly.
Then he looked out of the window.
"Have a care of this man Bass," he said, in a lower voice. "He began many
years ago by debauching the liberties of that little town of Coniston,
and since then he has gradually debauched the whole state, judges and
all. If I have a case to try" (he spoke now with more intensity and
bitterness), "concerning my mills, or my bank, before I get through I
find that rascal mixed up in it somewhere, and unless I arrange matters
with him, I--"
He paused abruptly, his eyes going out of the window, pointing with a
long finger at a grizzled man crossing the street with a yellow and red
horse blanket thrown over his shoulders.
"That man, Judge Baker, holding court in this town now, Bass owns body
and soul."
"And the horse blanket?" Wetherell queried, irresistibly.
Dudley Worthington did not smile.
"Take my advice, Mr. Wetherell, and pay off that note somehow." An odor
of the stable pervaded the room, and a great unkempt grizzled head and
shoulders, horse blanket and all, were stuck into it.
"Mornin', Dudley," said the head, "busy?"
"Come right in, Judge," answered Mr. Worthington. "Never too busy to see
you." The head disappeared.
"Take my advice, Mr. Wetherell."
And then the storekeeper went into the bank.
For some moments he stood dazed by what he had heard, the query ringing
in his head: Why had Jethro Bass bought that note? Did he think that the
storekeeper at Coniston would be of use to him, politically? The words
Chester Perkins had spoken that morning came back to Wetherell as he
stood in the door. And how was he to meet Jethro Bass again with no money
to pay even the interest on the note? Then suddenly he missed Cynthia,
hurried out, and spied her under the trees on the common so deep in
conversation with a boy that she did not perceive him until he spoke to
her. The boy looked up, smiling frankly at something Cynthia had said to
him. He had honest, humorous eyes, and a browned, freckled face, and was,
perhaps, two years older than Cynthia.
"What's the matter?" said Wetherell.
Cynthia's face was flushed, and she was plainly vexed about something.
"I gave her a whistle," said the boy, with a little laugh of vexation,
"and now she says she won't take it because I owned up I made it for
another girl."
Cynthia held it out to him, not deigning to appeal her ease.
"You must take it back," she said.
"But I want you to have it," said the boy.
"It wouldn't be right for me to take it when you made it for somebody
else."
After all, people with consciences are born, not made. But this was a
finer distinction that the boy had ever met with in his experience.
"I didn't know you when I made the whistle," he objected, puzzled and
downcast.
"That doesn't make any difference."
"I like you better than the other girl."
"You have no right to," retorted the casuist; "you've known her longer."
"That doesn't make any difference," said the boy; "there are lots of
people I don't like I have always known. This girl doesn't live in
Brampton, anyway."
"Where does she live?" demanded Cynthia,--which was a step backward.
"At the state capital. Her name's Janet Duncan. There, do you believe me
now?"
William Wetherell had heard of Janet Duncan's father, Alexander Duncan,
who had the reputation of being the richest man in the state. And he
began to wonder who the boy could be.
"I believe you," said Cynthia; "but as long as you made it for her, it's
hers. Will you take it?"
"No," said he, determinedly.
"Very well," answered Cynthia. She laid down the whistle beside him on
the rail, and went off a little distance and seated herself on a bench.
The boy laughed.
"I like that girl," he remarked; "the rest of 'em take everything I give
'em, and ask for more. She's prettier'n any of 'em, too."
"What is your name?" Wetherell asked him, curiously, forgetting his own
troubles.
"Bob Worthington."
"Are you the son of Dudley Worthington"
"Everybody asks me that," he said; "I'm tired of it. When I grow up,
they'll have to stop it."
"But you should be proud of your father."
"I am proud of him, everybody's proud of him, Brampton's proud of
him--he's proud of himself. That's enough, ain't it?" He eyed Wetherell
somewhat defiantly, then his glance wandered to Cynthia, and he walked
over to her. He threw himself down on the grass in front of her, and lay
looking up at her solemnly. For a while she continued to stare inflexibly
at the line of market wagons, and then she burst into a laugh.
"Thought you wouldn't hold out forever," he remarked.
"It's because you're so foolish," said Cynthia, "that's why I laughed."
Then she grew sober again and held out her hand to him. "Good-by."
"Where are you going?"
"I must go back to my father. I--I think he doesn't feel very well."
"Next time I'll make a whistle for you," he called after her.
"And give it to somebody else," said Cynthia.
She had hold of her father's hand by that, but he caught up with her,
very red in the face.
"You know that isn't true," he cried angrily, and taking his way across
Brampton Street, turned, and stood staring after them until they were out
of sight.
"Do you like him, Daddy?" asked Cynthia.
William Wetherell did not answer. He had other things to think about.
"Daddy?"
"Yes."
"Does your trouble feel any better?"
"Some, Cynthia. But you mustn't think about it."
"Daddy, why don't you ask Uncle Jethro to help you?"
At the name Wetherell started as if he had had a shock.
"What put him into your head, Cynthia?" he asked sharply. "Why do you
call him 'Uncle Jethro'?"
"Because he asked me to. Because he likes me, and I like him."
The whole thing was a riddle he could not solve--one that was best left
alone. They had agreed to walk back the ten miles to Coniston, to save
the money that dinner at the hotel would cost. And so they started,
Cynthia flitting hither and thither along the roadside, picking the
stately purple iris flowers in the marshy places, while Wetherell
pondered.