For the dearest affection the heart can hold
Is the honest love of the nine-year-old.
It isn’t checked by the five-barred gate
Of worldly prudence or real-estate,
And that is the reason why, till the end,
A childhood lover is loyal friend.
The little crowd that followed Klebe Willard out of the Look door-yard
moved slowly, for the irate skipper formed the nucleus of the group
and stopped every few steps to mop at his wounded ear with a big
handkerchief, while he grunted threats and promises of vengeance.
“I hope you’ll give it to him hot and heavy, Cap’n. He needs it. To
be sure, I’ve done days’ work for him and got my pay, but I was never
cussed so much before in my life as I was by him in that one week, and I
don’t allow no man to talk that way to me.” This war-counsellor was Ezra
Mayo, the carpenter, a sallow, weasened little man who had prudently
run out of the door-yard at the showman’s first hostile movement. “And
there’s others in the Look family that better be made to mind their own
bus’ness,” he added with bitterness.
He looked around apprehensively, and he now saw Squire Phin following
slowly, as though to avoid overtaking them.
A carriage was standing in front of Brickett’s store, and the man who
occupied it leaned back with crossed legs and lazily kicked his foot
over the wheel. A white hat, a black moustache and the light lining
of the Goddard top emphasised the colour of his florid face. He looked
prosperous, well-fed and entirely self-satisfied, and hailed the
sputtering captain with great familiarity.
As the Squire turned to ascend the outside stairway the man in the
carriage flapped a greeting at him with careless hand, garbed in a tan
glove. There was in the salute the same half-mocking condescension that
marked the intercourse of King Bradish with most of the townsmen. But
long before that, Squire Phin felt there was something more subtle than
mere condescension in Bradish’s attitude toward him’. There Was a sneer
under all, and there had been a sneer ever since the time when Palermo
knew that Judge Willard wanted King Bradish for his son-in-law.
As the lawyer toiled up his stairs he heard Bradish inquire
sardonically:
“Well, Klebe, which licked?”
The Squire closed his door on the flood of profane threats that Willard
began to pour out, clutching the tire of Bradish’s wheel with one hand
and pounding emphasis with the other.
The lawyer’s hands were trembling a bit as he sat down in his arm-chair
and drew his tin tobacco-box toward him. He heard the voice of Bradish
outside, raised above the captain’s angry diapason:
“Do it? Why, of course I should do it; and you’d be backed up in it by
all of us.”
Squire Phin leaned on his table, and, narrowing his eyes in earnest
thought, stared up at a row of creosote stains on the cracked plastering
of his wall. Those stains for many years had occupied a peculiar place
in his thoughts. When he half shut his eyes and gazed on the wall
without studying detail, the stains took on the semblance of a row of
men. He used at first to imagine them a jury, and he rehearsed his cases
before them. It was profitable exercise. Every judge who came to hold
court in that county had grown to respect the ability of the earnest
attorney whose law was so flawless and whose cases were so thoroughly
prepared.
And after the Squire began to study the conditions of the country and
its great social questions, he found recreation in applying to them the
broad principles of law and seeking for solution. His own modest orbit
of practice afforded him no mental stimulus such as he got from this
imaginary practice.
One day when there were no loafers in his office, he half-shamefacedly
cut the picture of the Chief Justice of the United States out of an
illustrated weekly and tacked it on the wall in the centre of the
creosote stains, and after that he argued “big cases.”
And in order to argue them he stinted himself in his modest personal
wants in order to buy reports and digests and commentaries and all kinds
of fat books in slippery buff calf; and he read those books until his
eyes ached and his head spun, and he trained his big guns of logic and
appeal on those creosote stains--and then sometimes wondered whimsically
if this were not a sign of incipient aberration. He worried a bit
occasionally until a certain grave judge whom he met at nisi prius term
confessed to him one day as they were strolling after supper that he,
from childhood, had entertained a gnawing hankering to be a locomotive
engineer, and even then at sixty-five liked to walk by himself along
country paths, chuffing softly between his teeth and keeping as sharp a
lookout as though he were in the cab of a limited express.
After that--the Judge being generally considered the most matter-of-fact
old hard-head on the State bench--Squire Phin reflected that probably
all men, if one but knew it, nurse little notions of their own.
Therefore he kept on hammering the great trusts before that Creosote
Supreme Bench, cherished the diversion as his chief recreation--lived in
a dream world of amazing activity and usefulness. And in the meantime
he humbly and contentedly drew deeds, conveyances and wills, appraised
estates, presided sagely over “leave-it-out” questions of dispute, and
spent most of his time keeping would-be litigants in Palermo out of the
law.
The voices under his window kept on their monotonous rumble as he
meditated. There was the occasional spit of an oath from Willard,
following the irritating drawl of Bradish, who seemed to relish the
skipper’s rage.
“Your honours,” murmured Squire Phin, “I want to thank God in your
presence that I never yet ste-boyed a bulldog into a fight, rubbed a
tomcat’s ears, nor scuffed a rooster’s feathers and set him over into a
neighbour’s barnyard.”
He tossed his pipe into the tin box and went along and threw up the
front window as though he had arrived at his resolution.
“Bradish!” he called, and when the man poked his head around the side of
the Goddard and peered at the window, the Squire beckoned and went back
to his chair.
“I was intending to come up right away, Squire,” said the visitor, with
an irritating air of condescension, standing with one foot on a chair
and slapping his glove against his leg. His garments seemed peculiarly
fresh and smart in the dingy office, in contrast with the lawyer’s
careless attire. “But I got pretty much interested in hearing Klebe give
personal recollections of ‘When I was a circus animal for five minutes!’
It strikes me that your brother----”
“I didn’t call you up here to talk about my brother,” broke in the
lawyer, brusquely.
“Sure enough,” replied Bradish, airily, “I’d be ashamed of him if I were
you. So, then, to business! Have you collected from Buffum and Crummett
and those others?”
“No,” said the lawyer, “and it isn’t about them I want to talk. I----”
“But I propose to talk about ’em,” snapped Brad-ish, interrupting in
turn. “Here I’ve put a lot of bills in your hands to collect--_collect!_
I want all that’s due me and I’ve got to have it. I’m in a hurry and I
told you so. This is the fourth time I’ve ordered you to put ’em to
the wall, and you haven’t done it.”
“Look here, Bradish,” said Squire Phin, standing up and planting his
broad hands on the table to prop himself, “I’ve collected your bills
from all except a half dozen men, and that half dozen intend to pay. But
I’m not the kind of a lawyer that will take a poor man by the heels and
pound his head on the ground to shake money out of his pockets. Those
men have had sickness and death and troubles in their families, and
they simply can’t pay. And you can’t buy law in my office with which to
persecute honest men, Bradish.”
“Give me the bills, then,” commanded the other, stretching out his hand
and clacking his middle finger smartly into the palm. “You aren’t the
only lawyer in this county.”
Squire Phin looked at him steadily for a time, then pulled down a letter
file and began to search it. When he had found the papers he held them
and gazed at his client, knotting his eyebrows.
“I didn’t call you up here to talk about your bills,” he said, “but now
that we are on the subject I’m going to ask you something, Bradish.
Why is it that, after I’ve collected and put in your hands almost
ten thousand dollars in the last few weeks--from men to whom you had
promised longer time--you are still driving me to take the very heart’s
blood out of these poor devils? Can’t you wait a few weeks?”
Bradish brought his foot to the floor.
“I suppose it’s a regular thing for a lawyer to ram his nose into a
man’s business and twist it clear to the bottom, hey?”
“I don’t know as I ever asked another client such a question,” rejoined
the Squire, coldly, “because I don’t usually have a client who wants me
to go to a debtor with an auger and a blood-pump when the poor chap is
down and helpless.”
“Then I’ll tell you, Look,” said Bradish, leaning forward with mock
appearance of confiding the truth; “it’s none of your infernal business.
Give me those papers. I know of a man that can collect them.”
“And I know a man that will,” returned the Squire, “and collect them
without making women and children go hungry while their men folks are
in jail.” He sat down at the table, pulled a long wallet from his pocket
and began counting money from a thick packet of banknotes. “Receipt
those bills,” he said curtly.
Bradish hesitated a moment, his anger prompting him to refuse the
money from this source. But evidently his anxiety to secure his cash
overmastered the grudge. He scrawled his name across the papers and took
the banknotes.
“Circus money, eh?” he sneered, unable to resist the impulse to make the
fling. “I heard that Hiram has been squaring himself with you.” He began
counting the money.
“Now there’s no more business between us, Brad-ish,” said the lawyer as
his client buttoned his coat.
“I hope not,” retorted Bradish.
“Only this,” pursued the Squire; “I may guess what you’re collecting
your money for and shortening financial sail in town, and I may not. No
matter! But I want to tell you, King Bradish, that from this time out
you are going to leave Damaris Mayo to her husband.” Again he propped
himself on the table and leaned forward.
The charge came so unexpectedly that the man’s florid face grew pale
and then as suddenly flushed crimson, as he stammered oaths, seeking
emphasis for his denial. The Squire came around the table toward him and
raised his hand.
“Not a word--not a word more, Bradish,” he said, his composure perfect.
“I married that boy and girl, and you can’t ruin that little home if I
can prevent it--no, sir, you can’t!”
Bradish strode to the door, but he drove his fists down at his sides
with a gesture of impotent ire, whirled and came back close to the
lawyer.
“Why don’t you own up what your grudge is against me?” he gritted. “Why
ain’t you man enough to fight fair and lay down when you’re licked? If
Syl-vena Willard had wanted you she would have married you, and because
she is going to marry me when---when”--his eyes shifted uneasily under
the Squire’s stern gaze--“when she gets ready to, is no reason why you
should ghost me ’round town and make up stories to retail to her. I
suppose you’ll be reporting I’m planning to run away.”
“You stop right where you are, Bradish!” cried the lawyer. “Sylvena
Willard is too good a woman to have her name bandied here between us, or
dragged through a village scandal by your fault. Your affairs and hers
are between yourselves. You needn’t discuss them. But you shall not
break up young Mayo’s family, nor insult Sylvena Willard by your
actions, and I say this as a friend of both. Now, if you know where your
head is level you will get out of my office.”
The creases deepened about the Squire’s mouth. One fist was clenched at
his side. The other hand pointed to the door.
Bradish paused irresolutely, closing and unclosing his hands. But at
that moment the door opened and a woman came in. Bradish crowded past
her and went thumping down the stairs.
Mrs. Micajah Dunham, bolt upright in the middle of the seat of a rattly
beach waggon and disdaining the support of the leather-covered back,
even when the ledges of the Cove road danced her most vigorously, had
with a directness typical of Mrs. Micajah Dunham driven straight to the
gnawed hitching post in front of Brickett’s store. Mrs. Dunham always
appeared to be a very rigid sort of person, but on this occasion there
was extra rigidity about her, from the set of her jaw to the stiffness
of her knee action, as she stepped down from the waggon. Looking neither
right nor left, she ran the halter rope through the gnawed hitching post
and walked up the outside stairs exactly in the middle, hands at her
sides and neglecting the rain-bleached rail as she had disdained the
seat-back. A bonnet trimmed with dust-spotted imitations of grapes
framed her narrow face squarely, and a shawl appeared to pinch her
shoulders together.
She sat down in the “blind-stagger” chair well to the edge, on account
of the dust, at which her housewife’s eye glared in disfavour.
“Squire,” she said, with a directness of attack that took no account of
his averted face, “I’ve come to consult you legally, and I’ve brought
the dockyments.” She jerked herself up, crossed the room, and laid on
his open book a sheet of rudely scalloped pink paper, on which were
pasted hearts cut out of red and blue tissue.
“That’s almost the first to which I really was knowin’ the straight
facts,” she went on. “But I’ve had a glimmer of an idea for some time.
Oh, I tell you it ain’t come all to once, this thing ain’t!” The lawyer
turned slowly, picked up the paper, holding it gingerly by the corner.
“Sit down, Esther,” he said quietly, “and we’ll see what we can make out
of it.”
There were some lines of writing on the paper, and he read them aloud
in dry, legal monotone, the woman greeting the sentiments with scornful
sniffs:
“For those that love the world is bright;
And when it’s bright it is a sign
That some one’s eyes do shed the light;
Oh, darling, be my Valentine!”
He paused and cocked his eyebrows at her inquiringly.
“I caught Mr. Dunham writin’ that tormented sculch out of a book at the
sekert’ry in the best room one day the first of this month,” she said.
“And I took it away from him. And I know that he jest went to work and
made another, ’cause he said he was goin’ to. He’s been dead set and
possessed by the Old Harry for months, Squire, till I’m plumb out with
him. I can’t, won’t and shan’t stand it no longer. Here’s items, if you
need ’em.”
She unfolded a long roll composed of many sheets of notepaper pasted
together, and he read in the same calm voice her pencilled entries:
“July 15.--He helped her and her scholars to pick white weeds to trim up
the schoolhouse.
“July 19.--Took our ladder and clime trees for leaves, ditto.
“July 22.--Took broken candy to door and give it to her.
“August 2.--Hitched and took her to her boarding place when it rained.
“August 5.--More broken candy.
“August 7.--Hitched before school and went after her.
“August 10.--Dressed up and visited school.”
The lawyer ran his eye over the other entries, noting a general
similarity in all. Then he read aloud:
“August 10.--Suspect he is making a valentine.
“August 12.--Caught him at it and took the valentine.”
“And this is it, eh?” he inquired, tapping the gaudily decorated sheet
on the table. “But this is hardly the season for valentines.”
“And this ain’t the season for a man that’s goin’ on fifty-two to fall
in love with an eighteen-year-old girl, either,” she retorted. “But
he’s done it. And ’sides all I’ve put down, it has been a continual
peddlin’ out to her of candy and apples and fol-de-rols. You understand
that by twistin’ a little I can see that schoolhouse door right from my
but’ry winder, and there it is in that paper, chalked up to date.”
For the first time since she had entered the room his eyes softened a
bit. He shook the paper at her gently.
“I understand, do I,” he inquired, his mild tones contrasting soothingly
with her high-pitched anger, “that this record of devotion to a certain
school-house door means that ’Caje is----”
“It means,” she shrilled, “that that miserable, old, soft-headed fool
of a husband of mine has gone to work and fell in love with that young
teeter-bird of a schoolmarm in our deestrick, and has acted out till
I’m distracted. I can’t do nothin’ with him, Squire. He jest grunts and
growls and clears out of the house when I go at him. Now it’s come to
the end of the jig. Understand? It’s the wind-up.
“There’s the dockyments. I want to warn you right at the outset that you
ain’t goin’ to come none of your gum-games on me, the way they tell of
you actin’ with some of them that come to you for law. My mind is as
set as old Pisgy itself.” She brought her work-stained hand down on the
chair rail with a vehemence that made it creak.
“I’m not going to have any fight with you, Esther,” he replied, smiling
into her hostile eyes. “But you do surprise me about ’Caje. I thought
he was as steady-going as a stone boat.”
She nipped her lips spitefully.
“Always a hardworking man, ’Caje has been,” the lawyer went on; “has
stuck to his work a little speck too close, maybe.”
“Look here, Squire Phineas Look,” she broke in, “this ain’t gittin’ on
about that _di_-vose. You needn’t try to beat about the bush.”
“Let’s see!” he mused. “Poor, crazy Ben Haskell’s girl, ’Liza, is
teaching in the Dunham district, I believe. And Ben in the asylum these
five years! Is she as pretty as her mother was before her?”
“High-headed snippet,” sniffed Mrs. Dunham. “But I’ll show her!”
The Squire set his arms on the table, his elbows squared, and a
quizzical smile in the wrinkles about his eyes.
“’Caje Dunham is a good neighbour, is honest and pays his bills,
Esther,” he said, “but do you think for one moment that pretty ’Liza
Haskell wants that old, callous-fisted, round-shouldered husband of
yours hanging around her?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed, and she glared at him with malice in her
gaze.
“A school agent in a district has to putter around the school house more
or less,” he went on. “If he has been too neighbourly I’ll talk with
him about it. But you’re not going to drag an innocent girl through any
scandal, Esther, just to satisfy some grudge that you’ve hatched up in
your own mind.”
“So she has run to you with her budget, has she?” demanded the woman,
her expression still more malevolent.
“No, I haven’t seen ’Lize Haskell for months,” said the Squire with
candour.
“Oh, _she_ ain’t the one I mean,” Mrs. Dunham snapped. “I mean the
pompous Queen o’ Sheby that was sittin’ in that school house yistiddy
when I called there to give the little fool her come-uppance right
before her scholars.”
She nipped her lips and looked at him so spitefully and meaningly that a
flush crept up from under his collar.
He knew that the motherless girl had become a protégé of Sylvena
Willard’s at the time that Ben Haskell had been taken to the madhouse.
“No wonder you’re ’shamed,” the woman went on angrily. “You all of you
are in the plot ag’inst me. I give her her earful, all right, Willard so
high and mighty, or no Willard. That teacher and her, the both of ’em,
got it straight from _me_.”
“Do you mean to say that you went to the school house and abused that
girl before Sylvena Willard?” demanded the Squire, standing up and
glowering down on her.
But her spirit was equal to his, for her anger was bitterer.
“If any woman gits in my way when I’m doin’ my bounden duty by myself,”
she retorted, “she gits what’s comin’ to her. Says I to that snifflin’
school-marm, ‘There’s no man what’s draggin’ at a woman’s gown-tail
unless he gits encouragement.’ And I says to Miss Queen Sheby of the
Willards, ‘You can take that to yourself, you that’s tryin’ to shet me
up. King Bradish and Squire Phin Look wouldn’t both be----”
“Esther Dunham,” he shouted, “not another word. Not one word!”
It was the awful anger of a patient man thoroughly aroused that fronted
her.
“I have a right to speak my own mind, and I pretty gen’rally do it,” she
muttered, but she did not venture to say any more.
He slowly sank back into his armchair, still glaring at her.
“Oh, the devilish weapon that a woman feels privileged to use,” he
cried. After a time he went on sternly:
“Esther, I knew you at school, and I’ve watched you more or less since.
You were kind of a cute little girl, with your way of spitting out just
what you thought about folks and things. But we’d laugh at kittens when
we’d cuff an old cat’s ears for doing the same thing. You’ve nagged and
browbeaten your husband all your life together, and you know it!”
“Gimme them dockyments,” she rasped, popping up with a snap like a
carpenter’s rule. The lawyer put his broad hand on them.
“’Caje Dunham was the kind of man that you could have driven with
a cotton thread of love and teamed him anywhere. But you’ve used goad
sticks, and hot pitch and a twist bit, and it isn’t any wonder you’ve
made him balky.”
“So you’re stickin’ up for that missable critter right before my face
and eyes,” she cried. “I might ’a’ knowed better than to come here
and expect a dried-up old bach to admit anything about the rights of a
woman. You give me them papers, Squire Phin Look! I know where I can buy
law, even if it isn’t for sale in this shop.”
He calmly held the papers away from her clutching fingers.
“How much have you and ’Caje put away between you?” he inquired.
And when she did not reply, puckering her eyes and resenting his
intrusive question, he suggested, more gently, “In case of alimony, you
know!”
“If that’s what you’re askin’ for, I don’t know as there’s any hurt in
tellin’ you we’ve got risin’ ’leven thousand, put where it’s earnin’
int’rest and twenty-five hundred out on first mo’gidges.”
“And not a chick nor a child to leave it to,” he murmured, looking at
her with sudden sympathy in his eyes. “It’s too bad, Esther, that your
little ’Cilia was called away to her treasures in Heaven before she
could enjoy some of the treasures you heaped up on earth for her--you
two, poor, tug-a-lugging old critters, you!” She sat down suddenly, and
her work-stained, knotted hands trembled as she folded them on her lap.
“Saving and skinching and piling up,” he went on. “What good has it ever
done you, Esther? Why didn’t you and ’Caje knock off and have a little
fun together in the world before you got hardened this way? And for poor
’Cilia it was always ‘Sometime!’ till she got to be sixteen years old,
and then she went on the first journey of her life--to the grave! And
the only good dress she ever wore was the one you laid her out in! Do
you know what animals grub and grub with their noses rooting soil?” He
shouted the question at her.
She came back at him with equal fire. “When I want a sermon I’ll go to
the parson! ’Tain’t any disgrace to be prudent and forehanded, is it,
even if we ain’t got no one to enjoy it after we’re gone?”
Her voice broke suddenly. The tears flooded into her cold eyes.
“Oh, Squire,” she quavered, “’twould have been different with ’Caje
and me if only ’Cilla’d been left to us. Hain’t neither of us knowed
what to do with ourselves since we laid her away in the graveyard.”
He walked around the table and patted the shoulder bowed under the faded
shawl.
“And as little as you’ve got left in the world now, Esther, here you are
wanting to get rid of the biggest hunk of it. Can’t you realise that
you don’t understand this thing yet? Your husband don’t know what the
trouble is with him. Now let me tear up this list of ’Caje’s temporary
aberrations. I’ll have a talk with him, and we’ll see--we’ll see!”
But with an angry red in her cheeks that seemed to scorch the tears
there she jerked her shoulder away from his patting hand.
“Squire Phin, you’ve known me from a little snippet, and you know I
ain’t flyin’ off to no tangents without good reason. It ain’t no one
night’s growth, this ain’t. I’m going to have a bill from that man, I
say! The neighbours ain’t goin’ to have a chance to say _I’ve_
backed down. If you don’t want to take the case, then out with it,
bus’nesslike, and I’ll go farther. But that _di_-vose I’m goin’ to
have!”
There was no gainsaying her angry obstinacy.
“Well, Esther,” he said with a sigh, “leave the papers and I’ll have
notice of the libel served.”
“When? There can’t be no more fubbin’. The neighbours are all stirred
up, and I’ve made my talk!”
“To-morrow.”
“So do! And I’ll plan according,” she snapped, and with lips set tight
she left the room.
The Squire slowly filled his pipe, his eyes fixed in unblinking stare on
a far corner.
“Neighbours!” he snorted. “Poor little gaffer of a girl, and the whole
of ’em pecking at her!”
He aimlessly searched for a match in his pockets, his eyes still on the
corner.
“Oh, Sylvie,” he murmured, “they are just ready to bury their beaks in
you if you step between--oh-h-h!”
In sudden impotent choler he snapped the stem of the unlighted pipe,
threw the pieces into the corner and went out, shutting his office door
behind him with a vehemence that made the building shiver.