EVEN BY ITS POSSESSORS.
“Old Zibe Haines had a corn on his toe
And it ached like ginger ev’ry step he’d go.
He reckoned that toe had all them pains
Jest for to hector old Zibe Haines.
He grabbed up a mallet and a chisel, too,
And clear’n to the woodpile swore things blue.
He put that toe on the choppin’ block
And off he whacked it, slap, ker-chock!
And he throwed that toe ’bout ha’f a mile--
Oh, that was old Zibe Haines’s style.
Tum-diddy-dum and tum-diddy-dee,
Queer old crab was Haines, was he!”
--Narrated by Marriner Amazeen.
Squire Phineas Look, during the life of his love for Sylvena Willard,
had become pretty thoroughly accustomed to having his heart affairs
marked “Continued till next session,” as he half-bitterly termed it in
his meditations.
Coupled with Squire Phin’s natural reserve was that quality of his
trained lawyer mind that was willing to abide delays till “his case was
prepared.”
In some men this would have been timidity.
In others it would have been half-heartedness.
In Squire Phin it was fixity of purpose and the steady loyalty of a
firm, pure, true love that could wait.
Down in Smyrna the summer visitors still listen with mingled emotions to
the story of the loves of Moses Britt and Xoa Emerson.
After they became engaged Moses worked for eight years accumulating
enough money to buy three-eights of a fishing schooner. Xoa toiled
at housework in various families, picked blueberries for the canning
factory, and, by any employment that came to her hand, earned and saved
for the little home that they had planned.
“We won’t get married till we can have our house built and furnished and
ready to step into,” was the mark they had set thriftily for themselves.
The house went up, so old Mell Cowallis remarked, like the way
“Figger-Four” Avery walked--steady by jerks: one year the foundation,
another year the side walls and roof, a third year the chimneys and the
lathing and clapboards--and so on for successive seasons, according as
the fishing prospered and the work-stained fingers of Xoa tucked away
the clinking change and the worn dollar bills.
Now it came to the time when Xoa resolved to fulfill the dream of her
life and have a bow window of ample dimensions, the model of the one
on Sheriff Morton’s big house, where she had worked for years in the
kitchen, envying all the time the luxurious ease of the sheriff’s wife
lolling on a divan in the window. But this window meant postponing the
marriage a year, and with the house so nearly completed Moses had begun
to express an entirely natural anxiety to get married.
Xoa, with the bow window filling her vision, could not understand this
sudden haste in one who had been always as philosophic over delays as
she herself.
“You think more of your old bow winder than you do of me,” cried Moses,
in sudden jealousy. And he sailed away on a trip to the Banks, biting
his stubbly gray beard in pique.
And ere one week had gone a legacy came to Xoa from her aunt
Persis--just enough of a legacy to put on that bow window. So she hired
carpenters in haste and set them at work, determined to have her way
before the return of Moses. On one evening when the expanse of glass in
that window was glowing redly in the beams of the setting sun, the “Xoa
and Laura” sailed up the reach with her flag at half mast, and reported
the loss of Moses Britt and his dory mate, smashed under in a fog by a
roaring steamship.
Those who know say that Xoa knelt all night in her new bow window,
with her face against the glass, and when morning came she called the
carpenters again, and with clamour of hammers and rasp of saws they took
off the bow window and boarded the side of the building up. And then--it
being a case where the solemn ceremony could be deferred till all was
ready--she secured a casket from the city, put into it all the pathetic
old clothes that had been turned over to her with Moses’s dunnage-bag,
called in the parson and the neighbours, and the funeral of Moses
Britt was decorously carried out in a house upon which the soul of the
bridegroom-elect could look down from on high and not take exceptions.
For forty years after that, until death took her, Xoa lived an old maid
in the bow-windowless house.
It is not likely that Squire Phin Look used this case or any others
similar for precedents in heart affairs, as he would have employed
law-court decisions in his legal practice, but he had in his New England
temperament a finer grade of the same iron-stone that is found in such
dispositions as those of Moses and Xoa.
So much for the steadiness and the reserve of his affection in the past.
Since that unfortunate day in the fall there had been something else
than reserve to make him walk hastily past the Willard place, to keep
him away from the little social gatherings in the meeting-house vestry,
and he avoided Sylvena Willard with as much anxiety as she appeared to
avoid him. He was as ashamed of that blow as he would have been of a
crime. Now that the rage of the provocation had departed, he knew that
his act had been a vulgar street affray--there was no other word for it
in his vocabulary.
When some of the jesters in the attorneys’ room at county court
mentioned the affair at the December term with many humorous inquiries,
he was so overwhelmed with shame that he asked continuance for most of
his cases and hurried home.
Yet he heard other things at that term of court that disquieted him
more.
“Why, Look, I _know_ it!” one of his lawyer friends had insisted, when
he ventured to remonstrate at certain gossip. “I don’t know how much
property Judge Willard has got, nor what resources are back of him. But
I do know that he is as pinched for ready money as the devil. I can
talk with you without it’s going any farther; but being a trustee in
a savings bank and a director in a national bank, I come pretty near
knowing when a man is hustling hard for loans, and you can tell how
hard he is hustling from the kind of collateral he is offering. I’ve
got nothing against the Judge, but I’m afraid he’s in over his head with
Bradish. Your Bradish has been a country plunger for a long time--and
the country plunger is the worst of the breed. He thinks he knows it all
and is working the stock market at arm’s length. I know, myself, that
one bucket shop let him down for sixteen thousand in a single blind
pool. Willard seems to have played fox with you folks in Palermo
through it all, and, of course, he’s had a great start of you with his
reputation and all that. But if he’s your town treasurer, as I hear he
is, and custodian of about all the funds of widows and orphans and old
codgers in your town, give him a looking over and do it right away. You
can’t afford to let even a Willard dump the whole of you--especially
when it looks to me as though this Bradish is the chap responsible for
getting him into this mess and has gobbled most of the money.”
But even with that warning to spur him, Squire Look allowed the weeks to
pass without setting about any thorough investigation of Judge Willard’s
finances. If he were any other than Seth Look’s boy---Hiram Look’s
brother, he felt that the case would be different. Whenever he paused
in his work to ponder on the matter and on his duty to the citizens, he
groaned under his breath and put the thing away from him once more.
And as the winter went on the Squire found less and less time to think
upon anything but his own matters.
The State legislature had recognised his modest but just reputation as
one of the best-grounded “straight” lawyers in the State, and on the
recommendation of the judges had selected him as the reviser of the
statutes, a labour that he found exacting and absorbing.
Then on the heels of this work came a syndicate with a scheme for
helping municipalities to instal and own their own water plants, despite
the statutory restrictions that allow towns to assume so much debt and
no more. The syndicate had heard of the Squire’s legal invention of
“water districts” that he had studied out in the dumbly approving
presence of his “Creosote Supreme Court” and expounded to the amazement
of lawyers who studied for a while and then accepted.
And the syndicate would not listen to a nay and laid a certified check
in his hands of a size that would have caused Asa Brickett to swoon had
he realised that so large a consideration had passed over his head, and
on the first warming days of March thousands of picks and shovels were
ready to follow Squire Phineas Look when he had brushed away the last
tangle of litigation.
Uncle Buck had passed the necessary word among the veteran loafers who
used to occupy the lawyer’s shaky chairs.
“He’s busier’n a yaller dog with a tin can of snap-crackers tied to his
tail, and he don’t want nobody up there unless they come on straight
bus’ness.”
So all day long, whether the snow beat against the panes or the sun
shone warm upon his broad back down through the bare elms, the Squire
sat at his big table, his pen busy, scratchity-scratch, or his eyebrows
frowning above some volume of reports, his old dog Eli curled on the
dusty floor at his feet.
And the only ones who stamped up the slippery outside stairs were those
who came on business.
It was on business that Judge Collamore Willard came one snowy, blowy
day in March, the wind whipping his cloak about his skinny legs as he
toiled up the stairs leading to Squire Phin’s office. He came in with
the gust casting a last handful of snow at his back, as a roguish youth
snowballs a figure that is aged and eccentric.
It _was_ a queer figure that sat slowly down in one of the Squire’s
chairs, unwrapping fold on fold of a huge shawl that was coiled about
his head and long, thin neck. He had pulled the mitten from one of
his hands and the gaunt phalanges looked like a bundle of reeds tied
together by skin-strips. The skin was speckled with the brown spots of
age and the hand fluttered as it tugged at the shawl.
The Squire put his knees against the edge of the table, sat back in
his chair, and poised his pen in silent amazement for a moment. Then he
pointed the pen at the stove.
“Better sit close, Judge,” he admonished. “The draughts get to
sky-larking through here pretty lively on windy days.”
“I ought not to have come out this day,” said the old man querulously.
“But I didn’t want to send word to you to come to my office for fear you
would think it strange and not come. And I felt that I had much need to
see you, Lawyer Look.”
“I would have come if you had sent word,” said the Squire, simply. He
did not utter his curt “What can I do for you?” so common with him in
these busy times, but looked at his visitor with inquiring gaze.
“Haven’t you got any influence or control over that fool brother of
yours?” demanded the Judge, bluntly and indignantly.
“I don’t care to reply to questions of that sort put in that fashion,”
returned the lawyer, knitting his brows.
Willard stared a moment into his face with its hard lines and then
shifted his eyes under the steady gaze of the Squire.
“I don’t mean to be tart with you, Mr. Look,” he said, moderating his
tone, “but I don’t think you ought to let your brother come into this
town, after all that’s happened, and do what he is trying to do to me
and mine. You’re a man of standing and I’m going to say to you that I
think you are above such things.”
His apology was awkward and half-hearted.
“Aren’t you going to handle him and prevent him from making a fool of
himself?”
“I don’t care to enter into any statement to you, Judge Willard, of
certain family discussions that have already occurred between my brother
and myself. I simply want to state for your benefit that I have no
sympathy with certain movements of his. But my brother’s business is his
own, Judge. He has adopted his own manner of living and occupies his own
apartments at our house, and if you care to talk this matter over with
him you’ll find him there at any time. I shall not interfere in his
affairs.”
“I can’t talk with him,” remonstrated the old man. “There isn’t any
sense in him. With him it is either a curse or a blow, and the Willard
family has had enough of both from him. I have come to talk with you,
Mr. Look. Whatever else I have said to you and of you, I’ll acknowledge
that you are a fair man to talk with.”
The lawyer made no reply.
“I’ll say nothing to you of his under-handed tricks to interfere in my
business of loans and private banking,” went on Willard, stroking his
trembling hand along his withered neck. “But now he is going to mix
into town politics with his brass band and his free suppers and free
dances and his circus flapdoodle. It’s hurting this town, Lawyer Look,
and I appeal to you as a good citizen of Palermo to pull him back and
make him behave himself and not bring discredit on the place that I and
mine before me have been proud of so long.” There was some dignity as
well as earnest appeal in the old man’s voice.
“I understand that he has the hoodlums with him,” he went on. “He can
make a lot of trouble in our town meeting this month. We have always got
along so well that it will be a shame to bring uproar and contention and
cheapness into our town affairs, Mr. Look.”
Delicacy of touch at critical moments was not one of Squire Phineas
Look’s attributes. Now he leaned his elbows on the table, locked his
fingers together, and bending toward the old man said bluntly:
“What you mean is, that it would be bad for you if you were defeated
for town treasurer, after your thirty years of service, since that would
mean that your books would be examined.”
He pitied Willard when he crumpled down in his chair. In the silence
the lawyer had the queer thought come to him that the old man’s flabby
neck-skin looked like turkey’s wattles, flushed with dull red as they
were now.
“That is a cruel taunt--an unjust advantage to take of a man who has
served his town so many years, Lawyer Look. I’ll own to you that I do
have some pride in the fact that I have been treasurer of this town so
long. I have set my heart on being reelected. It’s an old man’s whim,
Mr. Look--just an old man’s whim, and it would hurt my feelings cruelly
if the voters allowed your brother to work out his grudge in that way.
If I could only have another year--if I----”
The lawyer, who had been steadily staring into his shifting eyes, broke
in upon his faltering appeal.
“I always hate to see any living creature squirm, whether it’s an
angle-worm on a hook or a man on the rack of his own conscience,” he
said in his blunt, brusque manner. “I never delighted in torturing
anything, Judge. This is something like killing a creature to put it out
of its misery, but I’m not going to beat about the bush.”
Willard had hooked his thin hands around the rungs of his chair and was
staring at the attorney with horror in his eyes.
“I know why you want to be re-elected town treasurer,” went on the
Squire. “You want to cover up the fact that you’re an embezzler of
almost forty thousand dollars of the town’s funds-----Oh, I know what
you are going to say,” he cried, holding up his hand; “you are going to
say that you’ve only hired this money on town’s notes and are going to
pay it back, and that if you can be re-elected no one will be the
wiser. You are begging for time, Judge. But I tell you”--he stood up and
pounded the table--“you have stolen that money! You cannot pay it back.
It’s no use for you to deceive me by stories. Every dollar of property
you have in the world is mortgaged for every cent it is worth, and that
money and the money you have stolen from this town have gone--gone down
into that hole of speculation, to the side of which King Bradish led
with his devilish arts and promises. You’re ruined, Judge Willard,
you’re ruined--and God only knows how many other poor people you will
drag down with you in this town--people whose little capital is all in
your hands! I curse Bradish, first, for I believe if it hadn’t been for
him no Willard would have turned out of the straight path his ancestors
always followed. But I curse you, Judge Willard, for having allowed
yourself to be inveigled into dishonesty and the betrayal of the great
trust that has been placed in your hands. You have called me various
names in the past,” he went on, his eyes flashing and the passionate
anger of the Look temperament getting the better of his self-control; “I
simply want to say to you now that you”--he leaned forward, supporting
himself by his knuckles on the table--“are as miserable a thief as I
ever knew. For when you fall--a man trusted by all--you have taken away
Palermo’s strongest prop of good example from the poor, weak devils who
are trying to be honest in their poverty.”
For a long time the two men looked at each other, the Squire stern and
angry, the Judge writhing in his self-abasement.
Then the old man’s secret passed from his desperate clinch on it. He
trembled like a leaf, but there was a certain air of relief in his
confession and appeal.
“God help me, Squire,” he wailed. “No, God cannot help me. But you can.
I am in awful trouble, Squire Look--awful! But it mustn’t be exposed
now, it mustn’t. If I can only tide it over this town meeting I can work
out of it. We got caught on the wrong side, King and I. It happened that
way right along until I knew it was wrong for us to work at arm’s
length from the market. But now that King is up there where he can study
things, we’re coming out all right. We can’t help coming out all right.
I have sat up night after night for weeks, Squire, and figured. I
haven’t slept for weeks and weeks. I have raked and scraped together
all I could and now we are going to win. King has it in his hands.
It’s going to win, I tell you! Only help me to tide it over this town
meeting, Squire. It was a mistake going into it. I realise it now. But
I had to stay in. I was tied up with King. But this time we are going
to win. We can’t help winning. Here’s King’s letter explaining the last
deal.”
He tore at the breast of his frock coat and pulled out a crumpled
envelope.
“Oh, it’s got to come out right now,” the old man mumbled on
appealingly. “I have sat up nights at my desk till my eyes were almost
burned out, planning and figuring. Here’s the letter, Squire. I’m going
to be honest with you at last. You can help me. You’ve got to help me!”
His trembling fingers pulled the letter from the envelope, but the
lawyer motioned it back.
“Excuse me, Judge,” he said, “but I don’t want to touch it. I’d rather
take hold of an adder from Watson’s bog. There’s less poison in the
adder. He has poisoned you through and through, Judge. I know more of
King Bradish in New York than you do. I----”
“It’s your brother that has come back and lied about him!” cried the old
man with reviving passion. “It’s all lies! Lies!”
“I say that I know about King Bradish,” pursued the lawyer with the
calm, dispassionate tone of utter conviction. “He has become a rake, a
spendthrift and a drunkard. He was all three when he lived here, but
he hid his passions. He ran away because he had stolen from you and was
afraid to face your ruin. He has thrown away the money you have sent
to him. You have nothing to hope from him, Judge. If I am cruel I am
at least honest, for now is the time for honesty. You are in an awful
position. Glossing over the situation cannot help you.”
He looked with pity into the gray face of the village magnate, for
he never saw anguish drawn in more agonising lines on the human
countenance. Then the face puckered with the sudden emotion of an old
man, wearied, driven to his last ditch and become a child again. He wept
weakly, and the lawyer sat back in his chair and watched him without a
word, his brows knitted in thought.
At last the old man rose and gathered his shawl about his neck. With a
pitiful attempt he had regained some of the old-time dignity.
“I had no right to come to you, Mr. Look,” he said. “I didn’t realise
how the interview would come out. I hoped that you would control your
brother, that’s all, and give me one chance to save myself from State’s
prison. I can understand perfectly why you should not be willing to
help. I don’t blame you. Probably I should do the same under similar
circumstances. It’s only human nature. Excuse me for giving way, but--it
was pretty sudden for an old man.” His lips quivered.
The Squire overtook him at the door and led him back to his chair
gently, but with a quiet decision that the Judge did not attempt to
resist. Then the lawyer leaned against one corner of the table and
looked down on the man before him.
“It’s bad, Judge Willard! It’s bad,” he said earnestly. “Both of us have
passed our opinions of each other in the past, and it didn’t do either
of us any good. Neither of us will now make any false pretences of
friendship or forgiveness. We’ll leave affairs between us just as they
stand. I am going to own up to you that in an investigation of the
town’s affairs I shall show up badly myself, for I have been knowing to
irregularities for some months and I have no explanation to offer why
I did not report and interfere. It is for my interest, therefore, to
attempt to arrange this matter. It is for the interest of Palermo in
general to arrange it if we can. Your family has been our model of
integrity for a long time. To say nothing of money loss, the showing
up of this terrible thing will have an effect on morals and business
confidence that our poor little town will not recover from in years. It
is on my own and the people’s account that I am willing to say this to
you--and that is: If it is within the power of one man to do it, I will
try to avert this calamity from this town. I cannot tell you just how,
for I do not know myself. I haven’t had time to think about it. It is
too painful to talk about any longer now. Go home and put your
affairs into such shape that I may determine your obligations and your
resources.”
The Judge weakly stammered promises, explanations and appeal, and would
have stayed, but the lawyer, with some impatience, helped him to tuck
his shawl about his neck, handed him his cane and opened the outside
door.
But he stopped him on the threshold.
“If I hear that you have sent one more dollar to Bradish or have had
truck or dealing of any sort with him after this talk of ours, I’ll have
no more to do with the affair. I’m not much of a man to threaten, but
that’s something you can depend upon.”
The lawyer stood at his side window and watched the old man buffeting
his way up the street, the corners of his shawl streaming on the wind,
his slender legs quivering like reeds.
“I’d hate to be cross-examined on a witness stand as to why I made such
a promise to him,” he muttered, and then he put another stick into the
stove, spatted his hands, gave the old dog an affectionate cuff, and
went back to his work.