"He barely touched him," was the disappointed reply of one.
"Thank the Lawd faw evm that little!" responded another.
Shotwell pulled March away, Halliday following. Near the rear door----
"Johnnie," began the General, with an air of complete digression, but at
the woebegone look that came into the young man's face, the old soldier
burst into a laugh. John whisked around to the door and stood looking
out, though seeing nothing, bitter in the thought that not for the
Englishman's own sake, but for the sake of the British capital coveted
by Suez, a gentleman and a Rosemonter was forbidden to pay him the price
of his insolence.
"I'd like to pass," presently said someone behind him. He started, and
Gamble went by.
"May I detain you a moment, sir?" said John.
The president frowned. "What is it?"
"In our passage of words just now--I was wrong."
"Yes, you were. What of it?"
"I regret it."
"I can't use your regrets," said the railroad man. He moved to go. "If
you want to see me about----"
John smiled. "No, sir, I'd rather never set eyes on you again."
As the Westerner's fat back passed into the farther coach his response
came----
"What you want ain't manners, it's gumption." The door slammed for
emphasis.
March presently followed, full of shame and indignation and those
unutterable wailings with which youth, so often, has to be born again
into manhood. Gamble had rejoined the Garnet group. John bowed affably
to all, smiled to Fannie and passed. Garnet still sat with Mrs. Proudfit
behind the others, and John, as he went by, was, for some cause supplied
by this pair, startled, angered anew, and for the time being benumbed by
conflicting emotions. He found his mother still talking joyously with
the Graveses, who were unfamiliar with the graceful art of getting away.
He found a seat in front of them, and sat stiff beside a man who
drowsed.
"I'm a hopeless fool," he thought, "a fool in anger, a fool in love. A
fool even in the eyes of that idiot of a railroad president in yonder
smirking around Fannie.
"They'll laugh at me together, I suppose. O, Fannie, why can't I give
you up? I know you're a flirt. Jeff-Jack knows it. I solemnly believe
that's why he doesn't ask you to marry him!
"Yes, they're probably all laughing at me by now. O, was ever mortal man
so utterly alone! And these people think what makes me so is this silly
temper. They say it! Mother assures me they say it! I believe I could
colonize our lands if it wa'n't for that. O, I will colonize them! I'll
do it all alone. If that jackanapes could open this road I can open our
lands. Whatever he used I can use; whatever he did I can do!"
"Sir?" said the neighbor at his elbow, "O excu--I thought you spoke."
"Hem! No, I was merely clearing my throat.
"I can do it. I'll do it alone. She shall see me do it--they shall all
see. I'll do it alone--all alone----"
He caught the steel-shod rhythm of the train and said over and over with
ever bigger and more bitter resolution, "I'll do it alone--I'll do it
alone!"
Then he remembered Garnet.
XXVII.
TO SUSIE--FROM PUSSIE
ON the return trip Garnet sat on the arm of almost every seat except
Fannie's.
"No, sir; no, keep your seat!" He wouldn't let anybody be "disfurnished"
for him! Proudfit had got the place next his wife and thought best to
keep it.
"Mr. Fair," said Garnet, "I'd like you to notice how all this region was
made in ages past. You see how the rocks have been broken and
tossed,"--etc.
"Mr. Fair"--the same speaker--"I _wish_ you'd change your mind and stay
a week with us. Come, spend it at Rosemont. It's vacation, you know, and
Barb and I shan't have a thing to do but give you a good time; shall we,
Barb?"
"It will give us a good time," said Barb. Her slow, cadenced
voice, steady eye, and unchallenging smile charmed the young Northerner.
He had talked about her to Fannie at luncheon and pronounced her
"unusual."
"Why, really"--he began, looked up at Garnet and back again to Barbara.
Garnet bent over him confidentially.
"Just between us I'd like to advise with you about something I've never
mentioned to a soul. That is about sending Barb to some place North to
sort o' round out her education and character in a way that--it's no use
denying it, though it would never do for me to say so--a way that's just
impossible in Dixie, sir."
The young man remembered Barbara's mother and was silent.
"Well, Barb, Mr. Fair will go home with us for a day or two, anyhow,"
Garnet was presently authorized to say. "I must go into the next car a
moment----"
John March, meditating on this very speaker with growing anger, saw him
approach. Garnet entered, beaming.
"Howdy, John, my son; I couldn't let you and Sister March----"
March had stepped before his mother: He spoke in a deep murmur.
"I'm not your son, sir. My mother's not your sister."
"Why, what in thun--why, John, I don't know whether to be angry or to
laugh."
"Don't you dare to do either. Go back to that other man's----"
"Speak more softly for heaven's sake, Mr. March, and don't look so, or
you'll do me a wrong that may cost us both our lives!"
"Cheap enough," said the youth, with a smile.
"You've made a ridiculous mistake, John. Before God I'm as innocent of
any----"
"Before God, Major Garnet, you lie. If you deny it again I'll accuse you
publicly. Go back and fondle the hand of that other man's wife; but
don't ever speak to my mother again. If you do, I--I'll shoot you on
sight."
"I'll call you to account for this, sir," said Garnet, moving to go.
"You're lying again," was John's bland reply, and he turned to his seat.
"Why, John," came the mother's sweet complaint, "I wanted to see Brother
Garnet."
"Oh, I'm sorry," said the complaisant son.
Garnet paused on the coach's platform to get rid of his tremors. "He'll
not tell," he said aloud, the uproar of wheels drowning his voice. "He's
too good a Rosemonter to tattle. At first I thought he'd got on the same
scent as Cornelius.
"Thank God, that's one thing there's no woman in, anyhow. O me, O me! If
that tipsy nigger would only fall off this train and break his neck!
"And now here's _this_ calf to live in daily dread of. O dear, O _dear_,
I ought to a-had more sense. It's all her fault; she's pure brass. They
call youth the time of temptation--Good Lord! Why youth's armored from
head to heel in its invincible ignorance. O me! Well--I'll pay him for
it if it takes me ten years."
John's complacency had faded with the white heat of his anger, and he
sat chafing in spirit while his elbow neighbor slept in the shape of an
N. Across the car he heard Parson Tombs explaining to the Graves
brethren and Sister March that Satan--though sometimes corporeal--and in
that case he might be either unicorporeal or multicorporeal--and at
other times unicorporeal--as he might choose and providence permit--and,
mark you, he might be both at once on occasion--was by no means
omnipresent, but only ubiquitous.
Lazarus supposed a case: "He might be in both these cahs at once an' yet
not on the platfawm between 'em."
"It's mo' than likely!" said the aged pastor, no one meaning anything
sly. Yet to some people a parson's smiling mention of the devil is
always a good joke, and the Graves laughed, as we may say. Not so,
Sister March; she never laughed at the prince of darkness, nor took his
name in vain. She spoke, now, of his "darts."
"No, Sister March, I reckon his darts, fifty times to one, ah turned
aside fum us by the provi_dence_ that's round us, not by the po' little
patchin' o' grace that's in us."
John's heart jumped. Garnet looked in and beckoned him out. He went.
"John "--the voice was tearful--"I offer my hand in penitent gratitude."
John took it. "Yes, my dear boy, my feet had well-nigh slipped."
"I oughtn't to have spoken as I did, Major Garnet."
"It was the word of the Lord, John. It saved me and my spotless name!
The mistake had just begun, in mere play, but it might have grown into
actual sin--of impulse, I mean, of course--not of action; my lifelong
correctness of----"
"Oh, I'm sure of that sir! I only wish _I_----"
"God bless you! I've a good notion to tell your mother this whole thing,
John, just to make her still prouder of you." He squeezed the young
man's hand. "But I reckon for others' sakes we'd better not breathe it."
"O, I think so, sir! I promise----"
"You needn't have promised, John. Your think-so was promise enough. And
a mighty good thing for us all it's so. For, John March, you're the hope
of Suez!
"You've got the key of all our fates in your pocket, John--you and your
mother now, and you when you come into full charge of the estate next
year. That's why Jeff-Jack's always been so willing to help me to help
you on. But never mind that, only--beware of new friends. When they come
fawning on you with offers to help you develop the resources of
Widewood, you tell 'em----"
"That I'm going to develop them myself, alone."
"N-n-no--not quite that. O, you couldn't! You've no idea what a--why, _I_
couldn't do it _with_ you, without Jeff-Jack's help, nor he without
mine! Why, just see what a failure the effort to build this road was,
until"--the locomotive bellowed.
"Half-an-hour late, and slowing up again!" exclaimed John. He knew the
parson's wife was pressing his mother to spend the night with them, and
he was afraid of having his soul asked after. "Why do we stop here,
hardly a mile from town?"
"It's to let my folks off. They're going to walk over to the pike while
I go on for the carriage and drive out; they and Jeff-Jack and the
Hallidays."
The train stopped where a beautiful lane crossed the track between two
fenced fields. Fair and Barbara alighted and stood on a flowery bank
with the sun glowing in some distant tree-tops behind them. Fannie
leaned from the train, took both Jeff-Jack's uplifted hands and
fluttered down upon rebounding tiptoes; the bell sounded, the scene
changed, and John murmured to himself in heavy agony,
"He's going to ask her! O, Fannie, Fannie, if you'd only refuse to say
yes, and give me three years to show what I can do! But he's going to
ask her before that sun goes down, and what's she going to say?"
XXVIII.
INFORMATION FOR SALE
"Hope of Suez!" Garnet felt he had spoken just these three words too
many. "Overtalked myself again," he said to himself while chatting with
others; "a liar always does. But he shall pay for this. Ah me!"
He was right. The young man would have sucked down all his flattery but
for those three words. Yet on one side they were true, and March guiltily
felt them so as, looking at his mother, he thought again of that deep
store of the earth's largess lying under their unfruitful custody. Suez
and her three counties would have jeered the gaudy name from Lover's
Leap to Libertyville though had they guessed better the meaning of the
change into which a world's progress was irresistibly pushing them,
whoever owned Widewood must have stood for some of their largest wishes
and hopes, and they would have ceased to deride the blessed mutation and
to hobble it with that root of so many world-wide evils--the calling
still private what the common need has made public. The ghost of this
thought flitted in John's mind, but would not be grasped or beckoned to
the light.
"I wish I could think," he sighed, but he could only think of Fannie.
The train stopped. The excursionists swarmed forth. The cannon belched
out its thunderous good-byes, and John went for his horse and buggy,
promising to give word for Garnet's equipage to be sent to him.
"I must mind Johanna and her plunder," said the Major; "but I'll look
after your mother, too." And he did so, though he found time to part
fondly with the Proudfits.
"He won't do," thought John, as he glanced back from a rise of ground.
"Fannie's right. And she's right about me, too; the only way to get her
is to keep away till I've shown myself fit for her; that's what she
means; of course she can't say so; but I'm satisfied that's what she
means!"
He passed two drunken men. Here in town at the end of Suez's wedding so
many had toasted it so often, it was as if Susie's own eyes were
blood-shot and her steps uncertain. "It's my wedding, too," he
soliloquized. "This Widewood business and I are married this day; it
alone, to me alone, till it's finished. Garnet shall see
whether--humph!--Jake, my horse and buggy!" And soon he was rattling
back down the stony slopes toward his mother.
"Hope of Suez!" he grimly laughed. "We'll be its despair if we don't get
something done. And I've got to do it alone. Why shouldn't I? Yes, it's
true, times have changed; and yet if this was ever rightly a private
matter in my father's hands, I can't see why it has or why it should
become a public matter in mine!"
He said this to himself the more emphatically because he felt, somehow,
very uncertain about it. He wished his problem was as simple as a
railroad question. A railroad can ask for public aid; but fancy him
asking public aid to open and settle up his private lands! He could
almost hear Susie's horse-laugh in reply. Why should she not laugh? He
recalled with what sweet unboastful tone his father had always condemned
every scheme and symptom of riding on public shoulders into private
fortune. In the dear _old_ Dixie there had been virtually no public, and
every gentleman was by choice his own and only public aid, no matter
what--"Look out!"
He hauled up his horse. A man pressed close to the side of the halted
buggy, to avoid a huge telegraph pole that came by quivering between two
timber wheels. He offered John a freckled, yellow hand, and a smile of
maudlin fondness.
"Mr. Mahch, I admiah to salute you ag'in, seh. _Hasn't_ we had a
glo'ious day? It's the mos' obtainable day Susie eveh see, seh!"
"Well, 'pon my soul!" said John, ignoring the proffered hand. "If I'd
seen who it was, I'd 'a' driven straight over you." Both laughed.
"Cornelius, did you see my mother waiting for me down by the tracks?"
"I did, seh. Thah she a-set'n' on a pile o' ceda'-tree poles, lookin'
like the las' o' pea-time--p-he-he-he!
"Majo' Gyarnit? O yass, seh, he thah, too. Thass how come I lingud thah,
seh, yass, seh, in espiration o' Johanna. Mr. Mahch, I loves that
creatu' yit, seh!--I means Johanna."
"Oh!--not Major Garnet," laughed John, gathering the reins.
Cornelius sputtered with delight, and kept between the wheels. "Mr.
Mahch,"--he straightened, solemnly, and held himself sober--"I was jess
about to tell you what I jess evise Majo' Gyarnit espressin' to yo'
maw--jess accidental as I was earwhilin' aroun' Johanna, you know."
"What was it? What did he say?"
"O, it wan't much, what he say. He say, 'Sis' Mahch, you e'zac'ly right.
Don't you on no accounts paht with so much's a' acre o' them lan's
lessn----"
"Lord!--the lands--take care for the wheel."
But Mr. Leggett leaned heavily on the buggy. "Mr. Mahch, I evince an'
repose you in confidence to wit: that long as you do like Gyarnit
say----"
John gave a stare of menace. "Major Garnet, if you please."
"Yass, seh, o' co'se; Majo' Gyarnit. I say, long as you do like he say,
Widewood stay jess like it is, an' which it suit him like grapes suit a
coon!" The informant's booziness had returned. One foot kept slipping
from a spoke of the fore-wheel. With pretence of perplexity he examined
the wheel. "Mr. Mahch, this wheel sick; she mighty sick; got to see
blacksmiff befo' she can eveh see Widewood."
John looked. The word was true. He swore. The mulatto snickered, sagged
against it and cocked his face importantly.
"Mr. Mahch, if you an' me was on'y in cahoots! En we _kin_ be, seh, we
kin--why, hafe o' yo' lan's 'u'd be public lan's in no time, an' the
res' 'u'd belong to a stawk comp'ny, an' me'n' you 'u'd be a-cuttin' off
kewponds an' a-drivin' fas' hawses an' a-drinkin' champagne suppuz, an'
champagne faw ow real frien's an' real pain faw ow sham frien's, an'
plenty o' both kine--thah goes Majo' Gyarnit's kerrige to him." It
passed.
"But, why, Cornelius, should it suit Major Garnet for my lands to lie
idle?"
"Mr. Mahch, has you neveh inspec' the absence o' green in my eye? It
suit him faw a reason known on'y to yo's truly, yit which the said yo's
truly would accede to transfawm to you, seh; yass, seh; in
considerations o' us goin' in cahoots, aw else a call loan, an' yit mo'
stric'ly a call-ag'in loan, a sawt o' continial fee, yass, seh; an' the
on'y question, now much kin you make it?"
John looked into the upturned face for some seconds before he said,
slowly and pleasantly, "Why, you dirty dog!" He gave the horse a cut of
the whip. Leggett smiling and staggering, called after him, to the
delight of all the street,
"Mr. Mahch, thass confidential, you know! An' Mr. Mahch! Woe! Mr.
Mahch." John glanced fiercely back--"You betteh 'zamine that _hine_
wheel! caze it jess now pa-ass oveh my foot!"
XXIX.
RAVENEL ASKS
The Garnet carriage, Johanna on the back seat, came smartly up through
the town, past Parson Tombs's, the Halliday cottage, and silent Montrose
Academy, and was soon parted from the Marches' buggy, which followed
with slower dignity and a growing limp.
"Well, Johanna," said Garnet, driving, "had a good time?"
"Yass, seh."
"What's made Miss Barb so quiet all day; doesn't she like our friend?"
The answer was a bashful drawl--"I reckon she like him tol'able, seh."
"If you think Miss Barb would be pleased you can change to this seat
beside me, Johanna." The master drew rein and she made the change. He
spoke again. "You saw me, just now, talking with Cornelius, didn't you?"
"Yass, seh."
"His wife's dead, at last."
No answer.
"Johanna," he turned a playful eye, "what makes you so hard on
Cornelius!"
She replied with a white glance of alarm and turned away. He would have
pressed the subject but she murmured,
"Dah Miss Barb."
Barbara sat on a bare ledge of rock above the road-side, platting
clovers. Fair stood close below, watching her fingers. She sprang to her
feet.
"What did keep you so?" She moved to where Fair had stopped to hand her
down, but laughed, turned away, waved good-by to Fannie and Ravenel out
in a field full of flowers and western sunlight, and ran around by an
easier descent to the carriage. Fair helped her in.
"Homeward bound," she said, and they spun away. As they turned a bend in
the pike she glanced back with a carefully careless air, but saw only
their own dust.
* * * * *
John, driving beside his mother, with eyes on the infirm wheel, was very
silent, and she was very limp. The buggy top was up for privacy. By and
by he heard a half-spoken sound at his side, and turning saw her eyes
full of tears.
"O thunder!" he thought, but only said, "Why, mother, what's the
matter?"
"Ah! my son, that's what I wonder. Why have you shunned me all day? Am
I----"
"There are the Tombses waiting at their gate," interrupted the son. The
aged pair had hurried away from the train on foot to have their house
open for Sister March.
"Yes," said Daphne, sweetly yielding herself to their charge, "John's
fierce driving has damaged a wheel, and we wont----"
"Go home till morning," said the delighted pastor with a tickled laugh
that drew from his wife a glance of fond disapproval.
John drove alone to a blacksmith shop and left his buggy there and his
horse at a stable. For the blacksmith lay across his doorsill "sick." He
had been mending rigs and shoeing critters since dawn, and had drunk
from a jug something he had thought was water and found--"it wusn't."
March sauntered off lazily to a corner where the lane led westward like
the pike, turned into it and ran at full speed.
With a warm face he came again into the main avenue at a point nearly
opposite the Halliday's cottage gate. General Halliday and the
Englishman were just going through it.
John turned toward the sun-setting at a dignified walk. "I'm a fool to
come out here," he thought. "But I must see at once what Jeff-Jack
thinks of my plan. Will he tell me the truth, or will he trick me as
they say he did Cornelius? O I must ask him, too, if he did that! I
can't help it if he is with her; I must see him. I don't want to see
her; at least that's not what I'm out here for. I'm done with her--for a
while; Heaven bless her!--but I must see him, so's to know what to
propose to mother."
The day was dying in exquisite beauty. Long bands of pale green light
widened up from the west. Along the hither slope of a ridge someone was
burning off his sedge-grass. The slender red lines of fire, beautiful
after passion's sort, but dimming the field's fine gold, were just
reaching the crest to die by a road-side. The objects of his search were
nowhere to be seen.
A short way off, on the left, lay a dense line of young cedars and
pines, nearly parallel with the turnpike. A footpath, much haunted in
term-time by Montrose girls, and leading ultimately to the rear of the
Academy grounds, lay in the clover-field beyond this thicket. John
mounted a fence and gazed far and near. Opposite him in the narrow belt
of evergreens was a scarcely noticeable opening, so deeply curved that
one would get almost through it before the view opened on the opposite
side. He leaped into the field, ran to this gap, burst into the open
beyond, and stopped, hat in hand--speechless. His quest was ended.
Not ten steps away stood two lovers who had just said that fearfully
sweet "mine" and "thine" that keeps the world a-turning. Ravenel's right
arm was curved over Fannie's shoulder and about her waist. His left hand
smoothed the hair from her uplifted brow, and his kiss was just lighting
upon it.
The blood leaped to his face, but the next instant he sunk his free hand
into his pocket and smiled. John's face was half-anger, half-anguish.
"Pleasant evening," said Ravenel.
"For you, sir." John bowed austerely. "I will not mar it. My business
can wait." He gave Fannie a grief-stricken look and was hurrying off.
"John March," cried Ravenel, in a voice breaking with laughter, "come
right back here, sir." But the youth only threw up an arm in tragic
disdain and kept on.
"John," called a gentler voice, and he turned. "Don't leave us so," said
Fannie. "You'll make me unhappy if you do." She had drawn away from her
lover's arm. She put out a hand.
"Come, tell me I haven't lost my best friend."
John ran to her, caught her hand in both his and covered it with kisses,
Ravenel stood smiling and breaking a twig slowly into bits.
"There, there, that's extravagant," said Fannie; but she let the youth
keep her hand while he looked into her eyes and smiled fondly through
his distress. Then she withdrew it, saying:
"There's Mr. Ravenel's hand, hold it. If I didn't know how men hate to
be put through forms, I'd insist on your taking it."
"I reckon John thinks we haven't been quite candid," said Ravenel.
"I'm not sure we have," responded Fannie. "And yet I do think we've been
real friends. You know John"--she smiled at her hardihood--"this is the
only way it could ever be, don't you?" But John turned half away and
shook his head bitterly. She spoke again. "Look at me, John." But
plainly he could not.
"Are you going to throw us overboard?" she asked. There was a silence;
and then--"You mustn't; not even if you feel like it. Don't you know we
hadn't ever ought to consult our feelings till we've consulted
everything else?"
John looked up with a start, and Fannie, by a grimace, bade him give his
hand to his rival. He turned sharply and offered it. Ravenel took it
with an air of drollery and John spoke low, Fannie loitering a step
aside.
"I offer you my hand with this warning--I love her. I'm going on to love
her after she's yours by law. I'll not make love to her; I may be a
fool, but I'm not a hound; I love her too well to do that. But she's
bound to know it right along. You'll see it. Everybody'll know it.
That'll be all of it, I swear. But any man who wants to stop me from it
will have to kill me. I believe I have the right, before God, to do it;
but I'm going to do it anyhow. I prize your friendship. If I can keep it
while you know, and while everybody else knows, that I'm simply hanging
round waiting for you to die, I'll do it. If I can't--I can't." The
hands parted.
"That's all right, John. That's what I'd do in your place."
March gazed a moment in astonishment. Then Fannie, still drifting away,
felt Ravenel at her side and glanced up and around.
"O, you haven't let him go, have you? Why, I wanted to give him this
four-leaf clover--as a sort o' pleasant hint. Don't you see?"