knocker the door opened and Barbara, carrying a book and pencil in one
hand, while the other held down her hat-brim, tripped across the
doorstep.
The cloud vanished. "Miss Barb--good-morning!"
"O!--Mr.--March." Her manner so lacked both surprise and pleasure that
he colored. He had counted on a sweet Southern handshake, but she kept
hold of the hat-brim, let her dry smile of inquiry fade into a formal
deference, and took comfort in his disconcertion.
"I was just coming," he said, "I--thought you'd let me come back just to
say good-by--but I see you're on your way to a recitation--I--"
Her smile was cruel. "Why, my recitations are not so serious as that,"
she drawled. "Just to say good-by ought not to con-sti-tute any
se-ri-ous de-ten-tion."
John's heart sank like a stone. Scarcely could he believe his senses.
Yet this was she; that new queen of his ambitions whose heavenly
friendship had lifted first love--boy love--from its grave and clad it
in the shining white of humility and abnegation to worship her sweet
dignity, purity, and tenderness, asking for nothing, not even for hope,
in return. This was she who at every new encounter had opened to him a
higher revelation of woman's worth and loveliness than the world had
ever shown him; she to whom he had been writing letters half last night
and all this morning, tearing each to bits before he had finished it
because he could see no life ahead which an unselfish love could ask her
to live, and as he rent the result of each fresh effort hearing the
voice of his father saying to him as in childhood days, "I'd be proud
faw you to have the kitt'n, son, but, you know, she wouldn't suit yo'
dear motheh's high-strung natu'e. You couldn't ever be happy with
anything that was a constant tawment to her, could you?"
These thoughts filled but a moment, and before the lovely presence
confronting him could fully note the depth of his quick distress a wave
of self-condemnation brought what seemed to him the answer of the
riddle: that this was _rightly_ she, the same angelic incarnation of
wisdom and rectitude, as of gentleness and beauty, to whom in
yesterday's sunset hour of surprise and ecstatic yearning he had implied
things so contrary to their "perfect understanding," and who now, not
for herself selfishly, but in the name and defence of all blameless
womanhood, was punishing him for his wild presumption. O but if she
would only accuse him--here--this instant, so that contrition might try
its value! But under the shade of her hat her eyes merely waited with a
beautiful sort of patient urgency for his parting word. The moment's
silence seemed an hour, but no word did he find. One after another
almost came, but failed, and at last, just as he took in his breath to
say he knew not what--anything so it were something--he saw her smile
melt with sudden kindness, while her lips parted for speech, and to his
immeasurable confusion and terror heard himself ask her with cheerful
cordiality, "Won't you walk in?"
It would have been hard to tell which of the two turned the redder.
"Why, Mr. March, you in-ti-ma-ted that you had no ti-i-ime!"
They stood still. "Time and bad news are about the only things I have
got, Miss Barb. Wrapped up in your father's interests as you are, I
reckon I ought to show you this." He handed her the telegram doubled
small. "Let me hold your book."
Barbara unfolded and read the despatch. It was from Springfield,
repeated at New York, and notified Mr. John March that owing to a
failure of Gamble to come to terms with certain much larger railroad
owners for the reception of his road into their "system," intelligence
of which had just reached them, it would be "useless for him," March,
"to come up," as there was "nothing more to say or hear." She read it
twice. Her notions of its consequences were dim, but she saw it was a
door politely closed in his face; and yet she lingered over it. There
was a bliss in these business confidences, which each one thought was
her or his own exclusive and unsuspected theft, and which was all the
sweeter for the confidences' practical worthlessness. As she looked up
she uttered a troubled "O!" to find him smiling unconsciously into her
book where she had written, "I stole this book from Barbara Garnet." It
seemed as if fate were always showing her very worst sides to him at the
very worst times! She took the volume with hurried thanks and returned
the telegram.
"It would have been better on every account if you hadn't come up at
all, wouldn't it?" she asked, bent on self-cruelty; but he accepted the
cruelty as meant for him.
"Yes," he meekly replied. "I--I reckon it would." Then more bravely:
"I've got to give up here and try the West. Your father's advised it
strongly these last three weeks."
"Has he?" she pensively asked. Here was a new vexation. Obviously March,
in writing him, had mentioned the rapid and happy growth of their
acquaintance!
"Yes," he replied, betraying fresh pain under an effort to speak
lightly. "It may be a right smart while before I see you again, Miss
Barb. I take the first express to Chicago, and next month I sail for
Europe to----"
"Why, Mr. March!" said Barbara with a nervous laugh.
"Yes," responded John once more, thinking that if she was going to treat
the thing as a joke he had better do the same, "immigrants for Widewood
have got to be got, and they're not to be got on this side the big
water."
"Why, Mr. March!"--her laugh grew--"How long shall you stay?"
"Stay! Gracious knows! I must just stay till I get them!--as your father
says."
"Why, Mr. March! When did--" the questioner's eyes dropped sedately to
the ground--"when did you decide to go? Since--since--yesterday?"
"Yes, it was!" The answer came as though it were a whole heart-load.
The maiden's color rose, but she lifted her quiet, characteristic gaze
to his and said, "You're glad you're going, are you not?"
"O--I--why, yes! If I'm not I know I ought to be! To see Europe and all
that is great, of course. It's beyond my dreams. And yet I know it
really isn't as much what I'm going to as what I'm going from that I
ought to--to be g-glad of! I hope I'll come back with a little more
sense. I'm going to try. I promise you, Miss Barb. It's only right I
_should_ promise--_you_!"
"Why, Mr. Mar--" Her voice was low, but her color increased.
"Miss Barb--O Miss Barb, I didn't come just to say good-by. I hope I
know what I owe you better than that. I--Miss Barb, I came to
acknowledge that I said too much yesterday!--and to--ask your pardon."
Barbara was crimson. "Mr. March!" she said, half choking, "as long as I
was simple enough to let it pass unrebuked you might at least have
spared me your apologies! No, I can't stay! No, not one instant! Those
girls are coming to speak to me--that man"--it was the drummer--"wants
to speak to you. Good-by."
Their intruders were upon them. John could only give a heart-broken look
as she faltered an instant in the open door. For reply she called back,
in poor mockery of a sprightly tone: "I hope you'll have ever so
pleasant a voyage!" and shut the door.
So it goes with all of us through all the ungraceful, inartistic
realisms of our lives; the high poetry is ever there, the kingdom of
romance is at hand; the only trouble is to find the rhymes--O! if we
could only find the rhymes!
LXXV.
A YEAR'S VICISSITUDES
It was during the year spent by John March in Europe that Suez first
began to be so widely famous. It was then, too, that the Suez _Courier_
emerged into universal notice. The average newspaper reader, from Maine
to Oregon, spoke familiarly of Colonel Ravenel as the writer of its
much-quoted leaders; a fact which gave no little disgust to Garnet,
their author.
Ravenel never let his paper theorize on the causes of Suez's renown or
the _Courier's_ vogue.
"It's the luck of the times," he said, and pleasantly smiled to see the
nation's eyes turned on Dixie and her near sisters, hardly in faith, yet
with a certain highly commercial hope and charity. The lighting of every
new coke furnace, the setting fire to any local rubbish-heap of dead
traditions, seemed just then to Northern longings the blush of a new
economic and political dawn over the whole South.
"You say you're going South? Well, now if you want to see a very small
but most encouraging example of the changes going on down there, just
stop over a day in Suez!" Such remarks were common--in the clubs--in the
cars.
"Now, for instance, Suez! I know something of Suez myself." So said a
certain railway passenger one day when this fame had entered its second
year and the more knowing journals had begun to neglect it. "I was an
officer in the Union army and was left down there on duty after the
surrender a short while; then I went out West and fought Indians. But
Suez--I pledge you my word I wouldn't 'a' given a horseshoe-nail for the
whole layout! Now!--well, you'd e'en a'most think you was in a Western
town! The way they're a slappin' money, b' Jinks, into improvements and
enterprises--quarries, roads, bridges, schools, mills--'twould make a
Western town's head swim!"
"What kind of mills?" asked his listener, a young man, but careworn.
"O, eh, saw-mills--tanbark mills--to start with. Was you ever there?"
"Yes, I--before the changes you speak of I----"
"Before! Hoh! then you've never seen Lover's Leap coal mine, or Bridal
Veil coal mine, or Sleeping Giant iron mine, or Devil's Garden coke
furnaces! They're putting up smelting works right opposite the steamboat
landing! You say you're going South--just stop over a day in Suez. It'll
pay you! You could write it up!--call it 'What a man just back f'm
Europe saw in Dixie'--only, you don't want to wave the Bloody Shirt, and
don't forget we're dead tired hearing about the 'illiterate South.' _I_
say, let us have peace; my son's in love with a Southern girl! Why, at
Suez you'll see school-houses only five miles apart, from Wildcat
Ridge--where the niggers and mountaineers had that skirmish last
fall--clean down to Leggettstown! School-houses, why,"--the speaker
chuckled at what was coming--"one of 'em stands on the very spot where
in '65 I found a little freckled boy trying to poke a rabbit out of a
log with an old bayon----"
"No!" exclaimed the careworn listener, in one smile from his hat to his
handsome boots.
He would have said more, but the story-teller lifted a finger to
intimate that the bayonet was not the main point--there was better
laughing ahead. "Handsome little chap he was--brave eyes--sweet mouth.
Thinks I right there, 'This's going to be somebody some day.' He
reminded me of my own son at home. Well, he clum up behind my saddle and
rode with me to the edge of Suez, where we met his father with a team of
mules and a wagon of provisions. Talk about the Old South, I'll say
this: I _never_ see so fine a gentlemen look so _techingly_ poor. Hold
up, let me--now, let me--just wait till I tell you. That little rat--if
it hadn't been for that little barefooted rat with his scalp-lock
a-stickin' up through a tear in his hat, most likely you'd never so much
as heard--of Suez! For that little chap was John March!"
The speaker clapped his hands upon his knees, opened his mouth, and
waited for his hearer's laughter and wonder; but the hearer merely
smiled, and with a queer look of frolic in the depths of his handsome
eyes, asked,
"How lately were you in Suez?"
"Me? O--not since '65; but my son's a commercial tourist--rattling smart
fellow--you've probably met him--I never see anybody that hadn't--last
year he was in New England--this year he's tryin' Dixie. He sells this
celebrated 'Hoptonica' for the great Cincinnati house of Pretzels &
Bier. Funny thing--he's been mistaken for John March. A young
lady--Southern girl--up in New England about a year ago--it was just for
an instant--O of course--Must you go? Well, look here! Try to stop over
a day in Suez--That's right; it'll pay you!"
The two travelers parted. The Union veteran went on westward, while the
other--March by name--John March--was ticketed, of course, for Suez.
Some ten days before, in London, having just ended a four weeks' circuit
through a region of the Continent where news of Suez was even scarcer
than emigrants for Widewood, he had, to his astonishment, met Proudfit.
The colonel had just arrived across. He was tipsy, as usual, and a sad
wreck, but bound for Carlsbad, bright in the faith that when he had
stayed there two months he would go home cured for life of his "only bad
habit." March was troubled, and did not become less so when Proudfit
explained that his presence was due to the "kind pressu' of Garnet and
othe's." He knew that Garnet, months before, had swapped his Land
Company stock to Proudfit for the Colonel's much better stock in the
Construction Company and succeeded him as president of the latter
concern.
"As a matteh of fawm--tempora'ily--du'ing my ill health," said the
Carlsbad pilgrim, adding, in an unfragrant stage-whisper, that there was
a secret off-setting sale of both stocks back again, the papers of which
were in Mrs. Proudfit's custody. Mrs. Proudfit was not with her husband;
she was at home, in Blackland.
John knew also how nearly down to nothing the price of his own company's
first-mortgage bonds had declined; but the Colonel's tidings of a later
fate fell upon him like a thunderbolt. He stood before his informant in
the populous street, now too sick at heart for speech, and now throbbing
with too resolute a resentment for outward show, but drawn up rigidly
with a scowl of indignant attention under his locks that made him the
observed of every quick eye. The matter--not to follow Proudfit too
closely--was this:
The Construction Company, paid in advance, and in the Land Company's
second-mortgage bonds, for its many expensive and recklessly immature
works, had promptly sold those bonds to a multitude of ready takers near
and far, but principally far. When the promised inpour of millers and
miners, manufacturers and operatives, so nearly failed that the Land
Company could not pay, nor half pay, the interest on its first-mortgage
bonds and they "tumbled," these second-mortgage bonds were, of course,
unsalable at any figure. The smallest child will understand this--and
worse to follow--at a glance; but if he doesn't he needn't. At this
point Ravenel, who had kept his paper very still, "persuaded" Gamble and
Bulger to buy, at the prices their holders had paid for them, all that
smaller portion of these second-mortgage bonds, as well as all small
lots of the Land Company's stock, held in the three counties. "The
_Courier_," he said, with his effectual smile, "couldn't afford to see
home folks suffer," and he presently had them all well out of it, Parson
Tombs among them.
"Thank God!" rumbled March. "And then what?"
Then Ravenel, as trustee for the three counties--Uncle Jimmie Rankin was
the other, but shrewdly let Jeff-Jack speak and act for him--privately
combined with the Construction Company, which, Proudfit pathetically
reminded John, was a loser by the Land Company in the discounts at which
it had sold that Company's second-mortgage bonds. They went on a still
hunt after the first-mortgage bonds, "bought," said Proudfit, "the whole
bilin' faw a song," foreclosed the mortgage, and at the sale of the Land
Company's assets were the only bidders, except Senator Halliday and
Captain Shotwell, whom they easily outbid.
"Right smart of us suspicioned those two gentlemen were bidding faw you,
John."
March, who was staring aside in fierce abstraction, started. "I reckon
not," he said, and stared in the other direction. "So, then, Widewood
and all its costly improvements belong half to the three counties and
half to Garnet's construc----"
"John"--the Colonel lifted his pallid hand with an air of amiable
greatness--"_my_ construc', seel view play! Not Garnet's.
_I_--Proudfit--am still the invisible head of that comp'ny. Garnet
acknowledges it privately to me. He and I have what you may call a
per-perfect und-und-unde'standing!"
"Perfect und'--O me!" interrupted March, with a broken laugh and a
frown. Proudfit liked his air and tried to reproduce it, but got his
features tangled, rubbed his mouth, and closed his eyes. March stared
into vacancy again.
The tippler interposed with moist emotion. "John, we're landless! My
plantation b'longs t' my wife. I can sympathize with you, John. As old
song says, 'we're landless! landless!' _We_ are landless, John. But you
have price--priceless 'dvant'ge over me in one thing, vice-president;
you've still got yo' motheh!"
"O!" groaned March, blazing up and starting away; but Proudfit clung.
"My dea' boy! let me tell you, that tendeh little motheh's been a
perfect hero! When I told her--in--in t-tears--how sorry I--and
Garnet--and all of us--was,--'O Curl Prou'fit,' says she--with that
ca'm, sweet, dizda-ainful smile of hers, you know--'it's no supprise to
me; it's what I've expected from the beginning.'"
LXXVI.
AGAINST OVERWHELMING NUMBERS
During the boom Tom Hersey's Swanee Hotel--repaired, enlarged,
repainted--had become Hotel Swanee. At the corner of the two streets on
which it fronted he had added a square tower or "observatory." But
neither guests nor "resi_dent_ers" had made use of it as he had
designed. Its low top was too high to be reached with that Southern ease
which Northern sojourners like, and besides, you couldn't see more than
half the earth anyhow when you got up there.
Early, therefore, it had been turned into an airy bed-chamber for
Bulger. He, however was gone. He had left Suez for good and all on the
same day on which John March arrived from abroad, being so advised to do
by Captains Champion and Shotwell, who loved a good joke with a good fat
coward to saddle it on, and who had got enough of Bulger on the day of
the skirmish mentioned a page or two back. The tower room he left came
to be looked upon as specially adapted for the sick, and here, some
eleven or twelve months after the wreck of the Three Counties Land and
Improvement Company, Limited, John March lay on his bed by night and sat
on it by day, wasted, bright-eyed, and pale, with a corded frown forever
between his brows save in the best moments of his unquiet sleep.
On the hither side of one of the two streets close under him, his
office--the old, first one, reopened on his return--stood closed, the
sign renovated and tacked up once more, and the early addendum,
_Gentleman_, still asserting itself, firmly though modestly, beneath the
new surface of repair. In and from that office he had, for these many
months, waged a bloodless but aggressive and indomitable war on the men
who, he felt, had robbed, not merely him, but his mother, and the grave
of his father, under the forms and cover of commerce and law; yet from
whom he had not been able to take their outermost intrenchment--the
slothful connivance of a community which had let itself be made a
passive sharer of their spoils. Now, in that office his desk was covered
with ten days' dust. "If you don't shut this thing up straight off and
go, say, to Chalybeate Springs," the doctor had one day exclaimed,
"you'll not last half through the summer." March had answered with
jesting obduracy, and two nights later had fainted on the stairs of Tom
Hersey's hotel. For twenty-four hours afterward he had been "not
expected to live." During which time Suez had entirely reconsidered
him--conduct, character, capacity--and had given him, at the expense of
his adversaries, a higher value and regard than ever, and a wholly new
affection. It would have been worth all the apothecary's arsenic and
iron for someone just to have told him so.
A Suez physician once said to me--I was struck with the originality of
the remark--that one man's cure is another's poison. Not even to himself
would March confess that this room, so specially adapted for the average
sick man, was for him the worst that could have been picked out. It
showed him constantly all Suez. Poor little sweating and fanning Suez,
grown fat, and already getting lean again on the carcass of one man's
unsalable estate!
"Come here," said Fannie Ravenel behind the blinds of her highest
window, to one who loved her still, but rarely had time to visit her
now, "look. That's John March's room. O sweet, how's he ever again to
match himself to our littleness and sterility without shriveling down to
it himself? And yet that, and not the catching of scamps or recovery of
lands, is going to be his big task. For I don't think he'll ever go 'way
from here; he's just the kind that'll always feel too many obligations
to stay; and I think his sickness will be a blessing straight from God,
to him and to all of us who love him, if it will only give him time to
see what his true work is--God bless him!" The two stood in loose
embrace looking opposite ways, until the speaker asked, "Don't you
believe it?"
"I don't know," said the other, gently drawing her away from the window.
Fannie yielded a step or two and then as gently resisted. "Sweetheart,"
she cried, with a melting gaze, "you don't suppose--just because I
choose to remember what he is and what he is suffering--you can't
imagine--O if _you_ mistake me I shall simply perish!"
"I know you too well, dear," caressingly murmured the guest, and they
talked of other things--"gusset and band and seam"--for it was Saturday
and there was to be a small occasion on the morrow. But that same night,
long after the house's last light was out, the guest said her prayers at
that window.
The windows of March's chamber, albeit his bed's head was against the
one to the east, opened four ways. The one on the west looked down over
the court-house square and up the verdant avenue which became the pike.
Here on the right stood the _Courier_ building! There was Captain
Champion going by it; honest ex-treasurer of the defunct Land Company.
His modest yet sturdy self-regard would not even yet let him see that he
had been only a cover for the underground doublings of shrewder men.
Yonder was the tree from which Enos had been shot by his own
brother--who was dead himself now, killed, with many others, in that
"skirmish" which John could never cease thinking that he, had he but
been here, might have averted. Over there were the two churches, and one
window of Ravenel's house. March had not been in that house a fourth as
many times as he had been prettily upbraided for not coming.
"Fannie's grea-atly cha-anged!" Parson Tombs said, with solemn triumph.
John had dreamily assented. The change he had noticed most was that the
old zest of living was gone from her still beautiful black eyes, and
that her freckles had augmented. He had met her oftenest in church. She
had the Suez Sunday-school's primary class, and more than filled the
wide vacancy caused by Miss Mary Salter's marriage to the other pastor.
These two wives had grown to be close friends. On the Sunday to which we
have alluded they had their infants baptized together. Fannie's was a
girl and did not cry. Johanna, in the gallery, did, when Father Tombs,
with dripping hand, said,
"Rose, I baptize thee."
Tears had started also in the eyes of at least one other: Fannie's
guest, as we say, whose presence was unusual and had not escaped remark.
"The wonder is," Miss Martha had said, "that she has time, or any
strength left, to ever come in to town-church at all, with that whole
overgrown Rosemont on her hands the way it is! If I had a sister no
older than she is--with that look on her face every time she falls into
a study"--she stopped; then sharply--"I tell you, that man Garnet"--and
stopped again.
From the tower's south window there was a wide view up and down the
Swanee and across the bridge, into Blackland. March never looked that
way but he found himself staring at those unfinished smelting works.
Smart saplings were growing inside the roofless walls, and you could buy
the whole plant for the cost of its brick and stone.