them wave their womankind. These also must be repaired and refitted
throughout, as Oscar Fernald's letter-heads used to say of the Thayer
House. Jane Barclay, Wife of John, must have the "star light, star
bright" wiped out of her eyes. Mary Barclay, Mother of the Same, must
have her limbs trimmed gaunt, and her face chiselled strong and
indomitable. Jeanette Barclay, a Toddler, must grow into dresses.
Molly Culpepper, a Dear, must have her heart taken out, and her face
show the shock of the operation. Nellie Logan, a poet's Wife, must
join all the lodges in the Ridge to help her husband in politics.
Trixie Lee, little Beatrix Lee, daughter of J. Lord and Lady Lee, must
have her childish face scarred and her eyes glazed. Mrs. Hally Bemis,
a Prodigal, must be swathed in silk. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward and
all her sisters must be put in the simple garb of school-teachers.
Miss Hendricks, a Mouse, must hide in the dusky places; and Ellen
Culpepper, a Memory, must come to life.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, while we have been diverting you, Time
has been at work on the little people of the passing show, and now
before we draw back the curtain to let them caper across your hearts,
let us again thank you one and all for your courtesy in staying, and
hope that what you see and hear may make you wiser and kinder and
braver; for this is a moral entertainment, good people, planned to
show you that yesterday makes to-day and they both make to-morrow, and
so the world spins round the sun.
CHAPTER XVII
The rumble of the wheels in the great stone mill across the Sycamore
and the roar of the waters over the dam seem to have been in Jeanette
Barclay's ears from the day of her birth; for she was but a baby when
the stone mill rose where the little red mill had stood, and beside
the stone mill there had grown up the long stone factory wherein
Lycurgus Mason was a man of consequence. As the trains whirled by
strangers could see the signs in mammoth letters, "The Golden Belt
Mills" on the larger building and on the smaller, "The Barclay Economy
Door Strip Factory." Standing on the stone steps of her father's house
the child could read these signs clear across the mill-pond, and from
these signs she learned her letters. For her father had more pride in
that one mill on the Sycamore than in the scores of other mills that
he controlled. And even in after years, when he controlled mills all
over the West, and owned railroads upon which to take his flour to the
sea, and ships in which to carry his flour all over the world, the
Golden Belt Mill at Sycamore Ridge was his chief pride. The rumble of
the wheels and the hoarse voice of the dam that seemed to Jeanette
like the call of the sea, were so sweet to her father's ears that when
he wearied of the work of the National Provisions Company, with its
two floors of busy offices in the Corn Exchange Building in the great
city, he would come home to Sycamore Ridge, and go to his private
office in the mill. The child remembers what seemed like endless days,
but what in truth were only a few hours in a few days in a few years,
when Daddy Barclay carried her on his shoulders across the bridge and
sat her down barefooted and bareheaded to play upon the dam, while he
in his old clothes prodded among the great wheels near by or sat
beside her telling her where he caught this fish or that fish or a
turtle or a water moccasin when he was a little boy. At low water, she
remembers that he sometimes let her wade in the clear stream, while he
sat in his office near by watching her from the window. That was when
she was only four years old, and she always had the strangest memory
of a playfellow on the dam, a big girl, who fluttered in and out of
the shadows on the stones. Jeanette talked with her, but no one else
could see her, and once the big girl, who could not talk herself,
stamped her feet and beckoned Jeanette to come away from a rock on
which she was playing, and her father, looking out of a window, turned
white when he saw a snake coiled beside the rock. But Jeanette saw the
snake and was frightened, and told her father that Ellen saw it too,
and she could not make him understand who Ellen was. So he only
trembled and hugged his little girl to him tightly, and mother would
not let the child play on the dam again all that summer.
She made songs to fit the rhythmic murmur of the wheels. And always
she remembered the days she had spent with Daddy Mason in the factory
where the machines thumped and creaked, and where the long rubber
sheets were cut and sewed, and the clanking rolls of tin and zinc
curled into strips, and Daddy Mason made her a little set of dishes
and all the things she needed in her playhouse from the scraps of tin
and rubber, and she learned to twist the little tin strips on a stick
and make the prettiest bright shiny tin curls for her dolls that a
little girl ever saw in all the world. And once Ellen came from among
the moving shadows of the wheels and drew Jeanette from beneath a
great knife that fell at her feet, and when Daddy Mason saw what had
happened he fainted, poor man, and made her promise never, never, so
long as she lived, to tell Grandma Mason. And then he drove her up
town, and they had some ice-cream, and she was sent to bed without her
lunch because she would not tell Grandma Mason why grandpa bought
ice-cream for her.
It was such a beautiful life, so natural and so exactly what a little
girl should have, that even though she went to the ocean and crossed
it as a child with her mother and grandmother, and even though she
went to the mountains many times, her childish heart always was
homesick for the mill, and at night in her dreams her ears were filled
with the murmur of waters and the wordless song of ceaseless wheels.
And once when she came back a big girl,--an exceedingly big girl with
braids down her back, a girl in the third reader in fact, who could
read everything in the fourth reader, because she had already done so,
and who could read Eugene Aram in the back of the sixth, only she
never did find out what "gyves upon his wrists" meant,--once when she
came back to the dam and was sitting there looking at the sunset
reflected in the bubbling, froth-flecked water at her feet, Ellen came
suddenly, under the noise of the roaring water, and frightened
Jeanette so that she screamed and jumped; and Ellen, who was much
older than Jeanette--four or five and maybe six years older--ran
right over the slippery, moss-covered ridge of the dam, and was gone
before Jeanette could call her back. The child never saw her playmate
again, though often Jeanette would wonder where Ellen lived and who
she was. As the years went by, Jeanette came to remember her playmate
as her dream child, and once when she was a young miss of eighteen,
and something in her hurt to be said, she tried to make a little poem
about her dream-child playmate, but all she ever got was:--
"O eyes, so brown and clear like water sparkling over mossy stones."
So she gave it up and wrote a poem about a prince who carried away a
maiden, and then she tore up the prince and the maiden, and if it were
not for that line about the eyes in the back of her trigonometry, with
a long list of words under it rhyming with "stones," she would have
forgotten about her playfellow, and much of the memory of the dam and
the pride she took as a child in the great letters upon the high stone
walls of the mills, and of the word "Barclay" on the long low walls of
the factory, might have passed from her consciousness altogether. By
such frail links does memory bind us to our past; and yet, once
formed, how like steel they hold us! What we will be, grows from what
we are, and what we are has grown from what we were. If Jeanette
Barclay, the only child of a man who, when she was in her twenties,
was to be one of the hundred richest men in his country,--so far as
mere money goes,--had been brought up with a governess and a maid,
and with frills and furbelows and tucks and Heaven knows what of silly
kinks and fluffy stuff in her childish head, instead of being brought
up in the Sycamore Ridge public schools, with Grandmother Barclay to
teach her the things that a little girl in the fourth reader should
know, and with a whole community of honest, hard-working men and women
about her to teach her what life really is, indeed she would have
lived a different life, and when she was ready to marry--But there we
go looking in the back of the book again, and that will not do at all;
and besides, a little blue-eyed girl in gingham aprons, sitting on a
cool stone with moss on its north side, watching the bass play among
the rocks in a clear, deep, sun-mottled pool under a great elm tree,
has a right to the illusions of her childhood and should not be
hustled into long dresses and love affairs until her time has come.
But the recollection of those days, so vivid and so sweet, is one of
her choicest treasures. Of course things were not as she saw them.
Jake Dolan was only in his forties then, and considered himself a
young man. But the child remembers him as a tall, brown-eyed man whom
she saw on state occasions in his faded blue army clothes, and to her
he has always been the picture of a veteran. Some one must have told
her--though she cannot remember who it was--that as Jake Dolan
gently descended the social and political scale, he sloughed off his
worldly goods, and as he moved about in the court-house from the
sheriff's office to the deputy's office, and from the deputy's to the
bailiff's, and from the bailiff's to the constable's, and from the
constable's to the janitor's room in the basement, he carried with him
the little bundle that contained all his worldly goods, the thin blue
uniform, spotless and trim, and his lieutenant's commission, and
mustering-out papers from the army. It is odd, is it not, that this
prosaic old chap, who smoked a clay pipe, and whose only
accomplishment was the ability to sing "The Hat me Father Wore," under
three drinks, and the "Sword of Bunker Hill," under ten, should have
epitomized all that was heroic in this child's memory. As for General
Philemon Ward,--a dear old crank who, when Jeanette was born, was
voting with the Republican party for the first time since the war, and
who ran twice for President on some strange issue before she was in
long dresses,--General Ward, whose children's ages could be guessed
by the disturbers of the public peace, whose names they bore,--Eli
Thayer, Mary Livermore, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, Neal
Dow, Belva Lockwood, and Helen Gougar,--General Ward, who scorned her
father's offer of ten thousand dollars a year as state counsel for the
National Provisions Company, and went out preaching fiat money and a
subtreasury for the farmers' crops, trusting to God and the flower
garden about his little white house, to keep the family alive--it is
odd that Jeanette's childish impression was that General Ward was a
man of consequence in the world. Perhaps his white necktie, his long
black coat, and his keen lean face, or his prematurely gray hair, gave
her some sort of a notion of his dignity, but whatever gave her that
notion she kept it, and though in her later life there came a passing
time when she hated him, she did not despise him. And what with the
song that she heard the bands playing all over the country, the song
that the bands sometimes played for Americans in Europe, very badly,
as though it was being translated from English into broken French or
Italian, what with Watts McHurdie's fame and with his verses that
appeared in the _Banner_ on formal occasions, the girl built a fancy
of him as one of the world's great poets--some one like Shakespeare
or Milton; and she was well into her teens before she realized the
truth, that he was an excellent harness maker who often brought out of
his quaint little dream world odd-shaped fancies in rhyme,--some
grotesque, some ridiculous, and some that seemed pretty for a
moment,--and who under the stress of a universal emotion had rhymed
one phase of our common nature and set it to a simple tune that moved
men deeply without regard to race or station. So she lived in her
child world--a world quite different from the real world--a world
gilded by the sunrise of consciousness; and because the angels loved
her and kept her heart clean, the gilding never quite wore off her
heroes. And nothing that Heaven gives us in this world is so blessed
as to have the gilding stick to the images of our youth. In Jeanette's
case even Lige Bemis--Judge Bemis, she had been taught to call
him--never showed the tar under the gilding to her eyes. Her first
memory of him was in her father's office in the big City. He was a
tall man, with gray hair that became him well, with sharp black eyes,
and enough flesh on his bones to carry the frock-coats he always wore
and give him a corporosity just escaping the portly. She remembers
seeing the name "E. W. Bemis" in gold letters on the door of his room,
and not being able to figure out how a man whose name began with "E"
or "W" could be called Lige. He was General Counsel of the Corn Belt
Railroad in those days, when her father was president of the road, and
she knew that he was a man always to be considered. And when, as a
woman grown, she learned the truth about Lige Bemis, it was hard to
believe, for all she could find against him was his everlasting smile.
It is a curious and withal a beautiful thing to see a child come into
the worn and weary world that we grownups have made, and make it over
into another world altogether. Perhaps the child's eye and the child's
heart, fresh from God, see and feel more clearly and more justly than
we do. For this much is sure--Jeanette was right in keeping to the
end the image of Colonel Martin Culpepper as a knight-errant, who
needed only a bespangled steed, a little less avoirdupois, and a
foolish cause to set him battling in the tourney. As it was, in this
humdrum world, the colonel could do nothing more heroic than come
rattling down Main Street into the child's heart, sitting with some
dignity in his weather-beaten buggy, while instead of shining armour
and a glistening helmet he wore nankeen trousers, a linen coat, and a
dignified panama hat. Moreover, it is stencilled into her memory
indelibly that the colonel was the first man in this wide world to
raise his hat to her.
Now it should not be strange that this world was a sad jumble of
fiction and of facts to a child's eyes; for to many an older pair of
eyes it has all seemed a puzzle. Even the shrewd, kind brown eyes of
Jacob Dolan often failed to see things as they were, and what his eyes
did see sometimes bewildered him. By day Dolan saw Robert Hendricks,
president of the Exchange National Bank, president and manager of the
Sycamore Ridge Light, Heat, and Power Company, proprietor of the
Hendricks Mercantile Company, treasurer and first vice-president of
the new Western Wholesale Grocery, and chairman of his party's
congressional central committee, and Dolan's eyes saw a hard, busy
man--a young man, it is true; a tall, straight, rather lean,
rope-haired young man in his thirties, with frank blue eyes, that
turned rather suddenly upon one as if to frighten out a secret. The
man seemed real enough to Dolan, from the wide crown of his slightly
bald, V-shaped head, to his feet with the hard click in the heels; and
yet that man paid no particular attention to Dolan. It was "Hello,
Jake," with a nod, as they passed, maybe only an abstracted stare and
a grunt. But at night, as they walked together over the town under the
stars or moon, a lonely soul rose out of the tall body and spread over
the face.
Dolan kept to his pipe and Hendricks to his cigar. But these were the
only marks of caste between them. One night Hendricks led the way
across the bridge down the river road and into the fields. They walked
far up the stream and their conversation had consisted largely of
"Watch out," "All right," "I see," "This is the best way." They
loitered down a dark lane shaded by hedgerows until they came to a
little wooden bridge and sat down. Dolan looked at the stars, while a
pipe and a cigar had burned out before Hendricks spoke, "Well,
chatterbox?"
"I was bothered with a question of mistaken identity," replied Dolan.
To the silence he answered: "Me myself. I'm the man. Do you happen to
know who I am?" Hendricks broke a splinter from the wood under him,
and Dolan continued: "Of course you don't, and neither do I. For
example, I go down into Union township before election and visit with
the boys. I bring a box of cigars and maybe a nip under the buggy
seat, and maybe a few stray five-dollar bills for the lads that drive
the wagons that haul the voters to the polls. I go home, and I says to
myself: 'I have that bailiwick to a man. No votes there against Jake.'
But the morning after election I see Jake didn't get but two votes in
the township. Very well. Now who did they vote against? Surely not
against the genial obliging rollicking Irish lad whose face I shave
every other morning. What could they possibly have against him?
No--they voted against that man Dolan, who got drunk, at the Fair and
throwed the gate receipts into the well, and tried to shoo the horses
off the track into the crowd at the home-stretch of the trotting race.
He's the man they plugged. And there's another one--him that
confesses to Father Van Sandt." Dolan shook his head sadly and sighed.
"He's a black-hearted wretch. If you want to see how a soul will look
in its underwear, get an Irishman to confess to a Dutchman." The chirp
of crickets arose in the silence, and after a time Dolan concluded,
"And now there abideth these three, me that I shave, me that they vote
against, and me that the Father knows; and the greatest of these is
charity--I dunno."
The soul beside him on the bridge came back from a lilac bower of
other years, with a girl's lips glowing upon his and the beat of a
girl's heart throbbing against his own. The soul was seared with
images that must never find spoken words, and it moved the lips to say
after exhaling a deep breath from its body, "Well, let's go home."
There, too, was a question of identity. Who was Robert Hendricks? Was
he the man chosen to lead his party organization because he was clean
above reproach and a man of ideals; was he the man who was trusted
with the money of the people of his town and county implicitly; or was
he the man who knew that on page 234 of the cash ledger for 1879 in
the county treasurer's office in the Garrison County court-house there
was a forgery in his own handwriting to cover nine thousand dollars of
his father's debt? Or was he the man who for seven years had crept
into a neighbour's garden on a certain night in April to smell the
lilac blossoms and always had found them gone, and had stood there
rigid, with upturned face and clenched fists, cursing a fellow-man? Or
was he the man who in the county convention of his party had risen
pale with anger, and had walked across the floor and roared his
denunciation of Elijah W. Bemis as a boodler and a scoundrel squarely
to the man's gray, smirking face and chattering teeth, and then had
reached down, and grabbed the trapped bribe-giver by the scruff of the
neck and literally thrown him out of the convention, while the crowd
went mad with applause? As he went home that night following the
convention, walking by the side of Dolan in silence, he wondered which
of all his _aliases_ he really was. At the gate of the Hendricks home
the two men stopped. Hendricks smiled quizzically as he asked: "Well,
I give it up, Jake. By the way, did you ever meet me?"
The brown eyes of the Irishman beamed an instant through the night,
before he hurried lightly down the street.
And so with all of this hide-and-seek of souls, now peering from
behind eyes and now far away patting one--two--three upon some
distant base, with all these queer goings-on inside of people here in
this strange world, it is no wonder that when the angels brought
Jeanette to the Barclays, they left her much to learn and many things
to study about. So she had to ask questions. But questions often
reveal more than answers. At least once they revealed much, when she
sat on the veranda of the Barclay home a fine spring evening with all
the company there. Aunt Molly was there; and Uncle Bob Hendricks was
there, the special guest of Grandma Barclay. Uncle Adrian was away on
a trip somewhere; but Uncle Colonel and Grandma Culpepper and all the
others were there listening to father's new German music-box, and no
one should blame a little girl, sitting shyly on the stone steps,
trying to make something out of the absurd world around her, if she
piped out when the talk stopped:--
"Mother, why does Aunt Molly cut off her lilac buds before they
bloom?"
And when her mother assured her that Aunt Molly did nothing of the
kind, and when Uncle Bob Hendricks looked up and saw Aunt Molly go
pale under her powder, and when Aunt Molly said, "Why, Jane--the
child must have dreamed that," no one in this wide world must blame a
little girl for opening her eyes as wide as she could, and lifting her
little voice as strongly as she could, and saying: "Why, Aunt Molly,
you know I saw you last night--when I stayed with you. You know I
did, 'cause I looked out of the window and spokened to you. You know I
did--don't you remember?" And no one must blame the mother for
shaking her finger at Jeanette, and no one must blame Jeanette for
sitting there shaking a protesting head, and screwing up her little
face, trying to make the puzzle out.
And when, later in the evening, Daddy Barclay went over to the mill
with his work, and Uncle Bob left in the twilight, and Aunt Molly and
mother were alone in mother's room, how should a little girl know what
the crying was all about, and how should a little girl understand when
a small woman, looking in a mirror, and dabbing her face with a powder
rag, said to mother, who knows everything in the world, and all about
the angels that brought you here: "Oh, Jane, Jane, you don't
know--you don't understand. There are things that I couldn't make you
understand--and I mustn't even think of them."
Surely it is a curious world for little girls--a passing curious
world, when there are things in it that even mothers cannot
understand.
So Jeanette turned her face to the wall and went to sleep, leaving
Aunt Molly powdering her nose and asking mother, "Does it look all
right now--" and adding, "Oh, I'm such a fool." In so illogical a
world, the reader must not be allowed to think that Molly Brownwell
lamented the folly of mourning for a handsome young gentleman in blue
serge with white spats on his shoes and a Byronic collar and a fluffy
necktie of the period. Far be it from her to lament that sentiment as
folly; however, when she looked at her eyes in the mirror and saw her
nose, she felt that tears were expensive and reproached herself for
them. But so long as these souls of ours, whatever they may be, are
caged in our bodies, our poor bodies will have to bear witness to
their prisoners. If the soul smiles the body shines, and if the soul
frets the body withers. And Molly Brownwell saw in the looking-glass
that night more surely than ever before that her face was beginning to
slump. Her cheeks were no longer firm, and at her eyes were the stains
of tears that would not wipe off, but crinkled the skin at the temples
and deepened the shadows into wide salmon-coloured lines that fell
away from each side of the nose so that no trick could hide them.
Moreover, the bright eyes that used to flash into Bob Hendricks'
steady blue eyes had grown tired, and women who did not know, wondered
why such a pretty girl had broken so.
The Culpeppers had remained with the Barclays for dinner, and the hour
was late for the Ridge--after nine o'clock, and as the departing
guests went down the long curved walk of Barclay pride to the Barclay
gate, they saw a late April moon rising over the trees by the mill.
They clanged the tall iron gate behind them, and stood a moment
watching the moon. For the colonel never grew too old to notice it. He
put his arms about his wife and his daughter tenderly, and said before
they started up the street, "It never grows old--does it?" And he
pressed his wife to him gently and repeated, "Does it, my dear--it's
the same old moon; the one we used to have in Virginia before the war,
isn't it?"
His wife smiled at him placidly and said, "Now, pa--"
Whereupon the colonel squeezed his daughter lustily, and exclaimed,
"Well, Molly still loves me, anyway. Don't you, Molly?" And the
younger woman patted his cheek, and then they started for home.
"Papa, how much money has John?" asked the daughter, as they walked
along.
A man always likes to be regarded as an authority in financial
matters, and the colonel stroked his goatee wisely before replying:
"U-h-m-m, let me see--I don't exactly know. Bob and I were talking
about it the other day--after I bought John's share in College
Heights--last year, to be exact. Of course he's got the mill and it's
all paid for--say a hundred thousand dollars--and that old wheat
land he got back in the seventies--he's cleaned all of that up. I
should say that and the mill were easily worth half a million, and
they're both clear. That's all in sight." The colonel ruminated a
moment and then continued: "About the rest--it's a guess. Some say a
million, some say ten. All I know in point of fact, my dear, to get
right down to bed-rock, is that Lycurgus says they are turning out two
or three car-loads of the strips a year. I wouldn't believe Lycurgus
on a stack of Bibles as high as his head, but little Thayer Ward, who
works down there in the shipping department, told the general the same
thing, and Bob says he knows John gets ten dollars apiece for them
now, so that's a million dollars a year income he's got. He handles
grain and flour way up in Minnesota, and back as far as Ohio, and west
to California. But what he actually owns,--that is, whether he rents
the mills or, to be exact, steals them,--I haven't any idea--not the
slightest notion in the world, in point of fact--not the slightest
notion."
As they passed through Main Street it was deserted, save in the
billiard halls, and as no one seemed inclined to talk, the colonel
took up the subject of Barclay: "Say we call it five million--five
million in round numbers; that's a good deal of money for a man to
have and haggle a month over seventy-five dollars the way he did with
me when he sold me his share of College Heights. But," added the
colonel, "I suppose if I had that much I'd value it more." The women
were thinking of other things, and the colonel addressed the night:
"Man gets an appetite for money just as he does for liquor--just like
the love for whiskey, I may say." He shook his sides as he meditated
aloud: "But as for me--I guess I've got so I can take it or let it
alone. Eh, ma?"
"I didn't catch what you were saying, pa," answered his wife. "I was
just thinking whether we had potatoes enough to make hash for
breakfast; have we, Molly?"
As the women were discussing the breakfast, two men came out of a
cross street, and the colonel, who was slightly in advance of his
women, hailed the men with, "Hello there, Bob--you and Jake out here
carrying on your illicit friendship in the dark?"
The men and the Culpeppers stopped for a moment at the corner. Molly
Brownwell's heart throbbed as they met, and she thought of the rising
moon, and in an instant her brain was afire with a hope that shamed
her. Three could not walk abreast on the narrow sidewalk up the hill,
and when she heard Hendricks say after the group had parleyed a
moment, "Well, Jake, good night; I'll go on home with the colonel,"
she managed the pairing off so that the young man fell to her, and the
colonel and Mrs. Culpepper walked before the younger people, and they
all talked together. But at Lincoln Avenue, the younger people
disconnected themselves from the talk of the elders, and finally
lagged a few feet behind. When they reached the gate the colonel
called back, "Better come in and visit a minute, Bob," and Molly
added, "Yes, Bob, it's early yet."
But what she said with her voice did not decide the matter for him. It
was her eyes. And what he said with his voice is immaterial--it was
what his eyes replied that the woman caught. What he said was, "Well,
just for a minute, Colonel," and the party walked up the steps of the
veranda, and Bob and Molly and the colonel sat down.
Mrs. Culpepper stood for a moment and then said, "Well, Bob, you must
excuse me--I forgot to set my sponge, and there isn't a bit of bread
in the house for Sunday." Whereupon she left them, and when the
colonel had talked himself out he left them, and when the two were
alone there came an awkward silence. In the years they had been apart
a thousand things had stirred in their hearts to say at this time, yet
all their voices spoke was, "Well, Molly?" and "Well, Bob?" The moon
was in their faces as it shone through the elm at the gate. The man
turned his chair so that he could look at her, and after satisfying
his eyes he broke the silence with, "Seven years."
And she returned, "Seven years the thirteenth of April."
The man played a tune with his fingers and a foot and said nothing
more. The woman finally spoke. "Did you know it was the thirteenth?"
"Yes," he replied, "father died the ninth. I have often counted it
up." He added shortly after: "It's a long time--seven years! My! but
it has been a long time!"
"I have wondered if you have thought so," a pause, "too!"
Their hearts were beating too fast for thoughts to come coherently.
The fever of madness was upon them, and numbed their wills so that
they could not reach beneath the surface of their consciousnesses to
find words for their emotions. Then also there was in each a
deadening, flaming sense of guilt. Shame is a dumb passion, and these
two, who in the fastnesses of a thousand nights had told themselves
that what they sought was good and holy, now found in each other's
actual presence a gripping at the tongue's root that held them dumb.
"Yes, I--" the man mumbled, "yes, I--I fancied you understood that
well enough."
"But you have been busy?" she asked; "very busy, Bob, and oh, I've
been so proud of all that you've done." It was the woman's tongue that
first found a sincere word.
The man replied, "Well--I--I am glad you have."
It seemed to the woman a long time since her father had gone. Her
conscience was making minutes out of seconds. She said, "Don't you
think it's getting late?" but did not rise.
The man looked at his watch and answered, "Only 10.34." He started to
rise, but she checked him breathlessly.
"Oh, Bob, Bob, sit down. This isn't enough for these long years. I had
so many things to say to you." She hesitated and cried, "Why are we so
stupid now--now when every second counts?"
He bent slightly toward her and said in a low voice, "So that's why
your lilacs have never bloomed again."
She looked at her chair arm and asked, "Did you know they hadn't
bloomed?"
"Oh, Molly, of course I knew," he answered, and then went on: "Every
thirteenth of April I have slipped through the fence and come over
here, rain or shine, at night, to see if they were blooming. But I
didn't know why they never bloomed!"
The woman rose and walked a step toward the door, and turned her head
away. When she spoke it was after a sob, "Bob, I couldn't bear it--I
just couldn't bear it, Bob!"
He groaned and put his hands to his forehead and rested his elbow on
the chair arm. "Oh, Molly, Molly, Molly," he sighed, "poor, poor
little Molly." After a pause he said: "I won't ever bother you again.
It doesn't do any good." A silence followed in which the woman turned
her face to him, tear-stained and wretched, with the seams of her
heart all torn open and showing through it. "It only hurts," the man
continued, and then he groaned aloud, "Oh, God, how it hurts!"
She sank back into her chair and buried her face in the arm farthest
from him and her body shook, but she did not speak. He stared at her
dry-eyed for a minute, that tolled by so slowly that he rose at the
end of it, fearful that his stay was indecorously long.
"I think I should go now," he said, as he passed her.
"Oh, no!" she cried. "Not yet, not just yet." She caught his arm and
he stopped, as she stood beside him, trembling, haggard, staring at
him out of dead, mad eyes. There was no colour in her blotched face,
and in the moonlight the red rims of her eyes looked leaden, and her
voice was unsteady. At times it broke in sobbing croaks, and she spoke
with loose jaws, as one in great terror. "I want you to know--" she
paused at the end of each little hiccoughed phrase--"that I have not
forgotten--" she caught her breath--"that I think of you every
day--" she wiped her eyes with a limp handkerchief--"every day and
every night, and pray for you, though I don't believe--" she
whimpered as she shuddered--"that God cares much about me."
He tried to stop her, and would have gone, but she put a hand upon his
shoulder and pleaded: "Just another minute. Oh, Bob," she cried, and
her voice broke again, "don't forget me. Don't forget me. When I was
so sick last year--you remember," she pleaded, "I raved in delirium a
week." She stopped as if afraid to go on, then began to shake as with
a palsy. "I raved of everything under God's sun, and through it all,
Bob--not one word of you. Oh, I knew that wouldn't do." She swayed
upon his arm. "I kept a little corner of my soul safe to guard you."
She sank back into her chair and chattered, "Oh, I guarded you."
She was crying like a child. He stood over her and touched her
dishevelled hair with the tips of his fingers and said: "I oughtn't to
stay, Molly."
And she motioned him away with her face hidden and sobbed, "No--I
know it."
He paused a moment on the step before her and then said, "Good-by,
Molly--I'm going now." And she heard him walking down the yard on the
grass, so that his footsteps would not arouse the house. It seemed to
them both that it was midnight, but time had moved slowly, and when
the spent, broken woman crept into the house, and groped her way to
her room, she did not make a light, but slipped into bed without
looking at her scarred, shameful face.
CHAPTER XVIII
In the sunshine of that era of world-wide prosperity in the eighties,
John Barclay made much hay. He spent little time in Sycamore Ridge,
and his private car might be found in Minnesota to-day and at the end
of the week in California. As president of the Corn Belt Road and as
controlling director in the North Lake Line, he got rates on other
railroads for his grain products that no competitor could duplicate.
And when a competitor began to grow beyond the small fry class,
Barclay either bought him out or built a mill beside the offender and
crushed him out. Experts taught him the value of the chaff from the
grain. He had a dozen mills to which he shipped the refuse from his
flour and heaven only knows what else, and turned the stuff into
various pancake flours and breakfast foods. He spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars in advertising--in a day when large
appropriations for advertising were unusual. And the words "Barclay's
Best" glared at the traveller from crags in the Rocky Mountains and
from the piers of all the great harbour bridges. He used Niagara to
glorify the name of Barclay, and "Use Barclay's Best" had to be washed
off the statue of the Goddess of Liberty in New York Harbour. The
greenish brown eyes of the little man were forever looking into space,
and when he caught a dream, instead of letting it go, he called a
stenographer and made it come true. In those days he was beginning to
realize that an idea plus a million dollars will become a fact if a
man but says the word, whereas the same idea minus a million remains a
dream. The great power of money was slowly becoming part of the man's
consciousness. During the years that were to come, he came to think
that there was nothing impossible. Any wish he had might be gratified.
Such a consciousness drives men mad.
But in those prosperous days, while the millions were piling up,
Barclay kept his head. All the world was buying then, but wherever he
could Barclay sold. He bought only where he had to, and paid cash for
what he bought. He did not owe a dollar for anything. He had no
equities; his titles were all good. And as he neared his forties he
believed that he could sell what he had at forced sale for many
millions. He was supposed to be much richer than he was, but the one
thing that he knew about it was that scores of other men had more than
he. So he kept staring into space and pressing the button for his
stenographer, and at night wherever his work found him, whether in
Boston or in Chicago or in San Francisco, he hunted up the place where
he could hear the best music, and sat listening with his eyes closed.
He always kept his note-book in his hand, when Jane was not with him,
and when an idea came to him inspired by the music, he jotted it down,
and the next day, if it stood the test of a night's sleep, he turned
the idea into an event.
In planning his work he was ruthless. He learned that by bribing men
in the operating department of any railroad he could find out what his
competitors were doing. And in the main offices of the National
Provisions Company two rooms full of clerks were devoted to
considering the duplicate way-bills of every car of flour or grain or
grain product not shipped by the Barclay companies. Thus he was able
to delay the cars of his competitors, and get his own cars through on
time. Thus he was able to bribe buyers in wholesale establishments to
push his products. And with Lige Bemis manipulating the railroad and
judiciary committees in the legislatures of ten states, no laws were
enacted which might hamper Barclay's activities.
"Do you know, Lucy," said General Ward to his wife one night when they
were discussing Barclay and his ways and works, "sometimes I think
that what that boy saw at Wilson's Creek,--the horrible bloodshed,
the deadly spectacle of human suffering at the hospital wagon, some
way blinded his soul's eye to right and wrong. It was all a man could
stand; the picture must have seared the boy's heart like a fire."
Mrs. Ward, who was mending little clothes in the light of the
dining-room lamp, put down her work a moment and said: "I have always
thought the colonel had some such idea. For once when he was speaking
of the way John stole that wheat land, he said, 'Well, poor John, he
got a wound at Wilson's Creek that never will heal,' and when I asked
if he meant his foot, the colonel smiled like a woman and said gently,
'No, Miss Lucy, not there--not there at all; in his heart, my dear,
in his heart!'"
And the general's eyes met the eyes of a mother wandering toward a boy
of nine sleeping, tired out, on a couch near by; he was a little boy
with dark hair, and red tanned cheeks, and his mouth--such a soft
innocent mouth--curved prettily, like the lips of children in old
pictures, and as he slept he smiled, and the general, meeting the
mother's eyes coming back from the little face, wiped his glasses and
nodded his head in understanding; in a moment they both rose and stood
hand in hand over their child, and the mother said in a trembling
voice, "And his mother prayed for him, too--she has told me so--so
many times."
But the people of Sycamore Ridge and of the Mississippi Valley did not
indulge in any fine speculations upon the meaning of life when they
thought of John Barclay. He had become considerable of a figure in the
world, and the Middle West was proud of him. For those were the days
of tin cornices, false fronts, vain pretences, and borrowed plumes
bought with borrowed money. Other people's capital was easy to get,
and every one was rich. Debt was regarded as an evidence of
prosperity, and the town ran mad with the rest of the country. It is
not strange then that Mrs. Watts McHurdie, she who for four years
during the war dispensed "beefsteak--ham and eggs--breakfast
bacon--tea--coffee--iced tea--or--milk" at the Thayer House, and
for ten years thereafter sold dry-goods and kept books at Dorman's
store, should have become tainted with the infection of the times. But
it is strange that she could have inoculated so sane a little man as
Watts. Still, there were Delilah and Samson, and of course Samson was
a much larger man than Watts, and Nellie McHurdie was considerably
larger than Delilah; and you never can tell about those things,
anyway. Also it must not be forgotten that Nellie McHurdie since her
marriage had become Grand Preceptress in one lodge, Worthy Matron in
another, Senior Vice Commander in a third, and Worshipful Benefactress
in a fourth, to say nothing of positions as corresponding secretary,
delegate to the state convention, Keeper of the Records and Seals,
Scribe,--and perhaps Pharisee,--in half a dozen others, all in the
interests of her husband's political future; and with such obvious
devotion before him, it is small wonder after all that he succumbed.
But he would not run for office. He had trouble every spring
persuading her, but he always did persuade her, that this wasn't his
year, that conditions were wrong, and that next year probably would be
better. But he allowed her to call their home "The Bivouac," and have
the name cut in stone letters on the horse-block; and he sat by meekly
for many long years at lodges, at church entertainments, at high
school commencement exercises, at public gatherings of every sort, and
heard her sing a medley of American patriotic songs which wound up
with the song that made him famous. It was five drinks in Jake Dolan
that stopped the medley, when the drinks aforesaid inspired him to
rise grandly from his chair at the front of the hall at an
installation of officers of Henry Schnitzler Post of the Grand Army,
and stalk majestically out of the room, while the singing was in
progress, saying as he turned back at the door, before thumping
heavily down the stairs, "Well, I'm getting pretty damn tired of
that!" Mrs. McHurdie insisted that Watts should whip Dolan, and it is
possible that at home that night Watts did smite his breast and shake
his head fiercely, for in the morning the neighbours saw Mrs. McHurdie
walk to the gate with him, talking earnestly and holding his arm as if
to restrain him; moreover, when Watts had turned the corner of Lincoln
Avenue and had disappeared into Main Street, she hurried over to the
Culpeppers' to have the colonel warn Dolan that Watts was a dangerous
man. But when Dolan, sober, walked into the harness shop that
afternoon to apologize, the little harness maker came down the aisle
of saddles in his shop blinking over his spectacles and with his hand
to his mouth to strangle a smile, and before Dolan could speak, Watts
said, "So am I--Jake Dolan--so am I; but if you ever do that again,
I'll have to kill you."
It happened in the middle eighties--maybe a year before the college
was opened--maybe a year after, though Gabriel Carnine, talking of it
some twenty years later, insists that it happened two years after the
opening of the college. But no one ever has mentioned the matter to
Watts, so the exact date may not be recorded, though it is an
important date in the uses of this narrative, as will be seen later.
All agree--the colonel, the general, Dolan, Fernald, and perhaps two
dozen old soldiers who were at the railroad station waiting for the
train to take them to the National Encampment of the Grand Army of the
Republic,--that it was a fine morning in September. Of course John
Barclay contributed the band. He afterwards confessed to that,
explaining that Nellie had told him that Watts never had received the
attention he should receive either in the town or the state or the
nation, and so long as Watts was a National Delegate for the first
time in his life, and so long as she had twice been voted for as
National President of the Ladies' Aid, and might get it this time, the
band would be, as she put it, "so nice to take along"; and as John
never forgot the fact that Nellie asked him to sing at her wedding, he
hired the band. Thus are we bound to our past. But the band was not
what caused the comrades to gasp, though its going was a surprise. And
when they heard it turn into Main Street far up by Lincoln Avenue,
playing the good old tune that the town loved for Watts' sake and for
the sake of the time and the place and the heroic deeds it
celebrated,--when they heard the band, the colonel asked the general,
"Where's Watts?" and they suspected that the band might be bringing
him to the depot.
Heaven knows the town had bought uniforms and new horns for the band
often enough for it to do something public-spirited once in a while
without being paid for it. So the band did not come to the town as a
shock in and of itself. Neither for that matter did the hack--the new
glistening silver-mounted hack, with the bright spick-and-span hearse
harness on the horses; in those bustling days a quarter was nothing,
and you can ride all over the Ridge for a quarter; so when the
comrades at the depot, in their blue soldiers' clothes their campaign
hats, and their delegates' badges, saw the band followed by the hack,
they were of course interested, but that was all. And when some of the
far-sighted ones observed that the top of the hack was spread back
royally, they commented upon the display of pomp, but the comment was
not extraordinary. But when from the street as the band stopped, there
came cheers from the people, the boys at the station felt that
something unusual was about to come to them. So they watched the band
march down the long sheet-iron-covered station walk, and the hack move
along beside the band boys; and the poet's comrades-in-arms saw him
sitting beside the poet's wife,--the two in solemn state. And then
the old boys beheld Watts McHurdie,--little Watts McHurdie, with his
grizzled beard combed, with his gold-rimmed Sunday glasses far down on
his nose so that he could see over them, and--wonder of wonders, they
saw a high shiny new silk hat wobbling over his modest head.
He stumbled out of the open hack with his hand on the great stiff
awkward thing, obviously afraid it would fall off, and she that was
Nellie Logan, late of the Thayer House and still later of Dorman's
store, and later still most worshipful, most potent, most gorgeous and
most radiant archangel of seven secret and mysterious covenants,
conclaves, and inner temples, stood beaming at the pitiful sight,
clearly proud of her shameless achievement. Watts, putting his hand to
his mouth to cover his smile, grabbed the shiny thing again as he
nodded cautiously at the crowd. Then he followed her meekly to the
women's waiting room, where the wives and sisters of the comrades were
assembled--and they, less punctilious than the men, burst forth with
a scream of joy, and the agony was over.
And thus Watts McHurdie went to his greatest earthly glory. The
delegation from the Ridge, with the band, had John Barclay's private
car; that was another surprise which Mrs. McHurdie arranged, and when
they got to Washington, where the National Encampment was, opinions
differ as to when Watts McHurdie had his high tide of happiness. The
colonel says that it was in the great convention, where the Sycamore
Ridge band sat in front of the stage, and where Watts stood in front
of the band and led the great throng,--beginning with his cracked
little heady tenor, and in an instant losing it in the awful diapason
of ten thousand voices singing his old song with him; and where, when
it was over, General Grant came down the platform, making his way
rather clumsily among the chairs, and at last in front of the whole
world grasped Watts McHurdie's hands, and the two little men,
embarrassed by the formality of it all, stood for a few seconds
looking at each other with tears glistening in their speaking eyes.
But Jake Dolan, who knows something of human nature, does not hold to
the colonel's view about the moment of McHurdie's greatest joy. "We
were filing down the Avenue again, thousands and ten thousands of us,
as we filed past the White House nearly twenty years before. And the
Sycamore Ridge band was cramming its lungs into the old tune, when up
on the reviewing stand, beside all the big bugs and with the President
there himself, stood little Watts, plug hat in hand, bowing to the
boys. 'Twas a lovely sight, and he had been there for two mortal hours
before we boys got down--there was the Kansas boys and the Iowa boys
and some from Missouri, carrying the old flag we fought under at
Wilson's Creek. Watts saw us down the street and heard the old band
play; a dozen other bands had played that tune that day; but Billy
Dorman's tuba had its own kind of a rag in it, and Watts knew it. I
seen him a-waving his hat at the boys, almost as soon as they saw him,
and as the band came nearer and nearer I saw the little man's face
begin to crack, and as he looked down the line and saw them Kansas and
Iowa soldiers, I seen him give one whoop, and throw that plug hat
hellwards over the crowd and jump down from that band stand like a
wild man and make for the gang. He was blubbering like a calf when he
caught step with me, and he yelled so as to reach my ears above the
roar of the crowds and the blatting of the bands--yelled with his
voice ripped to shreds that fluttered out ragged from the torn bosom
of him, 'Jake--Jake--how I would like to get drunk--just this
once!' And we went on down the avenue together--him bareheaded,
hay-footing and straw-footing it the same as in the old days."
Jake always paused at this point and shook his head sorrowfully, and
then continued dolefully: "But 'twas no use; he was caught and took
away; some says it was to see the pictures in the White House, and
some says it was to a reception given by the Relief Corps to the
officers elect of the Ladies' Aid, where he was pawed over by a lot of
old girls who says, 'Yes, I'm so glad--what name please--oh,
--McHurdie, surely not _the_ McHurdie; O dear me--Sister McIntire,
come right here, this is _the_ McHurdie--you know I sang your song
when I was a little girl'--which was a lie, unless Watts wrote it for
the Mexican War, and he didn't. And then some one else comes waddling
up and says, 'O dear me, Mr. McHurdie--you don't know how glad I am
to see the author of "Home, Sweet Home,"' and Watts blinks his eyes
and pleads not guilty; and she says, 'O dear, excuse the mistake;
well, I'm sure you wrote something?' And Watts, being sick of love, as
Solomon says in his justly celebrated and popular song, Watts looks
through his Sunday glasses and doesn't see a blame thing, and smiles
and says calmly, 'No, madam, you mistake--I am a simple harness
maker.' And she sidles off looking puzzled, to make room for the one
from Massachusetts, who stares at him through her glasses and says,
'So you're Watts McHurdie--who wrote the--' 'The same, madam,' says
Watts, courting favour. 'Well,' says the high-browed one, 'well--you
are not at all what I imagined.' And 'Neither are you, madam,' returns
Watts, as sweet as a dill pickle; and she goes away to think it over
and wonder if he meant it that way. No--that's where Nellie made her
mistake. It wouldn't have hurt him--just once. But what's done's
done, and can't be undone, as the man said when he fished his wife out
of the lard vat."
Now this all seems a long way from John Barclay--the hero of this
romance. Yet the departure of Watts McHurdie for his scene of glory
was on the same day that a most important thing happened in the lives
of Bob Hendricks and Molly Brownwell. That day Bob Hendricks walked
one end of the station platform alone. The east-bound train was half
an hour late, and while the veterans were teasing Watts and the women
railing at Mrs. McHurdie, Hendricks discovered that it was one hundred
and seventy-eight steps from one end of the walk to the other, and
that to go entirely around the building made the distance fifty-four
steps more. It was almost train time before Adrian Brownwell arrived.
When the dapper little chap came with his bright crimson carnation,
and his flashing red necktie, and his inveterate gloves and cane,
Hendricks came only close enough to him to smell the perfume on the
man's clothes, and to nod to him. But when Hendricks found that the
man was going with the Culpeppers as far as Cleveland, as he told the
entire depot platform, "to report the trip," Hendricks sat on a
baggage truck beside the depot, and considered many things. As he was
sitting there Dolan came up, out of breath, and fearful he should be
late.
"How long will you be gone, Jake?" asked Hendricks.
"The matter of a week or ten days, maybe," answered Dolan.
"Well, Jake," said Hendricks, looking at Dolan with serious eyes, yet
rather abstractedly, "I am thinking of taking a long trip--to be gone
a long time--I don't know exactly how long. I may not go at all--I
haven't said anything to the boys in the store or the bank or out at
the shop about it; it isn't altogether settled--as yet." He paused
while a switch engine clanged by and the crowd surged out of the
depot, and ebbed back again into their seats. "Did you deliver my note
this morning?"
"Yes," replied Dolan, "just as you said. That's what made me a little
late."
"To the lady herself?"
"To the lady herself," repeated Dolan.
"All right," acquiesced Hendricks. "Now, Jake, if I give it out that
I'm going away on a trip, there'll be a lot of pulling and hauling and
fussing around in the bank and in the store and at the shop
and--every place, and then I may not go. So I've gone over every
concern carefully during the past week, and have set down what ought
to be done in case I'm gone. I didn't tell my sister even--she's so
nervous. And, Jake, I won't tell any one. But if, when you get back
from Washington, I'm not here, I'm going to leave this key with you.
Tell the boys at the bank that it will open my tin box, and in the tin
box they'll find some instructions about things." He smiled, and Dolan
assented. Hendricks uncoiled his legs from the truck, and began to get
down. "I won't mix up with the old folks, I guess, Jake. They have
their own affairs, and I'm tired. I worked all last night," he added.
He held out his hand to Dolan and said, "Well, good-by, Jake--have a
good time."
The elder man had walked away a few steps when Hendricks called him
back, and fumbling in his pockets, said: "Well, Jake, I certainly am a
fool; here--" he pulled an envelope marked "Dolan" from his inside
pocket--"Jake, I was in the bank this morning, and I found a picture
for you. Take it and have a good time. It's a long time till pension
day--so long."
The Irishman peeped at the bill and grinned as he said, "Them holy
pictures from the bank, my boy, have powerful healing qualities." And
he marched off with joy in his carriage.
Hendricks then resumed his tramp; up and down the long platform he
went, stepping on cracks one way, and avoiding cracks the next,
thinking it all out. He tried to remember if he had been unfair to any
one; if he had left any ragged edges; if he had taken a penny more
than his honest due. The letter to the county treasurer, returning the
money his father had taken, was on top of the pile of papers in his
tin box at the bank. He had finally concluded, that when everything
else was known, that would not add much to his disgrace. And then it
would be paid, and that page with the forged entry would not always be
in his mind. There were deeds, each witnessed by a different notary,
so that the town would not gossip before he went, transferring all of
his real estate to his sister, and the stock he had sold to the bank
was transferred, and the records all in the box; then he went over the
prices again at which he had disposed of his holdings to the bank, and
he was sure he had made good bargains in every case for the bank. So
it was all fair, he argued for the thousandth time--he was all square
with the world. He had left a deposit subject to his check of twenty
thousand dollars--that ought to do until they could get on their feet
somewhere; and it was all his, he said to himself--all his, and no
one's business.
And when he thought of the other part, the voice of Adrian Brownwell
saying, "Well, come on, old lady, we must be going," rose in his
consciousness. It was not so much Brownwell's words, as his air of
patronage and possession; it was cheerful enough, quite gay in fact,
but Hendricks asked himself a hundred times why the man didn't whistle
for her, and clamp a steel collar about her neck. He wondered
cynically if at the bottom of Brownwell's heart, he would not rather
have the check for twelve thousand dollars which Hendricks had left
for Colonel Culpepper, to pay off the Brownwell note, than to have his
wife. For seven years the colonel had been cheerfully neglecting it,
and now Hendricks knew that Adrian was troubling him about the old
debt.
As he rounded the depot for the tenth time he got back to their last
meeting. There stood General Ward with his arm about the girlish waist
of Mrs. Ward, the mother of seven. There was John Barclay with Jane
beside him, and they were holding hands like lovers. The Ward children
were running like rabbits over the broad lawn under the elms, and
there, talking to the wide, wide world, was Adrian Brownwell,
propounding the philosophy of the _Banner_, and quoting from last
week's editorials. And there sat Bob and Molly by the flower bed that
bordered the porch.
"I am going to the city to hear Gilmore," he said. That was simple
enough, and her sigh had no meaning either. It was just a weary little
sigh, such as women sometimes bring forth when they decide to say
something else. So she had said: "I'll be all alone next week. I think
I'll visit Jane--if she's in town."
Then something throbbed in his brain and made him say:--
"So you'd like to hear Gilmore, too?"
She coloured and was silent, and the pulse of madness that was beating
in her made her answer:--
"Oh--I can't--you know the folks are going to Washington to the
encampment, and Adrian is going as far as Cleveland with the
delegation to write it up."
An impulse loosened his tongue, and he asked:--
"Why not? Come on. If you don't know any one up there, go to the Fifth
Avenue; it's all right, and I'll get tickets, and we'll go every night
and both matinees. Come on!" he urged.
She was aflame and could not think. "Oh--don't, Bob, don't--not now.
Please don't," she begged, in as low a tone as she dared to use.
Adrian was thundering on about the tariff, and the general was
wrangling with him. The Barclays were talking to themselves, and the
children were clattering about underfoot, and in the trees overhead.
Bob's eyes and Molly's met, and the man shuddered at what he saw of
pathos and yearning, and he said: "Well, why not? It's no worse to go
than to want to go. What's wrong about it--Molly, do you think--"
He did not finish the sentence, for Adrian had ceased talking, and
Molly, seeing his jealous eyes upon her, rose and moved away. But
before they left that night she found occasion to say, "I've been
thinking about it, Bob, and maybe I will."
In the year that had passed since Hendricks had left her sobbing in
the chair on the porch of the Culpepper home, a current between them
had been reëstablished, and was fed by the chance passing in a store,
a smile at a reception, a good morning on the street, and the current
was pulsing through their veins night and day. But that fine September
morning, as she stood on the veranda of her home with a dust-cap on
her head, cleaning up the litter her parents had made in packing, she
was not ready for what rushed into her soul from the letter Dolan left
her, as he hurried away to overtake the band that was turning from
Lincoln Avenue into Main Street. She sat in a chair to read it, and
for a moment after she had read it, she held it open in her lap and
gazed at the sunlight mottling the blue grass before her, through the
elm trees. Her lips were parted and her eyes wide, and she breathed
slowly. The tune the band was playing--McHurdie's song--sank into
her memory there that day so that it always brought back the mottled
sunshine, the flowers blooming along the walk, and the song of a robin
from a lilac bush near by. She folded the letter carefully, and put it
inside her dress, and then moving mechanically, took it out and read
it again:--
"MY DARLING, MY DARLING: There is no use struggling any more. You
must come. I will meet you in the city at the morning train, the one
that leaves the Ridge here at 2.35 A.M. We can go to the parks
to-morrow and be alone and talk it all out, before the concert--and
then--oh, Molly, core of my soul, heart of my heart, why should we
ever come back! BOB."
All that she could feel as she sat there motionless was a crashing
"no." The thing seemed to drive her mad by its insistence--a horrible
racking thing that all but shook her, and she chattered at it: "Why
not? Why not? Why not?" But the "no" kept roaring through her mind,
and as she heard the servant rattling the breakfast dishes in the
house, the woman shivered out of sight and ran to her room. She fell
on her knees to pray, but all she could pray was, "O God, O God, O
God, help me!" and to that prayer, as she said it, the something in
her heart kept gibbering, "Why not? Why not? Why not?" From an old box
hidden in a closet opening out of her mother's room she took Bob
Hendricks' picture,--the faded picture of a boy of twenty,--and
holding it close to her breast, stared open-lipped into the heart of
an elm tree-top. The whistle of the train brought her back to her real
world. She rose and looked at herself in the mirror, at the unromantic
face with its lines showing faintly around her eyes, grown quiet
during the dozen years that had settled her fluffy hair into sedate
waves. She smiled at the changes of the years and shook her head, and
got a grip on her normal consciousness, and after putting away the
picture and closing the box, she went downstairs to finish her work.
On the stairs she felt sure of herself, and set about to plan for the
next day, and then the tumult began, between the "no" and her soul. In
a few minutes as she worked the "no" conquered, and she said, "Bob's
crazy." She repeated it many times, and found as she repeated it that
it was mechanical and that her soul was aching again. So the morning
wore away; she gossiped with the servant a moment; a neighbour came in
on an errand; and she dressed to go down town. As she went out of the
gate, she wondered where she would be that hour the next day, and then
the struggle began again. Moreover, she bought some new
gloves--travelling gloves to match her gray dress.
In the afternoon she and Jane Barclay sat on the wide porch of the
Barclay home. "Gilmore's going to be in the city all this week," said
Jane, biting a thread in her sewing.
"Is he?" replied Molly. "I should so like to hear him. It's so poky up
at the house."
"Why don't you?" inquired Jane. "Get on the train and go on up."
"Do you suppose it would be all right?" replied Molly.
"Why, of course, girl! Aren't you a married woman of lawful age? I
would if I wanted to."
There was a pause, and Molly replied thoughtfully, "I have half a
notion to--really!"
But as she walked home, she decided not to do it. People from the
Ridge might be there, and they wouldn't understand, and her
finger-tips chilled at the memory of Adrian Brownwell's jealous eyes.
So as she ate supper, she went over the dresses she had that were
available. And at bedtime she gave the whole plan up and went upstairs
humming "Marguerite" as happily as the thrush that sang in the lilacs
that morning. As she undressed the note fell to the floor. When she
picked it up, the flash of passion came tearing through her heart, and
the "no" crashed in her ears again, and all the day's struggle was for
nothing. So she went to bed, resolved not to go. But she stared
through the window into the night, and of a sudden a resolve came to
her to go, and have one fair day with Hendricks--to talk it all out
forever, and then to come home, and she rose from her bed and tiptoed
through the house packing a valise. She left a note in the kitchen for
the servant, saying that she would be back for dinner the next
evening, and when she struck a match in the front hall to see what
time it was, she found that it was only one o'clock. For an hour she
sat in the chill September air on the veranda, thinking it all
over--what she would say; how they would meet and part; and over and
over again she told herself that she was doing the sensible thing. As
the clock struck two she picked up her valise--it was heavier than
she thought, and it occurred to her that she had put in many
unnecessary things, and that she had time to lighten it. But she
stopped a moment only, and then walked to the gate and down a side
street to the station. It was 2.20 when she arrived, and the train was
marked on the blackboard by the ticket window on time. She kept
telling herself that it was best to have it out; that she would come
right back; but she remembered her heavy valise, and again the warning
"no" roared through her soul. She walked up and down the long
platform, and felt the presence of Bob Hendricks strong and
compelling; she knew he had been there that very day, and wondered
where he sat. Then she thought perhaps she would do better not to go.
She looked into the men's waiting room, and it was empty save for one
man; his back was turned to her, but she recognized Lige Bemis. A
tremble of guilt racked and weakened her. And with a thrill as of pain
she heard the faint whistle of a train far up the valley. The man
moved about the room inside. Apparently he also heard the far-off
whistle. She shrank around the corner of the depot. But he caught
sight of her dress, and slowly sauntered up and down the platform
until he passed near enough to her to identify her in the faint
flicker of the gas. He spoke, and she returned his greeting. The train
whistled again--much nearer it seemed to her, but still far away, and
her soul and the "no" were grappling in a final contest. Suddenly it
came over her that she had not bought her ticket. Again the train
whistled, and far up the tracks she could see a speck of light. She
hurried into the waiting room to buy the ticket. The noise of the
train was beginning to sound in her ears, She was frightened and
nervous, and she fumbled with her purse and valise. Nearer and nearer
came the train, and the "no" fairly screamed in her ears, and her face
was pallid, with the black wrinkles standing out upon it in the
gaslight. The train was in the railroad yards, and the glare of the
headlight was in the waiting room. Bemis came in and saw her fumbling
with her ticket, her pocket book, and her valise.
"You'll have to hurry, Mrs. Brownwell, this is the limited--it only
stops a minute. Let me help you."
He picked up the valise and followed her from the room. The rush of
the incoming train shattered her nerves. They pulsed in fear of some
dreadful thing, and in that moment she wondered whether or not she
would ever see it all again--the depot, the familiar street, the
great mill looming across the river, and the Barclay home half a mile
above them. In a second she realized all that her going meant, and the
"no" screamed at her, and the "why not" answered feebly. But she had
gone too far, she said to herself. The engine was passing her, and
Bemis was behind her with the heavy valise. She wondered what he would
say when Bob met her at the train in the city. All this flashed across
her mind in a second, and then she became conscious that the rumbling
thing in front of her was not the limited but a cattle train, and the
sickening odour from it made her faint. In the minute while it was
rushing by at full speed she became rigid, and then, taking her valise
from the man behind her, turned and walked as fast as she could up the
hill, and when she turned the corner she tried to run. Her feet took
her to the Barclay home. She stood trembling in terror on the great
wide porch and rang the bell. The servant admitted the white-faced,
shaking woman, and she ran to Jane Barclay's room.
"Oh, Jane," chattered Molly, "Jane, for God's love, Jane, hold
me--hold me tight; don't let me go. Don't!" She sank to the floor and
put her face in Jane's lap and stuttered: "I--I--have g-g-got to
t-t-tell you, Jane. I've g-g-ot to t-t-t-ell you, J-J-Jane." And then
she fell to sobbing. "Hold me, don't let me go out there. When it
whistles ag-g-gain h-h-hold me t-t-tight."
Jane Barclay's strong kind hands stroked the dishevelled hair of the
trembling woman. And in time she looked up and said quietly, "You
know--you know, Jane, Bob and I--Bob and I were going to run away!"
Molly looked at Jane a fearful second with beseeching eyes, and then
dropped her head and fell to sobbing again, and lay with her face on
the other woman's knees.
When she was quiet Jane said: "I wouldn't talk about it any more,
dear--not now." She stroked the hair and patted the face of the woman
before her. "Shall we go to bed now, dear? Come right in with me." And
soon Molly rose, and her spent soul rested in peace. But they did not go
to bed. The dawn found the two women talking it out together--clear from
the beginning.
And when the day came Molly Brownwell went to Jane Barclay's desk and
wrote. And when Bob Hendricks came home that night, his sister handed
him a letter. It ran:--
"MY DEAR BOB: I have thought it all out, dear; it wouldn't do at
all. I went to the train, and something, I don't know what, caught
me and dragged me over to Jane's. She was good--oh, so good. She
knows; but it was better that she should than--the other way.
"It will never do, Bob. We can't go back. The terrible something
that I did stands irrevocably between us. The love that might have
made both our lives radiant is broken, Bob--forever broken. And all
the king's horses and all the king's men cannot ever put it together
again. I know it now, and oh Bob, Bob, it makes me sadder than the
pain of unsatisfied love in my heart.
"It just can't be; nothing ever can make it as it was, and unless it
could be that way--the boy and girl way, it would be something
dreadful. We have missed the best in the world, Bob; we cannot enjoy
the next best together. But apart, each doing his work in life as
God wills it, we may find the next best, which is more than most
people know.
"I have found during this hour that I can pray again, Bob, and I am
asking God always to let me hope for a heaven, into which I can
bring a few little memories--of the time before you left me. Won't
you bring yours there, too, dear? Until then--good-by.
"MOLLY."
The springs that move God's universe are hidden,--those that move the
world of material things and those that move the world of spiritual
things, and make events creep out of the past into the future so
noiselessly that they seem born in the present. It is all a mystery,
the half-stated equation of life that we call the scheme of things.
Only this is sure, that however remote, however separated by time and
space, the tragedy of life has its root in the weakness of men, and of
all the heart-breaking phantasms that move across the panorama of the
day, somewhere deep-rooted in our own souls' weakness is the
ineradicable cause. Even God's mercy cannot separate the punishment
that follows sin, and perhaps it is the greatest mercy of His mercy
that it cannot do so. For when we leave this world, our books are
clear. If our souls grow--we pay the price in suffering; if they
shrivel, we go into the next world, poorer for our pilgrimage.
So do not pity Molly Brownwell nor Robert Hendricks when you learn
that as she left the station at Sycamore Ridge that night, Lige Bemis
went to a gas lamp and read the note from Robert Hendricks that in her
confusion she had dropped upon the floor. Only pity the miserable
creature whose soul was so dead in him that he could put that note
away to bide his time. In this wide universe, wherein we are growing
slowly up to Godhood, only the poor leprous soul, whitened with malice
and hate, deserves the angels' tears. The rest of us,--weak, failing,
frail, to whom life deals its sorrows and its tears, its punishments
and its anguish,--we leave this world nearer to God than when we came
here, and the journey, though long and hard, has been worth the while.
CHAPTER XIX
Back in the days when John Barclay had become powerful enough to
increase the price of his door strips to the railroad companies from
five dollars to seven and a half, he had transferred the business of
the factory that made the strips from Hendricks' Exchange National to
the new Merchants' State Bank which Gabriel Carnine was establishing.
For Carnine and Barclay were more of a mind than were Barclay and
Hendricks; Carnine was bent on getting rich, and he had come to regard
Barclay as the most remarkable man in the world. Hendricks, on the
other hand, knew Barclay to the core, and since the quarrel of the
seventies, while they had maintained business relations, they were
merely getting along together. There were times when Barclay felt
uncomfortable, knowing that Hendricks knew much about his business,
but the more Carnine knew, the more praise Barclay had of him; and so,
even though Jane kept her own account with Hendricks, and though John
himself kept a personal account with Hendricks, the Economy Door Strip
Company and the Golden Belt Wheat Company did business with Carnine,
and Barclay became a director of the Merchants' State Bank, and
greatly increased its prestige thereby. And Bob Hendricks sighed a
sigh of relief, for he knew that he would never become John Barclay's
fence and be called upon to dispose of stolen goods. So Hendricks went
his way with his eyes on a level and his jaw squared with the world.
And when he knew that Jane knew the secret of his soul, about the only
comfort he had in those black days was the exultation in his heart
that John--whatever he might know--could not turn it into cash at
the Exchange National Bank.
As he walked alone under the stars that first night after Molly
Brownwell's note came to him, he saw his life as it was, with things
squarely in their relations. Of course this light did not stay with
him always; at times in his loneliness the old cloud of wild yearning
would come over him, and he would rattle the bars of his madhouse
until he could fight his way out to the clean air of Heaven under the
stars. And at such times he would elude Dolan, and walk far away from
the town in fields and meadows and woods struggling back to
sanity--sometimes through a long night. But as the years passed, this
truth came to be a part of his consciousness--that in some measure
the thing we call custom, or law, or civilization, or society, with
all its faults, is the best that man, endowed as he is to-day, can
establish, and that the highest service one can pay to man or to God
is found in conforming to the social compact, at whatever cost of
physical pain, or mental anguish, if the conformation does not require
a moral breach. That was the faith he lived by, that by service to his
fellows and by sacrifice to whatever was worthy in the social compact,
he would find a growth of soul that would pay him, either here or
hereafter. So he lent money, and sold light, and traded in
merchandise, and did a man's work in politics--playing each game
according to the rules.
But whatever came to him, whatever of honour or of influence, or of
public respect, in his own heart there was the cloud--he knew that he
was a forger, and that once he had offered to throw everything he had
aside and take in return--But he was not candid enough even in his
own heart to finish the indictment. It made him flush with shame, and
perhaps that was why on his face there was often a curious
self-deprecating smile--not of modesty, not of charity, but the smile
of the man who is looking at a passing show and knows that it is not
real. As he went into his forties, and the flux of his life hardened,
he became a man of reserves--a kind, quiet, strong man, charitable to
a fault for the weaknesses of others, but a man who rarely reflected
his impulses, a listener in conversation, a dreamer amid the tumult of
business, whose success lay in his industry and caution, and who drew
men to him not by what he promised, but by the faith we chattering
daws have in the man who looks on and smiles while we prattle.
His lank bones began to take on flesh, and his face rounded at the
corners, and the eagerness of youth passed from him. He always looked
more of a man than John Barclay. For Barclay was a man of enthusiasms,
who occasionally liked to mouth a hard jaw-breaking "damn," and who
followed his instincts with womanly faith in them--so that he became
known as a man of impulse. But Hendricks' power was in repression, and
in Sycamore Ridge they used to say that the only reason why Bob
Hendricks grew a mustache was to chew it when people expected him to
talk. It wasn't much of a mustache--a little blond fuzz about as
heavy as his yellow eyebrows over his big inquiring blue eyes, and he
once told Dolan that he kept it for a danger signal. When he found
himself pulling at it, he knew he was nervous and should get out into
the open. They tell a story in the Ridge to the effect that Hendricks
started to run to a fire, and caught himself pulling at his mustache,
and turned around and went out to the power-house instead.
It was the only anecdote ever told of Hendricks after he was
forty--for he was not a man about whom anecdotes would hang well,
though the town is full of them about John Barclay. So Hendricks lived
a strong reticent man, who succeeded in business though he was honest,
and who won in politics by choosing his enemies from the kind of noisy
men who make many mistakes, and let every one know it. The time came
when he did not avoid Molly Brownwell; she felt that he was not afraid
to see her in any circumstances, and that made her happy. Sometimes
she went to him in behalf of one of her father's charges,--some poor
devil who could not pay his note at the bank and keep the children in
school, or some clerk or workman at the power-house who had been
discharged. At such times they talked the matter in hand over frankly,
and it ended by the man giving way to the woman, or showing her simply
that she was wrong.
Only once in nearly a score of years did a personal word pass between
them. She had come to him for his signature to a petition for a pardon
for a man whose family suffered while he was in the penitentiary.
Hendricks signed the paper and handed it back to her, and his blue
eyes were fixed impersonally upon her, and he smiled his curious,
self-deprecatory smile and sighed, "As we forgive our debtors." Then
he reached for a paper in his desk and seemed oblivious to her
presence. No one else was near them, and the woman hesitated a moment
before turning to go and repeated, "Yes, Bob--as we forgive our
debtors." She tried to show him the radiance in her soul, but he did
not look up and she went away. When she had gone, he pushed aside his
work and sat for a moment looking into the street; he began biting his
mustache, and rose, and went out of the bank and found some other
work.
That night as Hendricks and Dolan walked over the town together, Dolan
said: "Did you ever know, Robert"--that was as near familiarity as
the elder man came with Hendricks--"that Mart Culpepper owed his
son-in-law a lot of money?"
"Well," returned Hendricks, "he borrowed a lot fifteen years ago or
such a matter; why?"
"Well," answered Dolan, "I served papers on Mart to-day in a suit
for--I dunno, a lot of money--as I remember it about fifteen
thousand dollars. That seems like a good deal."
Hendricks grunted, and they walked on in silence. Hendricks knew from
Brownwell's overdraft that things were not going well with him, and he
believed that matters must have reached a painful crisis in the
Culpepper family if Brownwell had brought suit against the colonel.
The next morning Colonel Martin Culpepper came into the bank. He had
grown into a large gray man--with gray hair, gray mustaches of
undiminished size, and chin whiskers grayed and broadened with the
years. His fine black eyes were just beginning to lose their lustre,
and the spring was going out of his stride. As he came into the bank,
Hendricks noticed that the colonel seemed to shuffle just a little. He
put out his fat hand, and said:--
"Robert, will you come into the back room with me a moment? It isn't
business--I just want to talk with you." He smiled apologetically and
added, "Just troubles, Robert--just an old man wants to talk to some
one, in point of fact."
Hendricks followed the colonel into the directors' room, and without
ceremony the colonel sank heavily into a fat leather chair, facing the
window, and Hendricks sat down facing the colonel. The colonel looked
at the floor and fumbled his triangular watch-charm a moment, and
cleared his throat, as he spoke, "I don't know just how to begin--to
get at it--to proceed, as I may say, Robert." Hendricks did not
reply, and the colonel went on, "I just wanted to talk to some one,
that's all--to talk to you--just to you, sir, to be exact."
Hendricks looked kindly at the colonel, whose averted eyes made the
younger man feel uncomfortable. Then he said gently, "Well, Colonel,
don't be backward about saying what you want to to me." It was a long
speech for Hendricks, and he felt it, and then qualified it with,
"But, of course, I don't want to urge you."
The colonel's face showed a flush of courage to Hendricks, but the
courage passed, and there was a silence, and then a little twitch
under his eyes told Hendricks that the colonel was contemplating a
flank attack as he spoke, "Robert, may I ask you in confidence if
Adrian Brownwell is hard up?"
Hendricks believed the truth would bring matters to a head, and he
answered, "Well, I shouldn't wonder, Colonel."
"Very hard up?" pressed the colonel.
Hendricks remembered Brownwell's overdraft and half a dozen past due
notes to cover other overdrafts and answered, "Well, Colonel, not
desperate, but you know the _Index_ has been getting the best of the
_Banner_ for two or three years."
There was a pause, and then the colonel blurted out, "Well, Bob, he's
sued me."
"I knew that, Colonel," returned Hendricks, anxious to press the
matter to its core. "Jake told me yesterday."
"I was going to pay him; he's spoken about it several times--dunned me,
sir, in point of fact, off and on for several years. But he knew I was
good for it. And now the little coward runs off up to Chicago to attend
the convention and sues me while he's gone. That's what I hate."
Hendricks could see that the object of the colonel's visit was still on
his mind, and so he left the way open for the colonel to talk. "You know
how Mrs. Culpepper feels and how Molly feels--disgraced, sir,
humiliated, shamed, to be exact, sir, in front of the whole town. What
would you do, Robert? What can a man do in a time like this--I ask you,
what can he do?"
"Well, I'd pay him, Colonel, if I were you," ventured the younger man.
The colonel straightened up and glared at Hendricks and exclaimed:
"Bob Hendricks, do you think, sir, that Martin Culpepper would rest
for a minute, while he had a dollar to his name, or a rag on his back,
under the imputation of not paying a debt like that? It is paid,
sir,--settled in full this morning, sir. But what am I going to do
about him, sir--the contemptible scamp who publicly sued his own
wife's father? That's what I came to you for, Robert. What am I going
to do?"
"It'll be forgotten in a week, Colonel--I wouldn't worry about it,"
answered Hendricks. "We all have those little unpleasantnesses."
The colonel was silent for a time, and then he said: "Bob--" turning
his eyes to meet Hendricks' for the first time during their
meeting--"that scoundrel said to me yesterday morning before leaving,
'If I hadn't the misfortune of being your son-in-law, you wouldn't
have the honour of owing me this money.' Then he sneered at me--you
know the supercilious way he has, the damn miserable hound-pup way he
has of grinning at you,--and says, 'I regarded it as a loan, even
though you seemed to regard it as a bargain.' And he whirled and left
me." The colonel's voice broke as he added: "In God's name, Bob, tell
me--did I sell Molly? You know--you can tell me."
The colonel was on his feet, standing before Hendricks, with, his
hands stretched toward the younger man. Hendricks did not reply at
once, and the colonel broke forth: "Bob Hendricks, why did you and my
little girl quarrel? Did she break it or did you? Did I sell her, Bob,
did I sell my little girl?" He slipped back into the chair and for a
moment hid his face, and shook with a great sob, then pulled himself
together, and said, "I know I'm a foolish old man, Bob, only I feel a
good deal depends on knowing the truth--a good deal of my attitude
toward him."
Hendricks looked at the colonel for an abstracted moment, and then
said: "Colonel, Adrian Brownwell is hard up--very hard up, and you
don't know how he is suffering with chagrin at being beaten by the
_Index_. He is quick-tempered--just as you are, Colonel." He paused a
moment and took the colonel by the hand,--a fat, pink hand, without
much iron in it,--and brought him to his feet. "And about that other
matter," he added, as he put his arm about the colonel, "you didn't
sell her. I know that; I give you my word on that. It was fifteen
years ago--maybe longer--since Molly and I were--since we went
together as boy and girl. That's a long time ago, Colonel, a long time
ago, and I've managed to forget just why we--why we didn't make a go
of it." He smiled kindly at the colonel as he spoke--a smile that the
colonel had not seen in Hendricks' face in many years. Then the mask
fell on his face, and the colonel saw it fall--the mask of the man
over the face of the boy. A puzzled, bewildered look crept into the
gray, fat face, and Hendricks could see that the doubt was still in
the colonel's heart. The younger man pressed the colonel's hand, and
the two moved toward the door. Suddenly tears flushed into the dimmed
eyes of the colonel, and he cried, through a smile, "Bob Hendricks, I
believe in my soul you're a liar--a damn liar, sir, but, boy, you're
a thoroughbred--God bless you, you're a thoroughbred." And he turned
and shuffled from the room and out of the bank.
When Colonel Martin Culpepper left Robert Hendricks at the door of the
directors' room of the Exchange National Bank, the colonel was
persuaded in his heart that his daughter had married Adrian Brownwell
to please her parents, and the colonel realized that day that her
parents were pleased with Brownwell as a suitor for their daughter,
because in time of need he had come to their rescue with money, and
incidentally because he was of their own blood and caste--a Southern
gentleman of family. The colonel went to the offices of the Culpepper
Mortgage and Loan Company and went over his bank-book again. The check
that he drew would take all but three hundred and forty-five dollars
out of the accounts of his company, and not a dollar of it was his.
The Culpepper Mortgage Company was lending other people's money. It
had been lending money on farm mortgages for ten years. Pay-day on
many mortgages was coming due, and of the fifteen thousand dollars he
checked out to pay Adrian Brownwell's debt, thirteen thousand dollars
was money that belonged to the Eastern creditors of the company--men
and women who had sent their money to the company for it to lend; and
the money checked out represented money paid back by the farmers for
the release of their mortgages. Some of the money was interest paid by
farmers on their mortgages, some of it was partial payments--but none
of it was Colonel Culpepper's money.
"Molly," said the colonel, as his daughter came into the office, "I've
given a check for that--that money, you know, to Adrian--paid it in
full, my dear. But--" the colonel fumbled with his pencil a moment
and added, "I'm a trifle shy--a few thousand in point of fact, and I
just thought I'd ask--would you borrow it of Bob, if you were me?"
He looked at her closely, and she coloured and shook her head
vehemently as she replied: "Oh, no, father--no, can't you get it
somewhere else? Not from Bob--for that! I mean--oh--I'd much rather
not."
The colonel looked at his daughter a moment and drew a deep breath,
and sighed, and smiled across his sigh, and took her hand and put it
around his neck and kissed it, and when she was close to him he put
his arm about her, and their eyes met for a fleeting instant, and they
did not speak. But in a moment from across his desk the daughter
spoke, "Why don't you go to John or Carnine, father?"
"Well, Gabe--you know Gabe. I'm borrowed clear to the limit there,
now. And John--you know John, Molly--and the muss, the disagreeable
muss,--the row, in point of fact, we had over that last seventy-five
dollars settling up the College Heights business--you remember? Well,
I just can't go to John. But," he added cheerfully, "I can get it
elsewhere, my dear--I have other resources, other resources, my
dear." And the colonel smiled so gayly that he deceived even his
daughter, and she went home as happy as a woman with eyelids as red as
hers were that day might reasonably expect to be.
As for the colonel, he sat figuring for an hour upon a sheet of white
paper. His figures indicated that by putting all of his property
except his home into the market, and reserving all of his commissions
on loans that would fall due during the three years coming, he could
pay back the money he had taken, little by little, and be square with
the company's creditors in three years--or four at the most. So he
let the check stand, and did not try to borrow money of the banks to
make it good, but trusted to to-morrow's receipts to pay yesterday's
debts of the company. Knowing that several mortgages of more than
three thousand each would fall due in a few weeks, and that the men
carrying them, expected to pay them, the colonel wrote dilatory
letters to the Eastern creditors whose money he had taken, explaining
that there was some delay in the payment of the notes, and that the
matter would be straightened out in a few weeks. When the money came
in from the mortgages falling due the next month, he paid those
already due, and delayed the payment of Peter until Paul paid up. It
was a miserable business, and Colonel Culpepper knew that he was a
thief. The knowledge branded him as one, and bent his eyes to the
ground, and wrenched his proud neck so that his head hung loosely upon
it. Always when he spoke in public, or went among his poor on errands
of mercy, at his elbow stood the accusing spectre, and choked his
voice, and unnerved his hand. And trouble came upon the Culpeppers,
and the colonel's clothes, which, had always been immaculate, grew
shabby. As that year and the next passed and mortgages began falling
due, not only in the colonel's company but all over the county, all
over the state, all over the Missouri Valley, men found they could not
pay. The cycle of business depression moved across the world, as those
things come and go through the centuries. Moreover, General Ward was
riding on the crest of a wave of unrest which expressed in terms of
politics what the people felt in their homes. Debts were falling due;
crops brought small returns; capital was frightened; men in the mills
lost their work; men on the farms burned their corn; and Colonel
Martin Culpepper sank deeper and deeper into the mire.
Those years of the panic of the early nineties pressed all the youth
out of his step, dimmed the lustre of his eyes, and slowly broke his
heart. His keenest anguish was not for his own suffering, but because
his poor, the people at the Mission, came trooping to him for help,
and he had to turn so many away. The whole town knew that he was in
trouble, though no one knew or even suspected just what it was. For
the people had their own troubles in those days, and the town and the
county and the state and the whole world grew shabby.
One day in the summer of '93, Colonel Culpepper was sitting in his
office reading a letter from Vermont demanding a long-deferred
interest payment on a mortgage. There were three hundred dollars due,
and the colonel had but half that amount, and was going to send what
he had. Jake Dolan came into the office and saw the colonel sitting
with the letter crumpled in his hands, and with worry in the dull old
eyes.
"Come in, Jake, come in," cried the colonel, a little huskily. "What's
the trouble, comrade--what's wrong?"
But let Dolan tell it to Hendricks three days later, as the two are
sitting at night on the stone bridge across the Sycamore built by John
Barclay to commemorate the battle of Sycamore Ridge. "'Well, Mart,'
says I, 'I'm in vicarious trouble,' says I. 'It's along of my orphan
asylum,' says I. 'What orphan asylum?' says he. 'Well, it's this way,
Mart,' says I. 'You know they found Trixie Lee guilty this afternoon
in the justice court, don't you?' Mart sighs and says, 'Poor Trixie, I
supposed they would sooner or later, poor girl--poor girl. An' old
Cap Lee of the Red Legs was her father; did you know that, Jake?' he
asks. 'Yes, Mart,' says I, 'and Lady Lee before her. She comes by it
honestly.' Mart sat drumming with his fingers on the table, looking
back into the years. 'Poor Jim,' he says, 'Jim was a brave soldier--a
brave, big-hearted, generous soldier--he nursed me all that first
night at Wilson's Creek when I was wounded. Poor Jim.' 'Yes,' says I,
'and Trixie has named her boy for him--Jim Lord Lee Young; that was
her husband's name--Young,' says I. 'And it's along of the boy that
I'm here for. The nicest bright-eyed little chap you ever saw; and he
seems to know that something is wrong, and just clings to his mother
and cries--seven years old, or maybe eight--and begs me not to put
his mother in jail. And,' says I to Mart, 'Mart, I just can't do it.
The sheriff he's run, and so has the deputy; they can't stand the boy
crying, and damn it to hell, Mart, I can't, either; so I just left 'em
in the office and locked the door and come around to see you. I'd 'a'
gone to see Bob, only he's out of town this week,' I says. 'I can
throw up the job, Mart--though I'd have to go on the county; but
Mart, they ain't a soul for the boy to go to; and it ain't right to
put him in jail with the scum that's in there.'"
"Tough--wasn't it?" said Hendricks. "What did you do? Why didn't you
go to Carnine or Barclay?"
"That's just what I'm a-comin' to,--the Priest or the Levite?" said
Jake. "Well, Mart said, 'Where're the men they caught--won't they
help?' and I says, 'They paid their tine and skipped.' 'Fine?' asks
Mart, 'fine? I thought you said it was jail sentence.' 'Well,' says I,
'it amounts to the same thing; she can't pay her fine, and that damn
reform judge, wanting to make a record as a Spartan, has committed her
to jail till it is paid!' 'So they go free, and she goes to jail,
because she is poor,' says Mart.' That's what your reform means,' says
I, 'or I let her and the boy loose and lose my job. And oh, Mart,'
says I, 'the screams of that little boy at the disgrace of it and the
terror of the jail--man--I can't stand it!' 'How much is it?' sighs
Mart. 'An even hundred fine and seventeen dollars and fifty cents
costs,' says I. Mart's eyes was leaking, and he gets up and goes to
the vault, and comes back with the cash and says, blubbering like a
calf: 'Here, Jake Dolan, you old scoundrel, take this. I'll pass a
paper and get it to-morrow--now get out of here.' And he handed me
the money all cried over where he'd been slow counting it out, and
said when he'd got hold of his wobbly jaw: 'Don't you tell her where
you got it--I don't want her around here. I'll see her to-morrow when
I'm down that way and talk to her for old Cap Lee--' And then he
laughs as he stands in the door and says: 'Well, Jim,' and he points
up, 'your bread cast upon the waters was a long time a-coming--but
here she is;' and he says, 'Do you suppose the old villain knows?' And
I turned and hunted up the justice and went around to the office, and
told Trixie to 'go sin no more,' and she laughs and says, 'Well,
hardly ever!' and I kissed the kid, and he fought my whiskers, and we
all live happy ever after."
But the colonel, after Dolan left the office, went into the darkening
room, and spread out the harsh letter from the Vermont banker
demanding money long past due, and read and reread it and took up his
burden, and got into the weary treadmill of his life. It rained the
next day, and he did not go out with his subscription paper; he had
learned that people subscribe better on bright days; and as Hendricks
and Barclay were both out of town, he wrote a dilatory letter to the
Vermont people--the fifth he had written about that particular
transaction--and waited another rainy day and still another before
starting out with his paper. But the event was past; the cry of the
child was not in the people's ears; they knew that the colonel had put
up the money; so it was not until Hendricks came back and heard the
story from Dolan that the colonel was repaid. Then because he actually
had the money--at least half of it due on that particular debt, which
was one of scores of its kind--the colonel delayed another day and
another, and while he was musing the fire burned. And events started
in Vermont which greatly changed the course of this story.
"I wonder," he has written in that portion of the McHurdie Biography
devoted to "The Press of the Years," "why, as we go farther and
farther into life, invariably it grows dingier and dingier. The 'large
white plumes' that dance before the eyes of youth soil, and are
bedraggled. And out of the inexplicable tangle of the mesh of life
come dark threads from God knows where and colour the woof of it gray
and dreary. Ah for the days of the large white plumes--for the days
when life's woof was bright!"
CHAPTER XX
If the reader of this tale should feel drawn to visit Sycamore Ridge,
he will find a number of interesting things there, and the trip may be
made by the transcontinental traveller with the loss of but half a
dozen hours from his journey. The Golden Belt Railroad, fifteen years
ago, used to print a guide-book called "California and Back," in which
were set down the places of interest to the traveller. In that book
Sycamore Ridge was described thus:--
"Sycamore Ridge, pop. 22,345, census 1890; large water-power, main
industry milling; also manufacturing; five wholesale houses. Seat
Ward University, 1300 students; also Garrison County High School,
also Business College. Thirty-five churches, two newspapers, the
_Daily Banner_ and the _Index_; fifty miles of paved streets;
largest stone arch bridge in the West, marking site of Battle of
Sycamore Ridge, a border ruffian skirmish; home of Watts McHurdie,
famous as writer of war-songs, best known of which is--" etc., etc.
But excepting Watts, who may be gone before you get there,--for he is
an old man now, and is alone and probably does not always have the
best of care,--the things above annotated will not interest the
traveller. At the Thayer House they will tell you that three things in
the town give it distinction: the Barclay home, a rambling gray brick
structure which the natives call Barclay Castle, with a great sycamore
tree held together by iron bands on the terraced lawn before the
house--that is number one; the second thing they will advise the
traveller to see is Mary Barclay Park, ten acres of transplanted elm
trees, most tastefully laid out, between Main Street and the Barclay
home; and the third thing that will be pointed out to the traveller is
the Schnitzler fountain, in the cemetery gateway, done by St. Gaudens;
it represents a soldier pouring water from his canteen into his hand,
as he bathes the brow of a dying comrade.
These things, of course,--the house, the park, and the
fountain,--represent John Barclay and his money. The town is proud of
them, but the reader is advised not to expect too much of them. One of
the two things really worth seeing at the Ridge is the view over the
wheat fields of the Sycamore Valley from the veranda of the Culpepper
home on the hill. There one may see the great fields lying in three
townships whereon John Barclay founded his fortune. The second thing
worth seeing may be found in the hallway of the public library
building, just at the turn of the marble stairway, where the morning
light strikes it. Take the night train out of Chicago and get to the
Ridge in the morning, to get the light on that picture.
It is a portrait of John Barclay, done when he was forty years old and
painted by a Russian during the summer when the Barclays were called
home from Europe before their journey was half completed, to
straighten out an obstreperous congressman, one Tom Wharton by name,
who was threatening to put wheat and flour on the free list in a
tariff bill, unless--but that is immaterial, except that Wharton was
on Barclay's mind more or less while the painter was at work, and the
portrait reflects what Barclay thought of a number of things. It shows
a small gray-clad man, with a pearl pin in a black tie, sitting rather
on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, so that the head is thrown
into the light. The eyes are well opened, and the jaw comes out, a
hard mean jaw; but the work of the artist, the real work that reveals
the soul of the sitter, is shown in three features, if we except the
pugnacious shoulders. In the face are two of these features: the
mouth, a hard, coarse, furtive mouth,--the mouth of the liar who is
not polished,--the peasant liar who has been caught and has brazened
it out; the mouth and the forehead, full almost to bulging, so clean
and white and naked that it seems shameful to expose it, a poet's
forehead, noble and full of dreams, broad over the eyes, and as
delicately modelled at the temples as a woman's where the curly brown
hair is brushed away from it. But the wonderful feature about the
portrait is the right hand. The artist obviously asked Barclay to
assume a natural attitude, and then seeing him lean forward with his
hand stretched out in some gesture of impatience, persuaded him to
take that pose. It is the sort of vital human thing that would please
Barclay--no sham about it; but he did not realize what the Russian
was putting into that hand--a long, hard, hairy, hollow, grasping,
relentless hand, full in the foreground and squarely in the light--a
horrible thing with artistic fingers, and a thin, greedy palm
indicated by the deep hump in the back. It reaches out from the
picture, with the light on the flesh tints, with the animal hair thick
upon it, and with the curved, slender, tapering fingers cramped like a
claw; and when one follows up the arm to the crouching body, the
furtive mouth, the bold, shrewd eyes, and then sees that forehead full
of visions, one sees in it more than John Barclay of Sycamore Ridge,
more than America, more than Europe. It is the menace of
civilization--the danger to the race from the domination of sheer
intellect without moral restraint.
General Ward, who was on the committee that received the picture
fifteen years after it was painted, stood looking at it the morning it
was hung there on the turn of the stairs. As the light fell
mercilessly upon it, the general, white-haired, white-necktied,
clean-shaven, and lean-faced, gazed at the portrait for a long time,
and then said to his son Neal who stood beside him, "And Samson wist
not that the Lord had departed from him."
It will pay one to stop a day in Sycamore Ridge to see that
picture--though he does not know John Barclay, and only understands
the era that made him, and gave him that refined, savage, cunning,
grasping hand.
Barclay stopped a week in Washington on his return from Europe the
year that picture was painted, made a draft for fifty thousand dollars
on the National Provisions Company to cover "legal expenses," and came
straight home to Sycamore Ridge. He was tired of cities, he told
Colonel Culpepper, who met Barclay at the post-office the morning he
returned, with his arms full of newspapers. "I want to hear the old
mill, Colonel," said Barclay, "to smell the grease down in the guts of
her, and to get my hair full of flour again." When he had gorged
himself for two days, he wired Bemis to come to the Ridge, and Barclay
and Bemis sat on the dam one evening until late bedtime, considering
many things. As they talked, Barclay found that a plan for the
reorganization of the Provisions Company was growing in his mind, and
he talked it out as it grew.
"Lige," he said, as he leaned with his elbows on a rock behind him,
"the trouble with the company as it now stands is that it's too
palpable. There's too much to levy on--too much in sight; too much
physical property. How would it do to sell all these mills and
elevators, and use the company as a kind of a cream skimmer--a profit
shop--to market the products of the mills?" He paused a moment, and
Bemis, who knew he was not expected to reply, flipped pebbles into the
stream. Barclay changed his position slightly and began to pick stones
out of the crevices, and throw the stones into the water. "That's the
thing to do--go ahead and sell every dollar's worth of assets the
company's got--I'll take the mill here. I couldn't get along without
that. Then we'll buy the products of the mills at cost of the millers,
and let them get their profits back as individual holders of our
stock. Our company will handle the Door Strip--buy it and sell
it--and if any long-nosed reformer gets to snooping around the mills,
he'll find they are making only a living profit; and as for us--any
state grain commissioner or board of commissioners who wanted to
examine us could do so, and what'd he find? Simply that we're buying
our products at cost of the millers and selling at the market
price--sometimes at a loss, sometimes at a profit; and what if we do
handle all the grain and grain products in the United States? They
can't show that we are hurting anything. I tell you there's getting to
be too much snooping now in the state and federal governments. Have
you got any fellow in your office who can fix up a charter that will
let us buy and sell grain, and also sell the Barclay Economy Strip?"
Bemis nodded.
"Then, damn 'em, let 'em go on with their commissioners and boards and
legislative committees; they can't catch us. There's no law against
the railroads that ship our stuff buying the Economy Door Strip, is
there? You bet there isn't. And we're entitled to a good round
inventor's profit, ain't we? You bet we are. You go ahead and get up
that reorganization, and I'll put it through. Say, Lige--" Barclay
chuckled as a recollection flashed across his mind--"you know I've
made some of our Northwest senators promise to make you a federal
judge. That's one of the things I did last week; I thought maybe
sometime we'd need a federal judge as one of the--what do you call
it--the hereditaments thereunto appertaining of the company." Bemis
opened his eyes in astonishment, and Barclay grunted in disgust as he
went on: "Of course we can't get you appointed from this
state--that's clear--but they think we can work it through in the
City--as soon as there is a vacancy--or make a new district. How
would you like that? Judge Bemis--say, that sounds all right, doesn't
it?"
Barclay rose and stretched his legs and arms. "Well, I must be
going--Mrs. Barclay and my mother want to hear the new organ over in
the Congregational Church. It's a daisy--Colonel Culpepper, amongst
hands, skirmished up three thousand. They let me pick it out, and I
had to put up another thousand myself to get the kind I wanted. Are
you well taken care of at the hotel?" When Bemis explained that he had
the bridal chamber, the two men clambered up the bank of the stream,
crossed the bridge, and at his gate Barclay said: "Now, I'll sleep on
this to-night,--this reorganization,--and then I'll write you a
letter to-morrow, covering all that I've said, and you can fix up a
tentative charter and fire it down--and say, Lige, figure out what a
modest profit on all the grain and grain produce business of the
country would be--say about two and a half per cent, and make the
capitalization of the reorganization fit that. We'll get the real
profits out of the Door Strip, and can fix that up in the books. We'll
show the reformers a trick or two." It was a warm night, and when the
organ recital was over, John and Jane Barclay, after the custom of the
town, sat on a terrace in front of the house talking of the day's
events. Music always made John babble.
"Jane," he asked suddenly, "Jane--when does a man begin to grow old?
Here I am past forty. I used to think when a man was forty he was
middle-aged; every five years I have advanced my idea of what an old
man was; when I was fifteen, I thought a man was getting along when he
was thirty. When I was twenty-five, I regarded forty as the beginning
of the end; when I was thirty, I put the limit of activity at
forty-five; five years ago I moved it up to fifty; and to-day I have
jumped it to sixty. It seems to me, Jane, that I'm as much of a boy as
ever; all this talk about my being a man puzzles me. What's this
Provisions Company but a game? And I'm going to play another game; I'm
going to get grain and grain produce organized, and then I'm going to
tackle meat. In ten years I'll have the packing-houses where I have
the mills; but it's just play--and it's a lot of fun."
He was silent a moment. Jane did not disturb his reveries. She
understood, without exactly putting her feeling into language, that
she was being talked at, not talked to.
"Say, Jane," he exclaimed, "wasn't that 'Marche Triomphante to-night
great?" He hummed a bar from the motif, "That's it--my--" he cried,
hitting his chair arm with his fist, "but that's a big thing--almost
good enough for Wagner to have done; big and insistent and strong. I'm
getting to like music with go to it--with bang and brass. Wagner does
it; honest, Jane, when I hear his trombones coming into a theme, I get
ideas enough to give the whole force in the office nervous prostration
for a month. To-night when that thing was swelling up like a great
tidal wave of music rolling in, I worked out a big idea; I'm going to
sell all the mills and factories back to the millers for our stock,
and when I own every dollar of our stock, I'm going to double the
price of it to them and sell it back to them; and if they haggle about
it, I'll build a new mill across the track from every man-jack who
tries to give me any funny business--I'll show 'em. That
reorganization ought to clean up millions for us in the next year.
What a lot of fun it all is! I used to think old Jay Gould was some
pumpkins; but if we get this reorganization through, I'll go down
there and buy the Gould outfit and sell 'em for old iron."
The current of his thoughts struck under language, as a prairie stream
sometimes hides from its surface bed. After a time Jane said: "Grandma
Barclay thought the 'Marche Funebre' was the best thing the man did. I
heard the Wards speaking of it in the vestibule; and Molly, who held
my hand through it, nearly squeezed it off--poor girl; but she looks
real well these days." Jane paused a moment and added: "Did you notice
the colonel? How worn and haggard he looks--he seems broken so. They
say he is in trouble. Couldn't we help him?"