Her husband did not reply at once. Finally he recalled his wandering

wits and answered: "Oh, I don't know, Jane. He'll pull through, I

guess." Then he reverted to the music, which was still in his head.

"He played the Largo well--didn't he? That was made for the organ.

But some way I like the big things. The Largo is like running a little

twenty-horse-power steam mill, and selling to the home grocers. But

'The Ride of the Valkyries,' with those screaming discords of brass,

and those magnificent crashes of harmony--Jane, I've got an

idea--Wagner's work is the National Provisions Company set to music,

and I'm the first trombone." He laughed and reached for his wife's

hand and kissed it; then he rose and stood before her, admiring her in

the starlight, as he exclaimed: "And you are those clarinets, sweet

and clear and delicious, that make a man want to cry for sheer joy.

Come on, my dear--isn't it very late?" And the little man limped

across the grass up the steps and into the house. The two stopped a

moment while he listened to the roar of the water and the rumble of

the mill, that glowed in the night like a phosphorescent spectre. He

squeezed her hand and cried out in exultation, "It's great, isn't

it--the finest mill on this planet, my dear--do you realize that?"

And then they turned into the house.

The next morning he kept two stenographers busy; he was spinning the

web of his reorganization, bringing about a condition under which men

were compelled to exchange their stock in the National Provisions

Company for their former property. He was a crafty little man, and his

ways were sometimes devious, even though to outward view his

advertised and proclaimed methods were those of a pirate. So when he

had dictated a day's work to two girls, he went nosing through the

mill, loafing in the engine rooms, looking at the water wheel, or

running about rafters in the fifth floor like a great gray rat. As he

went he hummed little tunes under his breath or whistled between his

teeth, with his lips apart. After luncheon he unlocked a row-boat, and

took a cane pole and rowed himself a mile up the mill-pond, and

brought home three good-sized bass. Thus did he spend his idle moments

around the Ridge. That night he thumped his piano and longed for a

pipe organ. The things he tried to play were noisy, and his mother,

sitting in the gloaming near him, sighed and said: "John, play some of

the old pieces--the quieter ones; play 'The Long and Weary Day' and

some of the old songs. Have you forgotten the 'Bohemian Girl' and

those Schubert songs?"

His fingers felt their way back to his boyhood, and when he ceased

playing, he stood by his mother a moment, and patted her cheeks as he

hummed in German the first two lines of the "Lorelei," and then said,

"We have come a long way since then--eh, mother?" She held his hand

to her cheek and then to her lips, but she did not reply. He repeated

it, "A long, long way from the little home of one room here!" After a

pause he added, "Would you like to go back?"

A tear fell on the hand against her cheek. He felt her jaw quiver, and

then she said, "Oh, yes, John--yes, I believe I would."

He knew she did not care for his wealth, and there were many things

about his achievements that he felt she might misunderstand; her

attitude often puzzled him. So he sat a moment on her chair arm, and

said, "Well, mother, I have done my best." It was a question more than

a protest.

"Yes, dear," she replied, "I know you have--you have done your

best--your very best. But I think it is in your blood."

"What?" he asked.

"Oh, all this," she answered; "all this money-getting. I am foolish,

John, but some way, I want my little boy back--the one who used to

sit with me so long ago, and play on the guitar and sing 'Sleeping, I

Dream, Love.' I don't like your new music, John; it's so like clanging

cars, and crashing hammers, and the groans of men at toil."

"But this is a new world, mother--a new world that is different,"

protested the son, impatiently.

And the mother answered sadly as she looked up at him: "I know,

dear--it is a new world; but the same old God moves it; and the same

faith in God and love of man move men that always have moved them, and

always will move them; there are as many things to live and die for

now, as when your father gave up his life, John--just as many." They

rocked together in silence--the boy of forty and the mother of sixty.

Finally she said, "Johnnie, play me 'Ever of Thee I'm fondly

Thinking,' won't you, before you go?"

He sat with his foot on the soft pedal and played the old love song,

and as he played his mother wandered over hills he had never seen,

through fields he had never known, and heard a voice in the song he

might never hear, even in his dreams. When he finished, she stood

beside him and cried with all the passion her years could summon: "Oh,

John--John--it will come out some way--some day. It's in your soul,

and God in His own way will bring it out." He did not understand her

then, and it was many years before he prayed her prayer.

The next day he went to the City and plunged into his work, and the

Ridge and its people and the prayers of his mother became to him only

as a dream that comes in the night and fades in the day. Even the

shabby figure of Colonel Martin Culpepper, with his market basket on

his arm, waving a good-by as the Barclay private car pulled out of the

Sycamore Ridge depot, disappeared from his mind, though that pathetic

image haunted him for nearly a hundred miles as he rode, and he could

not shake it off until he immersed himself in the roar of the great

City. He could not know that he had any remote relation with the worry

in the old man's eyes. Nor did Martin Culpepper try to shift his load

to John. He knew where the blame was, and he tried to take it like a

man. But in reckoning the colonel's account, may not something be

charged off to the account of John Barclay, who to save himself and

accomplish the Larger Good--which meant the establishment of his own

fortunes--sent Adrian Brownwell in those days in the seventies with

the money to the colonel, not so much to help the colonel as to save

John Barclay? The Larger Good is a slow, vicious, accumulative poison,

and heaven only knows when it will come out and kill.

It was a week after the pipe-organ recital at the church, when Mary

Barclay, doing her day's marketing, ran into Colonel Culpepper

standing rather forlornly in front of McHurdie's shop. He bowed to her

with elaborate graciousness, and she stopped to speak with him. In a

moment he was saying, "So you have not heard, are unaware, entirely

ignorant, in point of fact, of my misfortunes?" She assented, and the

colonel went on: "Well, madam, the end has come; I have played out my

hand; I have strutted my hour upon the stage, and now I go off. Old

Mart Culpepper, my dear, is no longer the leading citizen, nor our

distinguished capitalist, not even the hustling real estate agent of

former days--just plain old Mart Culpepper, I may say. He who was, is

now a has-been,--just an old man without a business." He saw that she

did not appreciate what had happened, and he smiled gently and said:

"Closed up, my dear madam. A receiver was appointed a few minutes ago

for the Culpepper Mortgage Company, and I gave him the key.

Failure--failure--" he repeated the word bitterly--"failure is

written over the door of this life."

Mary Barclay grasped his big fat hand and pressed it, and shook her

head. Something in her throat choked her, and she could not speak at

first. The two stood a moment in silence before the woman said

emphatically, "No--no! Martin Culpepper, God is keeping your books!"

The shabby old man stood uncovered, a smile quivering about his eyes.

"Maybe so, Mary Barclay, maybe so," he said. The smile fell into his

countenance as he added, "That is why I have gone so long without a

settlement; with my account so badly overdrawn, too." Then he turned

to go and walked as lightly down the street as a man could walk,

broken before his time with the weight of a humiliation upon him and a

fear greater than his shame burning in his fluttering old heart.

And now if you are reading this story to be in the company of the rich

Mr. Barclay, to feel the madness of his millions, to enjoy the vain

delirium of his power, skip the rest of this chapter. For it tells of a

shabby time in the lives of all of the threadbare people who move in

this tale. Even John Barclay sees the seams and basting threads of his

life here, and as for the others,--the colonel and Jake and the general

and Watts, and even Molly,--what do these people mean to you, these

common people, in their old clothes, with their old hearts and their

rusty sins and their homely sorrows? Milord and his lady will not

scamper across these pages; no rooms with rich appointments will gladden

your eyes, and perhaps in the whole book you will not find a man in

evening dress nor a woman in a dinner gown. And now the only thing there

is to offer is Jake Dolan, aged fifty-seven, with scanty, grizzled hair,

sitting in his shirt-sleeves in the basement of the court-house, with

the canvas cot he sleeps on for a chair, mending his blue army coat.

Beside him on the bed are his trousers, thin, almost worn through,

patched as to the knees and as to other important places, but clean and

without a loose thread hanging from them. Surely an old Irishman mending

an old army coat under a dusty electric light bulb in the basement of a

court-house, wherein he is janitor by grace of the united demand of

Henry Schnitzler Post of the G.A.R. No. 432, is not a particularly

inspiring picture. But he has bitten the last thread with his teeth, and

is putting away the sewing outfit. And now Mr. Dolan, from the drawer of

a little table beside the cot,--a table with Bob Hendricks' picture,

framed in plush, sitting on the top,--now Mr. Dolan takes from the

drawer a tablet of writing paper printed by the county. It is his

particular pride, that writing paper. For upon it at the top is the

picture of the new one-hundred-thousand-dollar court-house, and beside

the court-house picture are these words: "Office of Jacob Dolan,

Custodian of Public Buildings and Grounds of Garrison County." Mr. Dolan

will be writing a letter, and so long as it begins with "Dear Sir," and

nothing more endearing, surely we may look over his shoulder while he

writes,--even though it is bad form. And as Mr. Dolan will be writing to

"Robert Hendricks, care of Cook's Hotel, Cairo, Egypt,"--which he spells

with an "i," but let that pass, and let some of his literary style and

construction pass with it,--and as he will be writing to Mr. Hendricks,

perhaps Miss Nancy may do well to go sit in the corridor and put her

fingers in her ears while we read. For Mr. Dolan is an emotional man,

and he is breathing hard, and by the way he grabs his pen and jabs it

into the ink one can see that he is angry.

"DEAR SIR (begins Mr. Dolan): I take my pen in hand to answer yours

of this date from New York and would have written you anyhow, as

there is much on my mind and I would cable you, but I can't, being

for the moment short of funds. I write to say, Robert, that we have

Mart Culpepper in jail--right across the hall. He came in at nine

o'clock to-night, and the damn Pop judge put his bail at $15,999 to

cover his alleged shortage, and the stinker won't accept us old boys

on the bond--Phil and Watts and Os and the Company 'C' boys I could

get before the judge went to bed, and Gabe Carnine, the gut, would

not sign--would not sign old Mart's bond, sir, and I hope to be in

hell with a fishpole some day poking him down every time his slimy

fingers get on the rim of the kettle. But we'll have him out in the

morning, if every man in Garrison County has to go on the bond. They

say Mart received money to pay four or five mortgages due to a

Vermont Bank, and they sent a detective here about a month ago and

worked up the case, and closed his business to-day and waited until

to-night to arrest him. I've just come from Mart. It's hell. Hoping

this will find you enjoying the same I beg my dear sir to sign

myself

"Your ob't s'r'v't J. DOLAN."

When Jacob Dolan finished his letter, he addressed the envelope and

hurried away to mail it. And so long as we are here in the

court-house, and the custodian is gone, would you like to step in and

see Martin Culpepper across the hall? It is still in the basement now,

and if you are quiet, so quiet that the slipping patter of a rat's

foot on the floor comes to you, a sound as of a faint whining will

come to you also. There--now it comes again. No, it is not a dog; it

is a man--a man in his agony. Shall we open the great iron door, and

go into the cell room? Why, not even you, Miss Nancy--not even you,

who love tears so? You would not see much--only a man, with his coat

and vest off, an old man with a rather shaggy, ill-kept chin whisker

and not the cleanest shirt in the world--though it is plaited, and

once was a considerable garment. And the man wearing it, who lies

prostrate upon his face, once was a considerable man. But he is old

now, old and broken, and if he should look up, as you stepped in the

corridor before him, you would see a great face ripped and scarred by

fear and guilt, and eyes that look so piteously at you--eyes of a man

who cannot understand why the blow has fallen, surprised eyes with a

horror in them; and if he should speak, you will find a voice rough

and mushy with asthma. The heart that has throbbed so many nights in

fear and the breath that has been held for so many footsteps, at last

have turned their straining into disease. No--let's not go in. He

bade his daughter go, and would not see his wife, and they have sent

to the City for his son,--so let us not bother him, for to-morrow he

will be out on bail. But did you hear that fine, trembling, animal

whine--that cry that wrenched itself out of set teeth like a living

thing? Come on--let us go and find Jake, and if he is taking a drink,

don't blame him too much, Miss Nancy--how would you like to sleep in

that room across the corridor?

At nine o'clock the next morning two hundred men had signed the bond

the judge required, and Martin Culpepper shambled home with averted

eyes. They tried to carry him on their shoulders, thinking it would

cheer him up; and from the river wards of the town scores came to give

him their hands. But he shook himself away from them, like a great

whipped dog, and walked slowly up the hill, and turned into Lincoln

Avenue alone.

John Barclay heard the news of the colonel's trouble as he stepped

from his private car in the Sycamore Ridge yards that morning, and

Jane went to the Culpepper home without stopping at her own. That

afternoon, Molly Brownwell knocked at Barclay's office door in the

mill, and went in without waiting for him to open it. She was pale and

haggard, and she sat down before he could speak to her.

"John," she said in a dead voice that smote his heart, "I have come

for my reward now. I never thought I'd ask it, John, but last night I

thought it all out, and I don't believe it's begging."

"No," he replied quietly, "it's not. I am sure--"

But she did not let him finish. She broke in with: "Oh, I don't want

any of your money; I want my own money--money that you got when you

sold me into bondage, John Barclay--do you remember when?" She cried

the last words in a tremulous little voice, and then caught herself,

and went on before he could put into words the daze in his face. "Let

me tell you; do you remember the day you called me up into your office

and asked me to hold Adrian in town to save the wheat company? Yes,

you do--you know you do! And you remember that you played on my love

for Bob, and my duty to father. Well, I saved you, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did, Molly," Barclay replied.

She stared a moment at the framed pictures of mill designs on the

wall, and at the wheat samples on the long table near her, and did not

speak; nor did he. She finally broke the silence: "Well, I saved you,

but what about father--" her voice broke into a sob--"and Bob--Jane

has told you what Bob and I have been--and what about me--what have

you taken from me in these twenty years? Oh, John, John, what a

fearful wreck we have made of life--you with your blind selfishness,

and I with my weakness! Did you know, John, that the money that father

borrowed that day, twenty years ago, of Adrian, to lend to you, is the

very money that sent him to jail last night? I guess he--he took what

wasn't his to pay it back." Her face twitched, and she was losing

control of her voice. Barclay stepped to the door and latched it. She

watched him and shook her head sadly. "You needn't be afraid,

John--I'm not going to make a scene."

"It's all right, Molly," said Barclay. "I want to help you--you know

that. I'm sorry, Molly--infinitely sorry."

She looked at him for a moment in silence, and then said: "Yes, John,

I'll give you credit for that; I think you're as sorry as a selfish

man like you can be. But are you sorry enough to go to jail a pauper,

like father, or wander over the earth alone, like Bob, or come and beg

for money, like me?" Then she caught herself quickly and cried: "Only

it's not begging, John--it's my own; it's the price you got when you

sold me into bondage; it's the price of my soul, and I need it now.

Those people only want their money--that is all."

"Yes," he replied, "I suppose that is all they want." He drummed on

his desk a moment and then asked, "Does your father know how much it

is?"

"Yes," she answered, "I found in his desk at the house last night a

paper on which he had been figuring--poor father--all the night

before. All the night before--" she repeated, and then sobbed, "Poor

father--all the night before. He knew it was coming. He knew the

detective was here. He told me to-day that the sum he had there was

correct. It is sixteen thousand five hundred and forty-three dollars.

But he doesn't know I'm here, John. I told him I had some money of my

own--some I'd had for years--and I have--oh, I have, John

Barclay--I have." She looked up at him with the pallid face stained

with fresh tears and asked, "I have--I have--haven't I, John,

haven't I?"

He put his elbows on the desk and sank his head in his hands and

sighed, "Yes, Molly--yes, you have."

They sat in silence until the roar of the waters and the murmur of the

wheels about them came into the room. Then the woman rose to go.

"Well, John," she said, "I suppose one shouldn't thank a person for

giving her her own--but I do, John. Oh, it's like blood money to

me--but father--I can't let father suffer."

She walked to the door, he stepped to unlatch it, and she passed out

without saying good-by. When she was gone, he slipped the latch, and

sat down with his hands gripping the table before him. As he sat

there, he looked across the years and saw some of the havoc he had

made. There was no shirking anything that he saw. A footfall passing

the door made him start as if he feared to be caught in some guilty

act. Yet he knew the door was locked. He choked a little groan behind

his teeth, and then reached for the top of his desk, pulled down the

rolling cover, and limped quickly out of the room--as though he were

leaving a corpse. What he saw was the ghost of the Larger Good,

mocking him through the veil of the past, and asking him such

questions as only a man's soul may hear and not resent.

He walked over the mill for a time, and then calling his stenographers

from their room, dictated them blind and himself dumb with details of

a deal he was putting through to get control of the cracker companies

of the country. When he finished, the sunset was glaring across the

water through the window in front of him, and he had laid his ghost.

But Molly Brownwell had her check, and her father was saved.

That evening the colonel sat with Watts McHurdie, on the broad veranda

of the Culpepper home, and as the moon came out, General Ward wandered

up the walk and Jake Dolan came singing down the street about "the

relic of old dacincy--the hat me father wore." Perhaps he had one

drink in him, and perhaps two, or maybe three, but he clicked the gate

behind him, and seeing the three men on the veranda, he called out:--

"Hi, you pig-stealing Kansas soldiers, haven't ye heard the war is

over?" And then he carolled: "Oh, can't get 'em up, Oh, can't get 'em

up, Oh, can't get 'em up in the mornin'--Get up, you"--but the rest

of the song, being devoted to the technical affairs of war, and ending

with a general exhortation to the soldier to "get into your breeches,"

would give offence to persons of sensitive natures, and so may as well

be omitted from this story.

There was an awkward pause when Dolan came on the veranda. The general

had just tried to break the ice, but Dolan was going at too high a

speed to be checked.

"Do you know," he asked, "what I always remember when I hear that

call? You do not. I'll tell you. 'Twas the morning of the battle of

Wilson's Creek, and Mart and me was sleeping under a tree, when the

bugler of the Johnnies off somewhere on the hill he begins to crow

that, and it wakes Mart up, and he rolls over on me and he says:

'Jake,' he says, or maybe 'twas me says, 'Mart,' says I--anyway, one

of us says, 'Shut up your gib, you flannel-mouthed mick,' he says,

'and let me pull my dream through to the place where I find the

money,' he says. And I says, 'D'ye know what I'm goin' to do when I

get home?' says I. 'No,' says he, still keen for that money; 'no,'

says he, 'unless it is you're going to be hanged by way of diversion,'

he says. 'I'm going to hire a bugler,' says I. 'What fer--in the name

of all the saints?' says he. 'Well,' says I, 'I'm going to ask him to

blow his damn horn under my window every morning at five o'clock,' I

says, 'and then I'm going to get up and poke my head out of the window

and say: "Mister, you can get me up in the army, but on this occasion

would you be obliging enough to go to hell"!' And Mart, seeing that

the money was gone from his dream, he turns over and wallops me with

the blanket till I was merely a palpitating mass. That was a great

battle, though, boys--a great battle."

And then they shouldered arms and showed how fields were won. Boom!

went Sigel's guns out of the past, and crash! came the Texas cavalry,

and the whoop of the Louisiana Pelicans rang in their ears. They

marched south after Hindman, and then came back with Grant to

Vicksburg, where they fought and bled and died. The general left them

and went east, where he "deployed on our right" and executed flank

movements, and watched Pickett's column come fling itself to death at

Gettysburg. And Watts McHurdie rode with the artillery through the

rear of the rebel lines at Pittsburg Landing, and when the rebel

officer saw the little man's bravery, and watched him making for the

Union lines bringing three guns, he waved his hat and told his

soldiers not to shoot at that boy. The colonel took a stick and marked

out on the floor our position at Antietam, and showed where the

reserves were supposed to be and how the enemy masked his guns behind

that hill, and we planted our artillery on the opposite ridge; and he

marched with the infantry and lay in ambush while the enemy came

marching in force through the wood. In time Watts McHurdie was talking

to Lincoln in the streets of Richmond, and telling for the hundredth

time what Lincoln said of the song and how he had sung it. But who

cares now what Lincoln said? It was something kind, you may be sure,

with a tear and a laugh in it, and the veterans laughed, while their

eyes grew moist as they always did when Watts told it. Then they fell

to carnage again--a fierce fight against time, against the moment

when they must leave their old companion alone. Up hills they charged

and down dales, and the moon rose high, and cast its shadow to the

eastward before they parted. First Dolan edged away, and then the

general went, waving his hand military fashion; and the colonel

returned the salute. When the gate had clanged, Watts rose to go. He

did not speak, nor did the colonel. Arm in arm, they walked down the

steps together, and halfway down the garden path the colonel rested

his hand on the little man's shoulder as they walked in silence. At

the gate they saw each other's tears, and the little man's voice

failed him when the colonel said, "Well, good-by, comrade--good

night." So Watts turned and ran, while the colonel, for the first time

in his manhood, loosed the cords of his sorrow and stood alone in the

moonlight with upturned face, swaying like an old tree in a storm.

CHAPTER XXI

And now those who have avoided the gray unpainted shame of these

unimportant people of the Ridge may here take up again for a moment

the trailing clouds of glory that shimmer over John Barclay's office

in the big City. For here there is the sounding brass and tinkling

cymbal of great worldly power. Here sits John Barclay, a little

gray-haired, gray-clad, lynx-eyed man, in a big light room at the

corner of a tower high over the City in the Corn Exchange Building,

the brain from which a million nerves radiate that run all over the

world and move thousands of men. Forty years before, when John was

playing in the dust of the road leading up from the Sycamore, no king

in all the world knew so much of the day's doings as John knows now,

sitting there at the polished mahogany table with the green blotting

paper upon it, under the green vase adorned with the red rose. A

blight may threaten the wheat in Argentine, and John Barclay knows

every cloud that sails the sky above that wheat, and when the cloud

bursts into rain he sighs, for it means something to him, though

heaven only knows what, and we and heaven do not care. But a dry day

in India or a wet day in Russia or a cloudy day in the Dakotas are all

taken into account in the little man's plans. And if princes quarrel

and kings grow weary of peace, and money bags refuse them war, John

Barclay knows it and puts the episode into figures on the clean white

pad of paper before him.

It is a privilege to be in this office; one passes three doors to get

here, and even at the third door our statesmen often cool their toes.

Mr. Barclay is about to admit one now. And when Senator Myton comes

in, deferentially of course, to tell Mr. Barclay the details of the

long fight in executive session which ended in the confirmation by the

senate of Lige Bemis as a federal judge, the little gray man waves the

senator to a chair, and runs his pencil up a column of figures,

presses a button, writes a word on a sheet of paper, and when the

messenger appears, hands the paper to him and says, "For Judge Bemis."

"I have just dismissed a Persian satrap," expands Barclay, "who won't

let his people use our binders; that country eventually will be a

great field for our Mediterranean branch."

Myton is properly impressed. For a man who can make a senator out of

Red River clay and a federal judge out of Lige Bemis is a superhuman

creature, and Myton does not doubt Barclay's power over satraps.

When the business of the moment between the two men is done, Barclay,

rampant with power, says: "Myton" (it is always "Myton," never

"Senator," with Barclay; he finds it just as well to let his inferiors

know their relation to the universe), "Myton, I ran across a queer

thing last week when I took over that little jerkwater New England

coast line. The Yankees are a methodical lot of old maids. I find they

had been made agents of a lot of the big fellows--insurance people,

packing-houses, and transcontinental railroads--two of my lines were

paying them, though I'd forgotten about it until I looked it up--and

the good old sewing society had card-indexed the politics of the

United States--the whole blessed country, by state and congressional

districts. I took over the chap who runs it, and I've got the whole

kit in the offices here now. It's great. If a man bobs up for

something in Florida or Nebraska, we just run him down on the card

index, and there he stands--everything he ever did, every interview

he ever gave, every lawsuit he ever had, every stand he ever took in

politics--right there in the index, in an envelope ready for use, and

all the mean things ever written about him. I simply can't make a

mistake now in getting the wrong kind of fellows in. Commend me to a

Yankee or a Jap for pains. I can tell you in five minutes just what

influences are behind every governor, congressman, senator, judge,

most of the legislators in every state, the federal courts clear up to

the Supreme Court. There was a man appointed on that court less than a

dozen years ago who swapped railroad receiverships like a tin peddler

with his senator for his job, when he was on the circuit bench. And he

was considerable of a judge in the bean country for a time. Just to

verify my index, I asked Bemis about this judge. 'Lige,' I said, 'was

Judge So-and-So a pretty honest judge?' 'Oh, hell,' says Lige, and

that was all I could get out of him. So I guess they had him indexed

right." And Barclay rattles on; he has become vociferous and

loquacious, and seems to like to hear the roar of his voice in his

head. The habit has been growing on him.

But do not laugh at the blindness of John Barclay, sitting there in

his power, admiring himself, boasting in the strength of his

card-index to Senator Myton. For the tide of his power was running in,

and soon it would be high tide with John Barclay--high tide of his

power, high tide of his fame, high tide of his pride. So let us watch

the complacent smile crack his features as he sits listening to

Senator Myton: "Mr. Barclay, do you know, I sometimes think that

Providence manifests itself in minds like yours, even as in the days

of old it was manifest in the hearts of the prophets. In those days it

was piety that fitted the heart for higher things; to-day it is

business. You and a score of men like you in America are intrusted

with the destiny of this republic, as surely as the fate of the

children of Israel was in the hands of Moses and Aaron!"

Barclay closed his eyes a moment, in contemplation of the figure, and

then broke out in a roaring laugh, "Hanno is a god! Hanno is a

god!--get out of here, Henry Myton,--get out of here, I say--this

is my busy day," and he laughed the young senator out of the room. But

he sat alone in his office grinning, as over and over in his mind his

own words rang, "Hanno is a god!" And the foolish parrot of his other

self cackled the phrase in his soul for days and days!

It is our high privilege thus to stand close by and watch the wheels

of the world go around. In those days of the late nineties Barclay

travelled up and down the earth so much in his private car that Jane

used to tell Molly Brownwell that living with John was like being a

travelling man's wife. But Jane did not seem to appreciate her

privilege. She managed to stay at home as much as possible, and

sometimes he took the Masons along for company. Mrs. Mason gloried in

it, and lived at the great hotels and shopped at the highest-priced

antique stores to her heart's delight. Lycurgus' joy was in being

interviewed, and the Barclay secretaries got so that they could edit

the Mason interviews and keep out the poison, and let the old man

swell and swell until the people at home thought he must surely burst

with importance at the next town.

One day in the nineties Barclay appropriated a half-million dollars to

advertise "Barclay's Best" and a cracker that he was pushing. When the

man who placed the business in the newspaper had gone, Barclay sat

looking out of the window and said to his advertising manager: "I've

got an idea. Why should I pay a million dollars to irresponsible

newspapers? I won't do it."

"But we must advertise, Mr. Barclay--you've proved it pays."

"Yes," he returned, "you bet it pays, and I might just as well get

something out of it besides advertising. Take this; make five copies

of it; I'll give you the addresses later." Barclay squared himself to

a stenographer to dictate:--

"Dear Sir: I spend a million dollars a year advertising grain

products; you and the packers doubtless spend that much advertising

your products and by-products; the railroads spend as much more, and

the Oil people probably half as much more. Add the steel products

and the lumber products, and we have ten million dollars going into

the press of this country. In a crisis we cannot tell how these

newspapers will treat us. I think we should organize so that we will

know exactly where we stand. Therefore it is necessary absolutely to

control the trade advertising of this country. A company to take

over the five leading advertising agencies could be formed, for half

as much as we spend every year, and we could control nine-tenths of

the American trade advertising. We could then put an end to any

indiscriminate mobbing of corporations by editors. I will be pleased

to hear from you further upon this subject."

A day or two later, when the idea had grown and ramified itself in his

mind, he talked it all out to Jane and exclaimed, "How will old Phil

Ward's God manage to work it out, as he says, against that

proposition? Brains," continued Barclay, "brains--that's what counts

in this world. You can't expect the men who dominate this

country--who make its wealth, and are responsible for its prosperity,

to be at the mercy of a lot of long-nosed reformers who don't know how

to cash their own checks."

How little this rich man knew of the world about him! How

circumscribed was his vision! With all his goings up and down the

earth, with all of his great transactions, with all of his apparent

power, how little and sordid was his outlook on life. For he thought

he was somebody in this universe, some one of importance, and in his

scheme of things he figured out a kind of partnership between himself

and Providence--a partnership to run the world in the interests of

John Barclay, and of course, wherever possible, with reasonable

dividends to Providence.

But a miracle was coming into the world. In the under-consciousnesses

of men, sown God only knows how and when and where, sown in the

weakness of a thousand blind prophets, the seeds of righteous wrath at

greed like John Barclay's were growing during all the years of his

triumph. Men scarcely knew it themselves. Growth is so simple and

natural a process that its work is done before its presence is known.

And so this arrogant man, this miserable, little, limping, brass-eyed,

leather-skinned man, looked out at the world around him, and did not

see the change that was quickening the hearts of his neighbours.

And yet change was in everything about him. A thousand years are as

but a watch in the night, and tick, tock, tick, tock, went the great

clock, and the dresses of little Jeanette Barclay slipped down, down,

down to her shoe-tops, and as the skirts slipped down she went up. And

before her father knew it her shoe-tops sank out of sight, and she was

a miss at the last of her teens. But he still gave her his finger when

they walked out together, though she was head and shoulders above him.

One day when she led him to the _Banner_ office to buy some fancy

programmes for a party she was giving, he saw her watching young Neal

Ward,--youngest son of the general,--who was sitting at a reporter's

desk in the office, and the father's quick eyes saw that she regarded

the youth as a young man. For she talked so obviously for the Ward

boy's benefit that her father, when they went out of the

printing-office, took a furtive look at his daughter and sighed and

knew what her mother had known for a year.

"Jeanette," he said that night at dinner, "where's my shot-gun?" When

she told him, he said: "After dinner you get it, load it with salt,

and put it in the corner by the front door." Then he added to the

assembled family: "For boys--dirty-faced, good-for-nothing,

long-legged boys! I'm going to have a law passed making an open season

for boys in this place from January first until Christmas."

Jeanette dimpled and blushed, the family smiled, and her mother said:

"Well, John, there'll be a flock of them at Jeanette's party next week

for you to practise on. All the boys and girls in town are coming."

And after dessert was served the father sat chuckling and grinning and

grunting, "Boys--boys," and at intervals, "Measly little milk-eyed

kids," and again "Boys--boys," while the family nibbled at its

cheese.

Those years when the nineteenth century was nearing its close and when

the tide of his fortunes was running in, bringing him power and making

him mad with it, were years of change in Sycamore Ridge--in the old

as well as in the young. In those years the lilacs bloomed on in the

Culpepper yard; and John Barclay did not know it, though forty years

before Ellen Culpepper had guarded the first blossoms from those

bushes for him. Miss Lucy, his first ideal, went to rest in those

years while the booming tide was running in, and he scarcely knew it.

Mrs. Culpepper was laid beside Ellen out on the Hill; and he hardly

realized it, though no one in all the town had watched him growing

into worldly success with so kindly an eye as she. But the tide was

roaring in, and John Barclay's whole consciousness was turned toward

it; the real things of life about him, he did not see and could not

feel. And so as the century is old the booming tide is full, and John

Barclay in his power--a bubble in the Divine consciousness, a mere

vision in the real world--stands stark mad before his phantasm,

dreaming that it is all real, and chattering to his soul, "Hanno is a

god."

And now we must leave John Barclay for the moment, to explain why Neal

Dow Ward, son of General Philemon Ward, made his first formal call at

the Barclays'. It cannot be gainsaid that young Mr. Ward, aged

twenty-one, a senior at Ward University, felt a tingle in his blood

that day when he met Miss Jeanette Barclay, aged eighteen, and home

for the spring vacation from the state university; and seeing her for

the first time with her eyes and her hair and her pretty, strong, wide

forehead poking through the cocoon of gawky girlhood, created a

distinct impression on young Mr. Ward.

But in all good faith it should be stated that he did not make his

first formal call at the Barclays' of his own accord; for his sister,

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward, took him. She came home from the

Culpeppers' just before supper, laughing until she was red in the

face. And what she heard at the Culpeppers', let her tell in her own

way to the man of her heart. For Lizzie was her father's child; the

four other Ward girls, Mary Livermore, Frances Willard, Belva

Lockwood, and Helen Gougar, had climbed to the College Heights and had

gone to Ward University, and from that seat of learning had gone forth

in the world to teach school. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward had remained

in the home, after her mother's death filling her mother's vacant

place as well as a daughter may.

"Well, father," said the daughter, as she was putting the evening meal

on the table, addressing the general, who sat reading by the window in

the dining room, "you should have been at the Culpeppers' when the

colonel came home and told us his troubles. It seems that Nellie

McHurdie is going to make Watts run for sheriff--for sheriff, father.

Imagine Watts heading a posse, or locking any one up! And Watts has

passed the word to the colonel, and he has passed it to Molly and me,

and I am to see Mrs. Barclay, and she is to see Mrs. Carnine to-morrow

morning, and they are all to set to work on Nellie and get her to see

that it won't do. Poor Watts--the colonel says he is terribly wrought

up at the prospect."

The general folded his paper and smiled as he said: "Well, I don't

know; Watts was a brave soldier. He would make a good enough sheriff;

but I suppose he doesn't really care for it."

"Why, no, of course not, father--why should he?" asked the daughter.

"Anyhow, I want you to make Neal go down to Barclays' with me to-night

to talk it over with Jane. Neal," she called to the young man who was

sitting on the porch with his book on his knee, "Neal, I want you to

go to Barclays' with me to-night. Come in now, supper's ready."

And so it happened that Neal Dow Ward made his first call on Jeanette

Barclay with his sister, and they all sat on the porch together that

fine spring evening, with the perfume of the lilacs in the air; and it

happened naturally enough that the curious human law of attraction

which unites youth should draw the chairs of the two young people

together as they talked of the things that interest youth--the

parties and the ball-games and the fraternities and sororities, and

the freshman picnic and the senior grind; while the chairs of the two

others drew together as they talked of the things which interest women

in middle life--the affairs of the town, the troubles of Watts

McHurdie, the bereavement of the Culpeppers, the scarcity of good help

in the kitchen, the popularity of Max Nordau's "Social Evolution," and

the fun in "David Harum." Nor is it strange that after the girl had

shown the boy her Pi Phi pin, and he had shown her his Phi Delta

shield, they should fall to talking of the new songs, and that they

should slip into the big living room of the Barclay home, lighted by

the electric lamps in the hall, and that she should sit down to the

piano to show him how the new song went. And if the moonlight fell

across the piano, and upon her face as she sang the little Irish

folk-song, all in minors, with her high, trembling, half-formed notes

in the upper register, and if she flushed and looked up abashed and

had to be teased to go on,--not teased a great deal, but a

little,--will you blame the young man if he forgot for a moment that

her father was worth such a lot of money, and thought only that she

was a beautiful girl, and said so with his eyes and face and hands in

the pretty little pause that followed when she ceased singing? And if

to hide her confusion when her heart knew what he thought, she put one

foot on the loud pedal of the piano and began singing "O Margery, O

Margery," and he sang with her, and if they thrilled just a little as

their voices blended in the rollicking song--what of it? What of it?

Was it not natural that lilacs should grow in April? Was it not

natural that Watts McHurdie should dread the white light that beats

upon the throne of the sheriff's office? Was it not natural that he

should turn to women for protection against one of their sex, and that

the women plotting for him should have a boy around and having a boy

around where there is a girl around, and spring around and lilacs

around and a moon and music and joy around,--what is more natural in

all this world than that in the fire struck by the simple joy of youth

there should be the flutter of unseen wings around, and when the two

had finished singing, with something passing between their hearts not

in the words, what is more natural than that the girl, half frightened

at the thrill in her soul, should say timidly:--

"I think they will miss us out there--don't you?" as she rose from

the piano.

And if you were a boy again, only twenty-one, to whom millions of

money meant nothing, would you not catch the blue eyes of the girl as

she looked up at you, in the twilight of the big room, and answer,

"All right, Jeanette"? Certainly if you had known a girl all your

life, you would call her by her first name, if her father were worth a

billion, and would you not continue, emboldened some way by not being

frowned upon for calling her Jeanette, though she would have been

astonished if you had said Miss Barclay--astonished and maybe a

little fearful of your sincerity--would you not continue, after a

little pause, repeating your words, "All right, Jeanette--I suppose

so--but I don't care--do you?" as you followed her through the door

back to the moon-lit porch?

And as you walked home, listening to your elder sister, would you not

have time and inclination to wonder from what remote part of this

beautiful universe, from what star or what fairy realm, that creature

came, whose hair you pulled yesterday, whose legs seem to have been

covered with long skirts in the twinkling of an eye, and whose

unrelated features by some magic had sloughed off, leaving a beautiful

face? Would you not think these things, good kind sir, when you were

twenty-one--even though to-day they seem highly improbable thoughts

for any one to have who was not stark mad? But if we were not all

stark mad sometimes, how would the world go round? If we were not all

mad sometimes, who would make our dreams come true? How would visions

in thin air congeal into facts, how would the aspirations of the race

make history? And if we were all sane all the time, how would the

angels ever get babies into the world at all, at all?

CHAPTER XXII

"Speaking of lunatics," said Mr. Dolan to Mr. Hendricks one June

night, a few weeks after the women had persuaded Mrs. McHurdie not to

drag the poet into politics,--"speaking of lunatics, you may remember

that I was born in Boston, and 'twas my duty as a lad to drive the

Cambridge car, and many a time I have heard Mr. Holmes the poet and

Mr. Emerson the philosopher discussing how the world was made; whether

it was objective or subjective,--which I take it to mean whether the

world is in the universe or only in your eye. One fine winter night we

were waiting on a switch for the Boston car, when Mr. Holmes said to

Mr. Emerson: 'What,' says he, 'would you think if Jake Dolan driving

this car should come in and say, "Excuse me, gentlemen, but the moon I

see this moment is not some millions of miles away, but entirely in my

own noddle?"' 'I'd think,' says the great philosopher, never blinking,

'that Mr. Dolan was drunk,' says he. And there the discussion ended,

but it has been going on in my head ever since. Here I am a man

climbing up my sixties, and when have I seen the moon? Once walking by

this very creek here trying to get me courage up to put me arm around

her that is now Mary Carnine; once with me head poked up close to the

heads of Watts McHurdie, Gabe Carnine, and Philemon Ward, serenading

the girls under the Thayer House window the night before we left for

the army. And again to-night, sitting here on the dam, listening to

the music coming down the mill-pond. Did you notice them, Robert--the

young people--Phil Ward's boy, and John Barclay's girl, and Mary

Carnine's oldest, and Oscar Fernald's youngest, with their guitars and

mandolins, piling into the boats and rowing up stream? And now they're

singing the songs we sang--to their mothers, God bless 'em--the

other day before these children were born or thought of, and now I sit

here an old man looking at the moon."

"But is it the moon?" he went on after a long silence, puffing at his

pipe. "If the moon is off there, three or thirty or three hundred

million miles away in the sky, where has it been these forty years?

I've not seen it. And yet here she pops out of my memory into my eye,

and if I say the moon has always been in my eye, and is still in my

eye, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson says I'm drunk. But does that settle the

question of who's got the moon--me or the cosmos--as the poets call

it?" After that the two men smoked in silence, and as Hendricks threw

away the butt of his cigar, Dolan said, "'Tis a queer, queer world,

Robert--a queer, queer world."

Now do not smile at Mr. Dolan, gentle reader, for Adam must have

thought the same thing, and philosophy has been able to say nothing

more to the point.

It is indeed a queer, queer world, and our blindness is the queerest

thing in it. Here a few weeks, later sit John and Jane Barclay on the

terrace before their house one June night, listening to singing on the

water. Suddenly they realize that there is youth in the world--yet

there has been singing on the mill-pond ever since it was built. It

has been the habitat of lovers for a quarter of a century, this

mill-pond, yet Jane and John Barclay have not known it, and not until

their own child's voice came up to them, singing "Juanita," did they

realize that the song had not begun anew after its twenty years'

silence in their own hearts, but always had been on the summer breeze.

And this is strange, too, considering how rich and powerful John

Barclay is and how by the scratch of his pen, he might set men working

by the thousands for some righteous cause. Yet so it is; for with all

the consciousness of great power, with all the feeling of unrestraint

that such power gives a man, driving him to think he is a kind of god,

John Barclay was only a two-legged man, with a limp in one foot, and a

little mad place in his brain, wherein he kept the sense of his

relation to the rest of this universe. And as he sat, blind to the

moon, dreaming of a time when he would control Presidents and dominate

courts if they crossed his path, out on the mill-pond under an elm

tree that spread like a canopy upon the water, a boy, letting the oars

hang loosely, was playing the mandolin to a girl--a pretty girl

withal, blue as to eyes, fair as to hair, strong as to mouth and chin,

and glorious as to forehead--who leaned back in the boat, played with

the overhanging branches, and listened and looked at the moon, and let

God's miracle work unhindered in her heart. And all up and down those

two miles of mill-pond were other boats and other boys and other

maidens, and as they chatted and sang and sat in the moonlight, there

grew in their hearts, as quietly as the growing of the wheat in the

fields, that strange marvel of life, that keeps the tide of humanity

ceaselessly flowing onward. And it is all so simply done before our

eyes, and in our ears, that we forget it is so baffling a mystery.

Now let us project our astral bodies into the living room of the

Barclay home, while Mr. and Mrs. John Barclay are away in Boston, and

only John Barclay's mother and his daughter are in Sycamore Ridge; and

let us watch a young man of twenty-one and a young woman of eighteen

dispose of a dish of fudge together. Fudge, it may be explained to the

unsophisticated, is a preparation of chocolate, sugar, and cream,

cooked, cooled, and cut into squares. As our fathers and mothers

pulled taffy, as our grandfathers and grandmothers conjured with maple

sugar, and as their parents worked the mysterious spell with some

witchery of cookery to this generation unknown, so is fudge in these

piping times the worker of a strange witchery. Observe: Through a

large room, perhaps forty feet one way and twenty-five feet the other

way, flits a young woman in the summer twilight. She goes about

humming, putting a vase in place here, straightening a picture there,

kicking down a flapping rug, or rearranging a chair; then she sits

down and turns on an electric light and pretends to read. But she does

not read; the light shows her something else in the room that needs

attention, and she turns to that. Then she sits down again, and again

goes humming about the room. Suddenly the young woman rises and

hurries out of the room, and a footstep is heard on the porch,

outside. A bell tinkles, and a maid appears, and--

"Yes," she says. "I'll see if Miss Jeanette is at home!"

And then a rustle of skirts is heard on the stairway and Miss Jeanette

enters with: "Why, Neal, you are an early bird this evening--were you

afraid the worm would escape? Well, it won't; it's right here on the

piano."

The young man's eyes,--good, clear, well-set, dark eyes that match

his brown hair; eyes that speak from the heart,--note how they dwell

upon every detail of the opposing figure, caressing with their shy

surreptitious glances the girl's hair, her broad forehead, her lips;

observe how they flit back betimes to those ripe red lips, like bees

that hover over a flower trembling in the wind; how the eyes of the

young man play about the strong chin, and the bewitching curves of the

neck and shoulders, and rise again to the hair, and again steal over

the face, to the strong shoulders, and again hurry back to the face

lest some feature fade. This is not staring--it is done so quickly,

so furtively, so deftly withal as the minutes fly by, while the lips

and the teeth chatter on, that the stolen honey of these glances is

stored away in the heart's memory, all unknown to him who has gathered

it.

An hour has passed now, while we have watched the restless eyes at

their work, and what has passed with the hour? Nothing, ladies and

gentlemen--nothing; gibber, chatter, giggles, and squeals--that is

all. Grandma Barclay above stairs has her opinion of it, and wonders

how girls can be so addle-pated. In her day--but who ever lived long

enough or travelled far enough or inquired widely enough to find one

single girl who was as wise, or as sedate, or as industrious, or as

meek, or as gentle, or as kind as girls were in her grandmother's day?

No wonder indeed that grandmothers are all married--for one could

hardly imagine the young men of that day overlooking such paragons of

virtue and propriety as lived in their grandmothers' days. Fancy an

old maid grandmother with all those qualities of mind and heart that

girls had in their grandmothers' days!

So the elder Mrs. Barclay in her room at the top of the stairs hears

what "he said," "he said he said," and what "she said she said," and

what "we girls did," and what "you boys ought to do," and what "would

be perfectly lovely," and what "would be a lot of fun!" and so

grandmother, good soul, grows drowsy, closes her door, and goes to

bed. She does not know that they are about to sit down together on a

sofa--not a long, straight, cold, formal affair, but a small, rather

snuggly sofa, with the dish between them. No, girls never did that in

their grandmothers' days, so of course who would imagine they would do

so now? Who, indeed? But there they are, and there is the dish between

them, and two hands reaching into the same dish, must of course

collide. Collision is inevitable, and by carefully noting the

repetitions of the collisions, one may logically infer that the

collisions are upon the whole rather pleasurable than otherwise; and

when it comes to the last piece of fudge in the dish,--the very last

piece,--the astral observer will see that there is just the

slightest, the very slightest, quickest, most fleeting little tussle

of hands for it, and much laughter; and then the young woman rises

quickly--also note the slight pink flush in her cheeks, and she goes

to her chair and folds her pretty hands in her lap, and asks:--

"Well, do you like my fudge, Neal Ward? Is it as good as Belva

Lockwood's? She puts nuts in hers--I've eaten it; do you like it with

nuts in it?"

"Not so well as this," says the boy.

The girl slips into the dining room, for a glass of water. See the eyes

of the youth following her. It is dusky in the dining room, and the

youth longs for dusky places, but has not developed courage enough to

follow her. But he has courage enough to steady his eyes as she comes

back with the water, so that he can look into her blue eyes while you

would count as much as one--two--three--slowly--four--slowly--five. A

long, long time, so long indeed that she wishes he would look just a

second longer.

So at the end of the evening here stand Neal, and Jeanette, even as

Adam and Eve stood in the garden, talking of nothing in particular as

they slowly move toward the door. "Yes, I suppose so," she says, as

Eve said and as Eve's daughters have said through all the centuries,

looking intently at the floor. And then Neal, suddenly finding the

language of his line back to Adam, looks up to say, "Oh, yes, I

forgot--but have you read 'Monsieur Beaucaire'?" Now Adam said, "Have

you heard the new song that the morning stars are singing together?"

and Priam asked Helen if she would like to hear that new thing of

Solomon's just out, and so as the ages have rolled by, young gentlemen

standing beside their adored but not declared ones have mixed

literature with love, and have tied wisdom up in a package of candy or

wild honey, and have taken it to the trysting place since the

beginning of time. It is thus the poets thrive. And when she was asked

about the new song of the morning stars, Eve, though she knew it as

she knew her litany, answered no; and so did Eve's daughter, standing

in the dimly lighted hallway of the Barclay home in Sycamore Ridge;

and so then and there being, these two made their next meeting sure.

In those last years of the last century John Barclay became a powerful

man in this world--one of the few hundred men who divided the

material kingdoms of this earth among them. He was a rich man who was

turning his money into great political power. Senates listened to him,

many courts were his in fee simple, because he had bought and paid for

the men who named the judges; Presidents were glad to know what he

thought, and when he came to the White House, reporters speculated

about the talk that went on behind the doors of the President's room,

and the stock market fluttered. If he desired a law, he paid for it

and got it--not in a coarse illegal way, to be sure, but through the

regular conventional channels of politics, and if he desired to step

on a law, he stepped on it, and a court came running up behind him,

and legalized his transaction. He sneered at reformers, and mocked

God, did John Barclay in those days. He grew arrogant and boastful,

and strutted in his power like a man in liquor with the vain knowledge

that he could increase the population of a state or a group of states,

or he could shrivel the prosperity of a section of the country by his

whim. For by changing a freight rate he could make wheat grow, where

grass had nourished. By changing the rate again, he could beckon back

the wilderness. And yet, how small was his power; here beside him,

cherished as the apple of his eye, was his daughter, a slip of a girl,

with blue eyes and fair hair, whose heart was growing toward the

light, as the hearts of young things grow, and he, with all of his

power, could only watch the mystery, and wonder at it. He was not

displeased at what he saw. But it was one of the few things in his

consciousness over which he could find no way to assume control. He

stood in the presence of something that came from outside of his realm

and ignored him as the sun and the rain and the simple processes of

nature ignored him.

"Jane," he said one night, when he was in the Ridge for the first time

in many weeks,--a night near the end of the summer when Jeanette and

Neal Ward were vaguely feeling their way together, "Jane, mother says

that while we've been away Neal Ward has been here pretty often. You

don't suppose that--"

"Well, I've rather wondered about it myself a little," responded Jane.

"Neal is such a fine handsome young fellow."

"But, Jane," exclaimed Barclay, impatiently, as he rose to walk the

rug, "Jennie is only a child. Why, she's only--"

"Nineteen, John--she's a big girl now."

"I know, dear," he protested, "but that's absurdly young. Why--"

"Yes," she answered, "I was nearly twenty when I was engaged to you,

and Jennie's not engaged yet, nor probably even thinking seriously of

it."

"Don't you think," cried Barclay, as he limped down the diagonal of

the rug, "that you should do something? Isn't it a little unusual?

Why--"

"Well, John," smiled the wife, "I might do what mother did: turn the

young man over to father!" Barclay laughed, and she went on patiently:

"It's not at all unusual, John, even if they do--that is, if they

are--you know; but they aren't, and Jennie is too much in love with

her work at school to quit that. But after all it's the American way;

it was the way we did, dear, and the way our mothers and fathers did,

and unless you wish to change it--to Europeanize it, and pick--"

"Ah, nonsense, Jane--of course I don't want that! Only I thought some

way, if it's serious she ought to--Oh, don't you know she ought

to--"

Mrs. Barclay broke her smile with, "Of course she ought to, dear, and

so ought I and so ought mother when she married father and so ought my

grandmother when she married grandpa--but did we? Dear, don't you see

the child doesn't realize it? If it is anything, it is growing in her

heart, and I wouldn't smudge it for the world, by speaking to her

now--unless you don't like Neal; unless you think he's too--unless

you want a different boy. I mean some one of consequence?"

"Oh, no, it isn't that, Jane--it isn't that. Neal's all right; he's

clean and he is honest--I asked Bob Hendricks about him to-day, when

we passed the boy chasing news for the _Banner_, and Bob gives him a

fine name." Barclay threw himself into a chair and sighed. "I suppose

it's just that I feel Jeanette's kind of leaving us out of it--that

is all."

Jane went to him and patted his head gently, as she spoke: "That is

nature, dear--the fawn hiding in the woods; we must trust to Jennie's

good sense, and the good blood in Neal. My, but his sisters are proud

of him! Last week Lizzie was telling me Neal's wages had been

increased to ten dollars a week--and I don't suppose their father in

all of his life ever had that much of a steady income. The things the

family is planning to do with that ten dollars a week brought tears of

joy to my eyes. Neal's going to have his mother-in-law on his side,

anyway--just as you had yours. I know now how mother felt."

But John Barclay did not know how mother felt, and he did not care. He

knew how father felt--how Lycurgus Mason felt, and how the father of

Mrs. Lycurgus Mason felt; he felt hurt and slighted, and he could not

repress a feeling of bitterness toward the youth. All the world loves

a daughter-in-law, but a father's love for a son-in-law is an acquired

taste; some men never get it. And John Barclay was called away the

next morning to throttle a mill in the San Joaquin Valley, and from

there he went to North Dakota to stop the building of a competitive

railroad that tapped his territory; so September came, and with it

Jeanette Barclay went back to school. The mother wondered what the

girl would do with her last night at home. She was clearly nervous and

unsettled all the afternoon before, and made an errand into town and

came back with a perturbed face. But after dinner the mother heard

Jeanette at the telephone, and this is the one-sided dialogue the

mother caught: "Yes--this is Miss Barclay." "Oh, yes, I didn't

recognize your voice at first." "What meeting?" "Yes--yes." "And they

are not going to have it?" "Oh, I see." "You were--oh, I don't know.

Of course I should have felt--well, I--oh, it would have been all

right with me. Of course." Then the voice cheered up and she said:

"Why, of course--come right out. I understand." A pause and then,

"Yes, I know a man has to go where he is called." "Oh, she'll

understand--you know father is always on the wing." "No--why, no, of

course not--mother wouldn't think that of you. I'll tell her how it

was." "All right, good-by--yes, right away." And Jeanette Barclay

skipped away from the telephone and ran to her mother to say, "Mother,

that was Neal Ward--he wants to come out, and he was afraid you'd

think it rude for him to ask that way, but you know he had a meeting

to report and thought he couldn't come, and now they've postponed the

meeting, and I told him to come right out--wasn't that all right?"

And so out came Neal Ward, a likely-looking young man of twenty-one or

maybe twenty-two--a good six feet in height, with a straight leg, a

square shoulder, and firm jaw, set like his father's, and clean brown

eyes that did not blink. And as Jeanette Barclay, with her mother's

height, and her father's quick keen features, and her Grandmother

Barclay's eyes and dominant figure, stood beside him in the doorway,

Mrs. Jane Barclay thought a good way ahead, and Jeanette would have

blushed her face to a cinder if the mother had spoken her thoughts.

The three, mother and daughter and handsome young man, sat for a while

together in the living room, and then Jane, who knew the heart of

youth, and did not fear it, said, "You children should go out on the

porch--it's a beautiful night; I'm going upstairs."

And now let us once more in our astral bodies watch them there in the

light of the veiled moon--for it is the last time that even we should

see them alone. She is sitting on a balustrade, and he is standing

beside her, and their hands are close together on the stones. "Yes,"

he is saying, "I shall be busy at the train to-morrow trying to catch

the governor for an interview on the railroad question, and may not

see you."

"I wish you would throw the governor into the deep blue sea," she

says, and he responds:--

"I wish I could." There is a silence, and then he risks it--and the

thing he has been trying to say comes out, "I wonder if you will do

something for me, Jeanette?"

"Oh, I don't know--don't ask me anything hard--not very hard, Neal!"

The last word was all he cared for, and by what sleight of hand he

slipped his fraternity pin from his vest into her hand, neither ever

knew.

"Will you?" he asks. "For me?"

She pins it at her throat, and smiles. Then she says, "Is this long

enough--do you want it back now?"

He shakes his head, and finally she asks, "When?" and then it comes

out:--

"Never."

And her face reddens, and she does not speak. Their hands, on the

wall, have met--they just touch, that is all, but they do not hasten

apart. A long, long time they are silent--an eternity of a minute;

and then she says, "We shall see in the morning."

And then another eternal minute rolls by, and the youth slips the rose

from her hair--quickly, and without disarranging a strand.

"Oh," she cries, "Neal!" and then adds, "Let me get you a pretty

one--that is faded."

But no, he will have that one, and she stands beside him and pins it

on his coat--stands close beside him, and where her elbows and her

arms touch him he is thrilled with delight. In the shadow of the great

porch they stand a moment, and her hand goes out to his.

"Well, Jeanette," he says, and still her hand does not shrink away,

"well, Jeanette--it will be lonesome when you go."

"Will it?" she asks.

"Yes--but I--I have been so happy to-night."

He presses her hand a little closer, and as she says, "I'm so glad,"

he says, "Good-by," and moves down the broad stone steps. She stands

watching him, and at the bottom he stops and again says:--

"Well--good-by--Jeanette--I must go--I suppose." And she does not

move, so again he says, "Good-by."

* * * * *

"Youth," said Colonel Martin Culpepper to the assembled company in the

ballroom of the Barclay home as the clock struck twelve and brought in

the twentieth century; "Youth," he repeated, as he tugged at the

bottom of Buchanan Culpepper's white silk vest, to be sure that it met

his own black trousers, and waved his free hand grandly aloft;

"Youth," he reiterated, as he looked over the gay young company at the

foot of the hall, while the fiddlers paused with their bows in the

air, and the din of the New Year's clang was rising in the town;

"Youth,--of all the things in God's good green earth,--Youth is the

most beautiful." Then he signalled with some dignity to the leader of

the orchestra, and the music began.

It was a memorable New Year's party that Jeanette Barclay gave at the

dawn of this century. The Barclay private car had brought a dozen girls

down from the state university for the Christmas holidays, and then had

made a recruiting trip as far east as Cleveland and had brought back a

score more of girls in their teens and early twenties--for an invitation

from the Barclays, if not of much social consequence, had a power behind

it that every father recognized. And what with threescore girls from the

Ridge, and young men from half a dozen neighbouring states,--and young

men are merely background in any social picture,--the ballroom was as

pretty as a garden. It was her own idea,--with perhaps a shade of

suggestion from her father,--that the old century should be danced out

and the new one danced in with the pioneers of Garrison County set in

quadrilles in the centre of the floor, while the young people whirled

around them in the two-step then in vogue. So the Barclays asked a score

or so of the old people in for dinner New Year's Eve; and they kept

below stairs until midnight. Then they filed into the ballroom, with its

fair fresh faces, its shrill treble note of merriment,--these old men

and women, gray and faded, looking back on the old century while the

others looked into the new one. There came Mr. and Mrs. Watts McHurdie

in the lead, Watts in his best brown suit, and Mrs. Watts in lavender to

sustain her gray hair; General Ward, in his straight black frock coat

and white tie, followed with Mrs. Dorman, relict of the late William

Dorman, merchant, on his arm; behind him came the Brownwells, in evening

clothes, and Robert Hendricks and his sister,--all gray-haired, but

straight of figure and firm of foot; Colonel Culpepper followed with

Mrs. Mary Barclay; the Lycurgus Masons were next in the file, and in

their evening clothes they looked withered and old, and Lycurgus was not

sure upon his feet; Jacob Dolan in his faded blue uniform marched in

like a drum-major with the eldest Miss Ward; and the Carnines followed,

and the Fernalds followed them; and then came Judge and Mrs. Bemis--he a

gaunt, sinister, parchment-skinned man, with white hair and a gray

mustache, and she a crumbling ruin in shiny satin bedecked in diamonds.

Down the length of the long room they walked, and executed an

old-fashioned grand march, such as Watts could lead, while the orchestra

played the tune that brought cheers from the company, and the little old

man looked at the floor, while Mrs. McHurdie beamed and bowed and

smiled. And then they took their partners to step off the

quadrille--when behold, it transpired that in all the city orchestra,

that had cost the Barclays a thousand dollars according to town

tradition, not one man could be found who could call off a quadrille.

Then up spake John Barclay, and stood him on a chair, and there, when

the colonel had signalled for the music to start, the voice of John

Barclay rang out above the din, as it had not sounded before in nearly

thirty years. Old memories came rushing back to him of the nights when

he used to ride five and ten and twenty miles and play the cabinet organ

to a fiddle's lead, and call off until daybreak for two dollars. And

such a quadrille as he gave them--four figures of it before he sent them

to their seats. There were "cheat or swing," the "crow's nest," "skip to

my Loo,"--and they all broke out singing, while the young people clapped

their hands, and finally by a series of promptings he quickly called the

men into one line and the women into another, and then the music

suddenly changed to the Virginia reel. And so the dance closed for the

old people, and they vanished from the room, looking back at the youth

and the happiness and warmth of the place with wistful but not eager

eyes; and as Jacob Dolan, in his faded blues and grizzled hair and

beard, disappeared into the dusk of the hallway, Jeanette Barclay,

looking at her new ring, patted it and said to Neal Ward: "Well, dear,

the nineteenth century is gone! Now let us dance and be happy in this

one."

And so she danced the new year and the new century and the new life

in, as happy as a girl of twenty can be. For was she not a Junior at

the state university, if you please? Was she not the heir of all the

ages, and a scandalous lot of millions besides, and what is infinitely

more important to a girl's happiness, was she not engaged, good and

tight, and proud of it, to a youth making twelve dollars every week

whether it rained or not? What more could an honest girl ask? And it

was all settled, and so happily settled too, that when she had

graduated with her class at the university, and had spent a year in

Europe--but that was a long way ahead, and Neal had to go to the City

with father and learn the business first. But business and graduation

and Europe were mere details--the important thing had happened. So

when it was all over that night, and the girls had giggled themselves

to bed, and the house was dark, Jeanette Barclay and her mother walked

up the stairs to her room together. There they sat down, and Jeanette

began--

"Neal said he told you about the ring?"

"Yes," answered her mother.

"But he did not show it to you--because he wanted me to be the first

to see it."

"Neal's a dear," replied her mother. "So that was why? I thought

perhaps he was bashful."

"No, mother," answered the girl, "no--we're both so proud of it." She

kept her hand over the ring finger, as she spoke, "You know those

'Short and Simple Annals' he's been doing for the _Star_--well, he

got his first check the day before Christmas, and he gave half of it

to his father, and took the other twenty-five dollars and bought this

ring. I think it is so pretty, and we are both real proud of it." And

then she took her hand from the ring, and held her finger out for her

mother's eyes, and her mother kissed it. They were silent a moment;

then the girl rose and stood with her hand on the doorknob and cried:

"I think it is the prettiest ring in all the world, and I never want

any other." Then she thought of mother, and flushed and ran away.

And we should not follow her. Rather let us climb Main Street and turn

into Lincoln Avenue and enter the room where Martin Culpepper sits

writing the Biography of Watts McHurdie. He is at work on his famous

chapter, "Hymen's Altar," and we may look over his great shoulder and

see what he has written: "The soul caged in its prison house of the

flesh looks forth," he writes, "and sees other chained souls, and

hails them in passing like distant ships. But soul only meets soul in

some great passion of giving, whether it be man to his fellow-man, to

his God, or in the love of men and women; it matters not how the

ecstasy comes, its root is in sacrifice, in giving, in forgetting self

and merging through abnegation into the source of life in this

universe for one sublime moment. For we may not come out of our prison

houses save to inhale the air of heaven once or twice, and then go

scourged back to our dungeons. Great souls are they who love the most,

who breathe the deepest of heaven's air, and give of themselves most

freely."

CHAPTER XXIII

The next morning, before the guests were downstairs, Barclay, reading

his morning papers before the fireplace, stopped his daughter, who was

going through the living room on some morning errand.

"Jeanette," said the father, as he drew her to his chair arm, "let me

see it."

She brought the setting around to the outside of her finger, and gave

him her hand. He looked at it a moment, patted her hand, put the ring

to his lips, and the two sat silent, choked with something of joy and

something of sorrow that shone through their brimming eyes. Thus Mary

Barclay found them. They looked up abashed, and she bent over them and

stroked her son's hair as she said:--

"John, John, isn't it fine that Jennie has escaped the curse of your

millions?"

Barclay's heart was melted. He could not answer, so he nodded an

assenting head. The mother stooped to kiss her son's forehead, as she

went on, "Not with all of your millions could you buy that simple

little ring for Jennie, John." And the father pressed his lips to the

ring, and his daughter snuggled tightly into his heart and the three

mingled their joy together.

Two hours later Barclay and General Ward met on the bridge by the

mill. It was one of those warm midwinter days, when nature seems to be

listening for the coming of spring. A red bird was calling in the

woods near by, and the soft south wind had spring in it as it blew

across the veil of waters that hid the dam. John Barclay's head was

full of music, and he was lounging across the bridge from the mill on

his way home to try his new pipe organ. He had spent four hours the

day before at his organ bench, trying to teach his lame foot to keep

up with his strong foot. So when General Ward overhauled him, Barclay

was annoyed. He was not the man to have his purposes crossed, even

when they were whims.

"I was just coming over to the mill to see you," said the general, as

he halted in Barclay's path.

"All right, General--all right; what can I do for you?"

The general was as blunt a man as John Barclay. If Barclay desired no

beating around the bush, the general would go the heart of matters. So

he said, "I want to talk about Neal with you."

Barclay knew that certain things must be said, and the two men sat in

a stone seat in the bridge wall, with the sun upon them, to talk it

out then and there. "Well, General, we like Neal--we like him

thoroughly. And we are glad, Jane and I, and my mother too--she likes

him; and I want to do something for him. That's about all there is to

say."

"Yes, but what, John Barclay--what?" exclaimed the general. "That's

what I want to know. What are you going to do for him? Make him a

devil worshipper?"

"Well now, General, here--don't be too fast," Barclay smiled and

drawled. He put his hands on the warm rocks at his sides and flapped

them like wing-tips as he went on: "Jeanette and Neal have their own

lives to live. They're sensible--unusually sensible. We didn't steal

Neal, any more than you stole Jeanette, General, and--"

"Oh, I understand that, John; that isn't the point," broke in the

general. "But now that you've got him, what are you going to do with

him? Can't you see, John, he's my boy, and that I have a right to

know?"

"Now, General, will you let me do a little of this talking?" asked

Barclay, impatiently. "As I was saying, Jeanette and Neal are

sensible, and money isn't going to make fools of them. When the time

comes and I'm gone, they'll take the divine responsibility--"

"The divine tommyrot!" cried the general; "the divine fiddlesticks!

Why should they? What have they done that they should have that thrust

upon them like a curse; in God's name, John Barclay, why should my

Neal have to have that blot upon his soul? Can't they be free and

independent?"

Barclay did not answer; he looked glumly at the floor, and kicked the

cement with his heel. "What would you have them do with the money when

they get it," he growled, "burn it?"

"Why not?" snapped the general.

"Oh--I just thought I'd ask," responded Barclay.

The two men sat in silence. Barclay regarded conversation with the

general in that mood as arguing with a lunatic. Presently he rose, and

stood before Ward and spoke rather harshly: "What I am going to do is

this--? and nothing more. Neal tells me he understands shorthand: I

know the boy is industrious, and I know that he is bright and quick

and honest. That's all he needs. I am going to take him into our

company as a stockholder--with one share--a thousand-dollar share,

to be explicit; I'm going to give that to him, and that's all; then

he's to be my private secretary for three years at five thousand a

year, so long as you must know, and then at the end of that time, if

he and Jennie are so minded, they're going to marry; and if he has any

business sense--of course you know what will happen. She is all we

have, General--some one's got to take hold of things."

As Barclay spoke General Ward grew white--his face was aquiver as his

trembling voice cried out: "Oh, God, John Barclay, and would you take

my boy--my clean-hearted, fine-souled boy, whom I have taught to fear

God, and callous his soul with your damned money-making? How would you

like me to take your girl and blacken her heart and teach her the

wiles of the outcasts? And yet you're going to teach Neal to lie and

steal and cheat and make his moral guide the penal code instead of his

father's faith. Shame on you, John Barclay--shame on you, and may God

damn you for this thing, John Barclay!" The old man trembled, but the

sob that shook his frame had no tears in it. He looked Barclay in the

eyes without a tremor for an angry moment, and then broke: "I am an

old man, John; I can't interfere with Neal and Jeanette; it's their

life, not mine, and some way God will work it out; but," he added,

"I've still got my own heart to break over it--that's mine--that's

mine."

He rose and faced the younger man a moment, and then walked quickly

away. Barclay limped after him, and went home. There he sat on his

bench and made the great organ scream and howl and bellow with rage

for two hours.

When Neal Ward went to the City to live, he had a revelation of John

Barclay as a man of moods. The Barclay Neal Ward saw was an electric

motor rather than an engine. The power he had to perceive and to act

seemed transmitted to him from the outside. At times he dictated

letters of momentous importance to the young man, which Neal was sure

were improvised. Barclay relied on his instincts and rarely changed a

decision. He wore himself out every day, yet he returned to his work

the next day without a sign of fag. The young man found that Barclay

had one curious vanity--he liked to seem composed. Hence the big

smooth mahogany table before him, with the single paper tablet on it,

and the rose--the one rose in the green vase in the centre of the

table. Visitors always found him thus accoutred. But to see him

limping about from room to room, giving orders in the great offices,

dictating notes for the heads of the various departments, to see him

in the room where the mail was received, worrying it like a pup, was

to see another man revealed. He liked to have people from Sycamore

Ridge call upon him, and the man who kept door in the outer office--a

fine gray-haired person, who had the manners of a brigadier--knew so

many people in Sycamore Ridge that Neal used to call him the City

Directory. One day Molly Brownwell called. She was the only person who

ever quelled the brigadier; but when a woman has been a social leader

in a country town all of her life, she has a social poise that may not

be impressed by a mere brigadier. Mrs. Brownwell realized that her

call was unusual, but she refused to acknowledge it to him. Barclay

seemed glad to see her, and as he was in one of his mellow moods he

talked of old times, and drew from a desk near the wall, which he

rarely opened, an envelope containing a tintype picture of Ellen.

Culpepper. He showed it to her sister, and they both sat silent for a

time, and then the woman spoke.

"Well, John," she said, "that was a long time ago."

"Forty years, Molly--forty years."

When they came back to the world she said: "John, I am up here looking

for a publisher. Father has written a Biography of Watts, and

collected all of his poems and things in it, and we thought it might

sell--Watts is so well known. But the publishers won't take it. I

want your advice about it."

Barclay listened to her story, and then wheeled in his chair and

exclaimed, "Can Adrian publish that book?"

"Yes," she answered tentatively; "that is, he could if it didn't take

such an awful lot of money."

After discussing details with her, Barclay called Neal Ward and

said:--

"Get up a letter to Adrian Brownwell asking him to print for me three

thousand copies of the colonel's book, at one dollar and fifty cents a

copy, and give seventy-five per cent of the profits to Colonel

Culpepper. We'll put that book in every public library in this

country. How's that?" And he looked at the tintype and said, "Bless

her dear little heart."

"Neal," asked Barclay, as Mrs. Brownwell left the room, "how old are

you? I keep forgetting." When the young man answered twenty-five,

Barclay, who was putting away the tintype picture, said, "And Jeanette

will be twenty-three at her next birthday." He closed the desk and

looked at the youth bending over his typewriter and sighed. "Been

going together off and on five or six years--I should say."

Neal nodded. Barclay put his hand on his chin and contemplated the

young man a moment. "Ever have any other love affair, son?"

The youngster coloured and looked up quickly with a puzzled look and

did not reply.

Barclay cut in with, "Well, son, I'm glad to find you don't lie

easily." He laughed silently. "Jennie has--lots of them. When she was

six she used to cry for little Watts Fernald, and they quarrelled like

cats and dogs, and when she was ten there was an Irish boy--Finnegan

I think his name was--who milked the cow, whom she adored, and when

she was fourteen or so, it was some boy in the high school who gave

her candy until her mother had to shoo him off, and I don't know how

many others." He paused for a few seconds and then went on, "But she's

forgotten them--that's the way of women." His eyes danced merrily as

he continued, while he scratched his head: "But with us men--it's

different. We never forget." He chuckled a moment, and then his face

changed as he said, "Neal, I wish you'd go into the mail room and see

if the noon mail has anything in it from that damn scoundrel who's

trying to start a cracker factory in St. Louis--I hate to bother to

smash him right now when we're so busy."

But it so happened that the damn scoundrel thought better of his

intention and took fifty thousand for his first thought, and Neal

Ward, being one of the component parts of an engaged couple, went

ahead being sensible about it. All engaged couples, of course, resolve

to be sensible about it. And for two years and a half--during

nineteen one and two and part of nineteen three--Jeanette Barclay and

Neal Ward had tried earnestly and succeeded admirably (they believed)

in being exceedingly sensible about everything. Jeanette had gone

through school and was spending the year in Europe with her mother,

and she would be home in May; and in June--in June of 1904--why, the

almanac stopped there; the world had no further interest, and no one

on earth could imagine anything after that. For then they proposed not

to be sensible any longer.

In the early years of this century--about 1902, probably--John

Barclay paid an accounting company twenty-five thousand dollars--more

money than General Ward and Watts McHurdie and Martin Culpepper and

Jacob Dolan had saved in all their long, industrious, frugal, and

useful lives--to go over his business, install a system of audits and

accounts, and tell him just how much money he was worth. After a score

of men had been working for six months, the accounting company made

its report. It was put in terms of dollars and cents, which are

fleeting and illusive terms, and mean much in one country and little

in another, signify great wealth at one time and mere affluence in

another period. So the sum need not be set down here. But certain

interesting details of the report may be set down to illuminate this

narrative. For instance, it indicates that John Barclay was a man of

some consequence, when one knows that he employed more men in that

year than many a sovereign state of this Union employed in its state

and county and city governments. It signifies something to learn that

he controlled more land growing wheat than any of half a dozen

European kings reign over. It means something to realize that in those

years of his high tide John Barclay, by a few lines dictated to Neal

Ward, could have put bread out of the reach of millions of his

fellow-creatures. And these are evidences of material power--these

men he hired, these lands he dominated, and this vast store of food

that he kept. So it is fair to assume that if this is a material

world, John Barclay's fortune was founded upon a rock. He and his

National Provisions Company were real. They were able to make laws;

they were able to create administrators of the law; and they were able

to influence those who interpreted the law. Barclay and his power were

substantial, palpable, and translatable into terms of money, of power,

of vital force.

And then one day, after long years of growth in the

under-consciousnesses of men, an idea came into full bloom in the

world. It had no especial champions. The people began to think this

idea. That was all. Now life reduced to its lowest terms consists of

you and him and me. Put us on a desert island together--you and him

and me--and he can do nothing without you and me--except he kill us,

and then he is alone; even then we haunt him, so our influence still

binds him. You can do nothing without him and me, and I can do nothing

without you and him. Not that you and he will hold me; not that you

will stop me; but what you think and say will bind me to your wishes

tighter than any chains you might forge. What you and he think is more

powerful than all the material forces of this universe. For what you

and he think is public opinion. It is not substantial; it is not

palpable. It may not readily be translated into terms of money, or

power, or vital force. But it crushes all these things before it. When

this public opinion rises sure and firm and strong, no material force

on this earth can stop it. For a time it may be dammed and checked.

For a day or a week or a year or a decade it may be turned from its

channel; yet money cannot hold it; arms cannot hold it; cunning cannot

baffle it. For it is God moving among men. Thus He manifests Himself

in this earth. Through the centuries, amid the storm and stress of

time, often muffled, often strangled, often incoherent, often raucous

and inarticulate with anguish, but always in the end triumphant, the

voice of the people is indeed the voice of God!

Nearly a dozen years had passed since the Russian painted the picture

of John Barclay, which hangs in the public library of Sycamore Ridge,

and in that time the heart of the American people had changed. Barclay

was beginning to feel upon him, night and day, the crushing weight of

popular scorn. He called the idea envy, but it was not envy. It was

the idea working in the world, and the weight of the scorn was

beginning to crumple his soul; for this idea that the people were

thinking was finding its way into newspapers, magazines, and books.

They were beginning to question the divine right of wealth to rule,

because it was wealth--an idea that Barclay could not comprehend even

vaguely. The term honest wealth, which was creeping into respectable

periodicals, was exceedingly annoying to him. For the very presence of

the term seemed to indicate that there was such a thing as dishonest

wealth,--an obvious absurdity; and when he addressed the students of

the Southwestern University at their commencement exercises in 1902,

his address attracted considerable attention because it deplored the

modern tendency in high places toward socialism and warned the

students that a nation of iconoclasts would perish from the earth. But

the people went on questioning the divine right of wealth to rule. In

the early part of 1903 Barclay was astounded at the action of a score

of his senators and nearly a hundred of his congressmen, who voted for

a national law prohibiting the giving of railroad rebates. He was

assured by all of them that it was done to satisfy temporary

agitation, but the fact that they voted for the law at all, as he

explained to Senator Myton, at some length and with some asperity, was

a breach of faith with "interests in American politics which may not

safely be ignored." "And what's more," he added angrily, "this is a

personal insult to me. That law hits my Door Strip."

And then out of the clear sky like a thunderbolt, not from an enemy,

not from any clique or crowd he had fought, but from the government

itself, during the last days of Congress came a law creating a

Department of Commerce and Labour at Washington, a law giving federal

inspectors the right to go through books of private concerns. Barclay

was overwhelmed with amazement. He raged, but to no avail; and his

wrath was heated by the rumours printed in all the newspapers that

Barclay and the National Provisions Company were to be the first

victims of the new law. Mrs. Barclay and Jeanette were going to Europe

in the spring of 1903, and Barclay on the whole was glad of it. He

wished the decks cleared for his fight; he felt that he must not have

Jane at his elbow holding his hand from malice in the engagement that

was coming, and when he left them on the boat, he spent a week

scurrying through the East looking for some unknown enemy in high

financial circles who might be back of the government's determination

to move against the N.P.C. He felt sure he could uncover the source of

his trouble--and then, either fight his enemy or make terms. It did

not occur to Barclay that he could not find a material, palpable,

personal object upon which to charge or with which to capitulate. But

he found nothing, and crossed the Alleghanies puzzled.

When he got home, he learned that a government inspector, one H. S.

Smith, was beginning the investigation of the Provisions Company's

books in St. Paul, Omaha, Chicago, and Denver. Barclay learned that

Smith had secured some bills of lading that might not easily be

explained. Incidentally, Barclay learned that an attempt had been

made, through proper channels, to buy Smith, and he was nonplussed to

learn that Smith was not purchasable. Then to end the whole matter,

Barclay wrote to Senator Myton, directing him to have Smith removed

immediately. But Myton's reply, which was forwarded to Barclay at

Sycamore Ridge, indicated that "the orders under which Smith is

working come from a higher source than the department."

Barclay's scorn of Inspector Smith--a man whom he could buy and sell

a dozen times from one day's income from his wealth--flamed into a

passion. He tore Myton's letter to bits, and refreshed his faith in

the god of Things As They Are by garroting a mill in Texas. While the

Texas miller was squirming, Barclay did not consider Inspector Smith

consciously, but in remote places in his mind always there lived the

scorned person whom Barclay knew was working against him.

From time to time in the early summer the newspapers contained

definite statements, authorized from Washington with increasing

positiveness, that the cordon around the N.P.C. was tightening. In

July Barclay's scorn of Inspector Smith grew into disquietude; for a

letter from Judge Bemis, of the federal court,--written up in the

Catskills,--warned him that scorn was not the only emotion with which

he should honour Smith. After reading Bemis' confidential and

ambiguous scrawl, Barclay drummed for a time with his hard fingers on

the mahogany before him, stared at the print sketches of machinery

above him, and paced the floor of his office with the roar of the mill

answering something in his angry heart. He could not know that the

tide was running out. He went to his telephone and asked for a city so

far away that when he had finished talking for ten minutes, he had

spent enough money to keep General Ward in comfort for a month. Neal

Ward, sitting in his room, heard Barclay say: "What kind of a damn

bunco game were you fellows putting up on me in 1900? You got my

money; that's all right; I didn't squeal at the assessment, did I?"

Young Ward in the pause closed his door. But the bull-like roar of

Barclay came through the wood between them in a moment, and he heard:

"Matter enough--here's this fellow Smith bullying my clerks out in

Omaha, and nosing around the St. Paul office; what right has he got?

Who is he, anyway--who got him his job? I wrote to Myton to get him

removed, or sent to some other work, and Myton said that the White

House was back of him. I wish you'd go over to Washington, and tell

them who I am and what we did for you in '96 and 1900; we can't stand

this. It's a damned outrage, and I look to you to stop it." In a

moment Ward heard Barclay exclaim: "You can't--why, that's a hell of

a note! What kind of a fellow is he, anyway? Tell him I gave half a

million to the party, and I've got some rights in this government that

a white man is bound to respect--or does he believe in taking your

money and letting you whistle?" A train rolling by the mill drowned

Barclay's voice, but at the end of the conversation Ward heard Barclay

say: "Well, what's a party good for if it doesn't protect the men who

contribute to its support? You simply must do it. I look to you for

it. You got my good money, and it's up to you to get results."

There was some growling, and then Barclay hung up the receiver. But he

was mad all day, and dictated a panic interview to Ward, which Ward

was to give to the Associated Press when they went to Chicago the next

day. In the interview, Barclay said that economic conditions were

being disturbed by half-baked politicians, and that values would

shrink and the worst panic in the history of the country would follow

unless the socialistic meddling with business was stopped.

The summer had deepened to its maturest splendour before Barclay

acknowledged to himself his dread of the City. For he began to feel a

definite discomfiture at the panorama of his pictures on the

news-stands in connection with the advertising of the Sunday

newspapers and magazines. The newspapers were blazoning to the whole

country that the Economy Door Strip was a blind for taking railroad

rebates, and everywhere he met the report of Inspector Smith that the

National Provisions Company's fifty-pound sack of Barclay's Best

contained but forty-eight pounds and ten ounces; also that Barclay had

been taking three ounces out of the pound cartons of breakfast food,

and that the cracker packages were growing smaller, while the prices

were not lowered. Even in Sycamore Ridge the reporters appeared with

exasperating regularity, and the papers were filled with diverting

articles telling of the Barclays' social simplicity and rehashing old

stories of John Barclay's boyhood. His attempt to stop the

investigation of the National Provisions Company became noised around

Washington, and the news of his failure was frankly given out from the

White House. This inspired a cartoon from McCutcheon in the _Chicago

Tribune_, representing the President weighing a flour sack on which

was printed "Barclay's Worst," with Barclay behind the President

trying to get his foot on the scales.

All of his life Barclay had been a fighter; he liked to hit and dodge

or get hit back. His struggles in business and in the business part of

politics had been with tangible foes, with material things; and his

weapons had been material things: coercion, bribery (more or less

sugar-coated), cheating, and often in these later years the roar of

his voice or the power of his name. But now, facing the formless,

impersonal thing called public opinion, hitherto unknown in his scheme

of things, he was filled with uncertainty and indecision.

One autumn day, after sending three stenographers home limp and weary

with directions for his battles, Barclay strayed into McHurdie's shop.

The general and Dolan were the only members of the parliament present

that afternoon, besides Watts. Barclay nodded at the general without

speaking, and Dolan said:--

"Cool, ain't it? Think it will freeze?"

Barclay took a chair, and when Dolan and Ward saw that he had come for

a visit, they left.

"Watts," asked Barclay, after the others had gone, and the little man

at the bench did not speak, "Watts, what's got into the people of this

country? What have I done that they should begin pounding me this

way?"

McHurdie turned a gentle smile on his visitor, knowing that Barclay

would do the talking. Barclay went on: "Here are five suits in county

courts in Texas against me; a suit in Kansas by the attorney-general,

five or ten in the Dakotas, three in Nebraska, one or two in each of

the Lake states, and the juries always finding against me. I haven't

changed my methods. I'm doing just what I've done for fifteen years.

I've had lots of lawsuits before, with stockholders and rival

companies and partners, and millers and all that--but this standing

in front of the mob and fighting them off--why? Why? What have I

done? These county attorneys and attorneys-general seem to delight in

it--now why? They didn't used to; it used to be that only cranks like

old Phil Ward even talked of such things, and people laughed at them;

and now prosecuting attorneys actually do these things, and people

reelect them. Why? What's got into the people? What am I doing that I

haven't been doing?"

"Maybe the people are growing honest, John," suggested the harness

maker amiably.

Barclay threw back his head and roared: "Naw--naw--it isn't that;

it's the damn newspapers. That's what it is! They're what's raising

the devil. But why? Why? What have I done? Why, they have even

bulldozed some of my own federal judges--my own men, Watts, my own

men; men whose senators came into my office with their hats in their

hands and asked permission to name these judges. Now why?" He was

silent awhile and then began chuckling: "But I fixed 'em the other

day. Did you see that article in all the papers briefed out of New

York about how that professor had said that the N.P.C. was an economic

necessity? I did that, Watts: and got it published in the magazines,

too--and our advertising agents made all the newspapers that get our

advertising print it--and they had to." Barclay laughed. After a

moody silence he continued: "And you know what I could do. I could

finance a scheme to buy out the meat trust and the lumber trust, and I

could control every line of advertising that goes into the damn

magazines--and I could buy the paper trust too, and that would fix

'em. The Phil Wards are not running this country yet. The men who make

the wealth and maintain the prosperity have got to run it in spite of

the long-nosed reformers and socialists. You know, Watts, that we men

who do things have a divine responsibility to keep the country off the

rocks. But she's drifting a lot just now, and they're all after me,

because I'm rich. That's all, Watts, just because I've worked hard and

earned a little money--that's why." And so he talked on, until he was

tired, and limped home and sat idly in front of his organ, unable to

touch the keys.

Then he turned toward the City to visit his temporal kingdom. There in

the great Corn Exchange Building his domain was unquestioned. There in

the room with the mahogany walls he could feel his power, and stanch

the flow of his courage. There he was a man. But alas for human

vanity! When he got to the City, he found the morning papers full of a

story of a baby that had died from overeating breakfast food made at

his mills and adulterated with earth from his Missouri clay banks, as

the coroner had attested after an autopsy; and a miserable county

prosecutor was looking for John Barclay. So he hid all the next day in

his offices, and that evening took Neal Ward on a special train in his

private car, on a roundabout way home to Sycamore Ridge.

It was a wretched homecoming for so great and successful a man as

Barclay. Yet he with all his riches, with all his material power, even

he longed for the safety of home, as any hunted thing longs for his

lair. On the way he paced the diagonals of the little office room in

his car, like a caged jackal. The man had lost his anchor; the things

which his life had been built on would not hold him. Money--men

envied the rich nowadays, he said, and the rich man had no rights in

the courts or out of them; friends--they had gone up in the market,

and he could not afford them; politics--he had found it a quicksand.

So he jabbered to Neal Ward, his secretary, and pulled down the

curtains of his car on the station side of every stop the train made

in its long day's journey.

CHAPTER XXIV

It was nearly midnight when the special train pulled into Sycamore

Ridge, and Neal Ward hurried home. He went to his room, and found

there a letter and a package, both addressed in Jeanette's

handwriting. The letter was only a note that read:--

"MY DEAREST BOY: I could not wait to send it for your Christmas

present. So I am sending it the very day it is finished. I hope it

will bring me close to you--into your very heart and keep me there.

I have kissed it--for I knew that you would.

"Your loving JEANETTE."

He tore open the package and found a miniature of Jeanette done on

ivory--that seemed to bring her into the room, and illumine it with

her presence. The thing bloomed with life, and his heart bounded with

joy as his eyes drank the beauty of it. His father called from below

stairs, and the youth went down holding the note and the miniature in

his hands. Before the father could speak, the son held out the

picture, and Philemon Ward looked for a moment into the glowing

faces--that of the picture and that of the living soul before him,

and hesitated before speaking.

"I got your wire--" he began.

"But isn't it beautiful, father--wonderful!" broke in the son.

The father assented kindly and then continued: "So I thought I'd sit

up for you. I had to talk with you." The son's face looked an

interrogation, and the father answered, "Read that, Neal--" handing

his son a letter in a rich linen envelope bearing in the corner the

indication that it was written at the Army and Navy Club in

Washington. The lovely face in the miniature lay on the table between

them and smiled up impartially at father and son as the young man drew

out the letter and read:--

"MY DEAR GENERAL WARD: This letter will introduce to you Mr. H. S.

Smith, an inspector from the Bureau of Commerce and Labour, who has

been working upon evidence connected with the National Provisions

Company. I happened to be at luncheon this afternoon with a man of

the highest official authority, whose name it would be bad faith to

divulge, but whom I know you respect, even if you do not always

agree with him. I mentioned your name and the part you took in the

battle of the Wilderness, and my friend was at once interested,

though, of course, he had known you by name and fame for forty

years. One word led to another, as is usual in these cases, and my

friend mentioned the fact that your son, Neal Dow Ward, is secretary

to John Barclay, and in a position to verify certain evidence which

the government now has in the N.P.C. matter. I happen to know that

the government is exceedingly anxious to be exactly correct in every

charge it makes against this Company, and hence I am writing to you.

Your son can do a service to his country to-day by telling the truth

when he is questioned by Inspector Smith, to my mind as important as

that you did in the Wilderness. Inspector Smith has a right to

question him, and will do so, and I have promised my friend here to

ask you to counsel with your son, and beg him in the name of that

good citizenship for which you have always stood, and for which you

offered your life, to tell the simple truth. As a comrade and a

patriot, I have no doubt what you will do, knowing the facts."

Neal Ward put his hand on the table, with the letter still in his

fingers. "Father," he asked blankly, "do you know what that means?"

"Yes, Neal, I think I understand; it means that to-morrow morning will

decide whether you are a patriot or a perjurer, my boy--a patriot or

a perjurer!" The general, who was in his shirt-sleeves and collarless,

rose, and putting his hands behind him, backed to the radiator to warm

them.

"But, father--father," exclaimed the boy, "how can I? What I learned

was in confidence. How can I?"

The father saw the anguish in his son's face, and did not reply at

once. "Is it crooked, Neal?"

"Yes," replied the son, and then added: "So bad I was going to get out

of it, as soon as Jeanette came home. I couldn't stand it--for a

life, father. But I promised to stay three years, and try, and I think

I should keep my promise."

The father and son were silent for a time, and then the father spoke.

"And you love her with all your life--don't you, Nealie?" The son was

gazing intently at the miniature and nodded. At length the father

sighed. "My poor, poor boy--my poor, poor boy." He walked to the

table on which were his books and papers, and then stood looking at

the girl's face. "You couldn't explain it to her, I suppose?" he

asked.

"No," replied the son. "No; she adores her father; to her he is

perfect. And I don't blame her, for he is good--you can't know how

good, to her." Again they stood in silence. The son looked up from the

picture and said, "And you know, father, what the world would think of

me--a spy, an informer--an ingrate?"

The old man did not reply, and the son shook his head and his face

twitched with the struggle that was in him. Suddenly the father walked

to the son and cried: "And yet you must, Neal Ward--you must. Is

there any confidence in God's world so sacred as your duty to mankind?

Is there any tie, even that of your wife, so sacred as that which

binds you to humanity? I left your mother, my sweetheart, and went out

to fight, with the chance of never seeing her again. I went out and

left her for the same country that is calling you now, Neal!" The boy

looked up with agony on his face. The father paused a moment and then

went on: "Your soul is your soul--not John Barclay's, my boy--not

Jeanette Barclay's--but yours--yours, Neal, to blight or to cherish,

as you will." A moment later he added, "Don't you see, son--don't you

see, Neal?" The son shook his head and looked down, and did not

answer. The father put his arm about the son. "Boy, boy," he cried,

"boy, you've got a a man's load on you now--a man's load. To-morrow

you can run away like a coward; you can dodge and lie like a thief, or

you can tell the simple truth, as it is asked of you, like a man--the

simple truth like a man, Neal."

"Yes, I know, father--I see it all--but it is so hard--for her

sake, father."

The old man was silent, while the kitchen clock ticked away a minute

and then another and a third. Then he took his arm away from his son,

and grasped the boy's hand. "Oh, little boy--little boy," he cried,

"can't I make you see that the same God who has put this trial upon

you will see you through it, and that if you fail in this trial, your

soul will be crippled for life, and that no matter what you get in

return for your soul--you will lose in the bargain? Can't you see it,

Nealie--can't you see it? All my life I have been trying to live that

way, and I have tried to make you see it--so that you would be ready

for some trial like this."

The son rose, and the two men stood side by side, clasping hands. The

boy suddenly tore himself loose, and throwing his hands in the air,

wailed, "Oh, God--it is too hard--I can't, father--I can't."

And with the miniature in his hand he walked from the room, and

Philemon Ward went to his closet and wrestled through the night. At

dawn his son sat reading and re-reading a letter. Finally he pressed

another letter to his lips, and read his own letter again. It read:--