BASIL EVERMAN
By Elsie Singmaster
BASIL EVERMAN.
MARTIN LUTHER. THE STORY OF HIS LIFE. With frontispiece.
THE LONG JOURNEY. Frontispiece in color.
EMMELINE. Illustrated.
KATY GAUMER. Illustrated.
GETTYSBURG. Illustrated.
WHEN SARAH WENT TO SCHOOL. Illustrated.
WHEN SARAH SAVED THE DAY. Illustrated.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK
BASIL EVERMAN
BY
ELSIE SINGMASTER
[Illustration: Logo]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
_The Riverside Press Cambridge_
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY ELSIE SINGMASTER LEWARS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
I. THE SHADOW ON A BRIGHT DAY 1
II. MOTHER AND DAUGHTER 13
III. A WALTONVILLE COMMENCEMENT AND AN INQUISITIVE STRANGER 28
IV. MR. UTTERLY MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MRS. SCOTT 45
V. MR. UTTERLY CONTINUES HIS SEARCH 54
VI. A NEW PIANO 67
VII. UTTERLY SPENDS A PLEASANT EVENING 83
VIII. UTTERLY IS PUT UPON HIS METTLE 93
IX. MRS. SCOTT'S PARTY 101
X. "MY BROTHER BASIL WAS DIFFERENT!" 119
XI. A DUET AND WHAT CAME OF IT 128
XII. GROWING PAINS 143
XIII. RICHARD WRITES A NOTE 155
XIV. AN ANXIOUS NIGHT 164
XV. EXPLANATIONS 176
XVI. FURTHER EXPLANATIONS 189
XVII. MRS. LISTER TAKES TO HER BED 208
XVIII. MRS. LISTER HAS TWO CALLERS 223
XIX. MRS. LISTER OPENS AN OLD BUREAU 234
XX. BASIL'S ROOM HAS A NEW VISITOR 239
XXI. A QUESTION PUT TO RICHARD 251
XXII. A CONFIDENCE BETRAYED 258
XXIII. A WALTONVILLE DELILAH 267
XXIV. A DEEPENING SHADOW 279
XXV. DR. SCOTT PAYS A CALL 286
XXVI. "LET US BE ENTIRELY FRANK WITH ONE ANOTHER" 293
XXVII. EPILOGUE 302
BASIL EVERMAN
CHAPTER I
THE SHADOW ON A BRIGHT DAY
Richard Lister's mother stood at the head of the stairs and called a
little impatiently. She was a large, middle-aged woman who looked older
than she was in the black silk dress and bonnet with strings which was
the church- and party-going costume of women of her years and time.
Middle age had not yet begun to dress in light colors and flowery hats
like youth.
When, above the sound of a tinkling piano, a young voice answered, "I'm
coming!" she returned to her room, without expecting, however, that
Richard would keep his promise at once.
Walton College, on whose campus Mrs. Lister lived, of which her husband
was president, and from which her only son was being graduated to-day,
had not yet dreamed of being a "greater Walton." Satisfied with its own
modest aims, it had not opened its eyes to that "wider vision" of
religion and education and "service" which was to be loudly proclaimed
by the next generation. Even games with other colleges were as yet
unheard of; the students were still kept at their books and it was
expected of them that they learn their lessons. Each was required to
deliver an oration on Commencement Day, the first speaker saluting in
old-fashioned English pronunciation _Auditores_, _Curatores_,
_Professores_, and _Comites_, and making humorous allusions to _puellæ_.
Only in admitting the daughters of the professors, and once an ambitious
girl from the village, was the college a little ahead of its own times.
Waltonville, like its college, belonged to an order which was elsewhere
passing. Lying a little north of Mason and Dixon's line, it resembled in
many pleasant ways a Southern town. The broad streets were quiet and
thickly shaded and the houses were plainly built of red brick with noble
white pillars. The young people gathered in the twilight and talked and
sang; occasionally a group of students lifted their voices in _Integer
Vitæ_ or "There's Music in the Air"; and those citizens who lived near
the campus could hear a chanted "bonus-a-um" or "amo-amas-amat" from the
room of the Latin professor, who was a stern drillmaster. Otherwise the
village was as quiet as the country.
The Civil War was still the chief topic of discussion among the older
men. Dr. Lister, Dr. Scott, who was the teacher of English--Waltonville
was careful about titles--and Dr. Green, the village physician, met many
times in the long vacation and talked about Grant and Sherman and Lee.
Dr. Lister had served a brief term at the end of the war; Dr. Scott had
been too young to enlist, but had lost father and brothers; Dr. Green,
who was still younger, had had no personal experience of war, nor, so
far as any one knew, of its losses.
Of Dr. Green, Waltonville knew comparatively little. Mrs. Lister
remembered his single year at the college, whither he had come,
self-prepared, to enter the senior class. An unexpected legacy had given
him the opportunity, passionately desired and as passionately despaired
of, of studying medicine. He was older than the other students, a tall,
dark, quiet man who allowed himself no diversions, who belonged to no
fraternities, and who cared nothing apparently for girls. His companions
knew, however, that he was not always silent. He burst occasionally into
fierce and eloquent harangues, condemning and scorning those who wasted
their time in idleness or love-making. His successful efforts to educate
himself gave him an air of authority. The students knew also that he
went now and then, as many of them did, to see Margie Ginter, the
daughter of the hotel-keeper, but they believed that he went merely to
be amused by her bad grammar, and that for him her round figure, her
childish mouth, and the touches of her pretty hand on arm or knee had no
temptation. When the Ginters left, Margie sent back to him letters with
misspelled addresses which the students did not believe he answered.
After being entirely lost to the view of Waltonville, Green returned. He
had become a physician, but the four years of preparation had lengthened
to six, during which he had changed into a weary and disappointed man.
He had come, he explained, to see old Dr. Percy, now retiring from his
practice, and offering the good-will of his business for sale. He had
hoped that Dr. Everman would recommend him and that others would
remember him. When he heard that Dr. Everman had died, he expressed to
Mrs. Lister so hearty an admiration for her imposing and learned father
and so unfeigned a regret that he was gone, that he won at once her
valuable support. It was not long before he ceased to look like a beaten
man, his thin frame filled out, he walked briskly, and began to exhibit
some of the scolding eloquence of his college days.
In Waltonville class distinctions continued. The college people, the
clergymen, Dr. Green, and the lawyers who attended a sleepy court in
April and August, made up one class; all other white persons another.
The servants were negroes who lived in low, neat cabins along a grassy
lane which bounded the town on its eastern side. Waltonville had never
been a slave-holding community, but some of the older negroes had been
attached to the same family for several generations. 'Manda Gates, Mrs.
Lister's cook, had served her mother, and Miss Thomasina Davis's 'Melia
had held her in her arms the day she was born.
There was neither strife nor envy between Waltonville's classes. Mrs.
Lister respected Mr. Underwood, the storekeeper, but did not invite him
to dinner, and Mrs. Underwood would have been greatly disturbed at the
prospect of entertaining Mrs. Lister.
The old house, in whose exact center Mrs. Lister stood when she called
Richard, had been built sixty years earlier for her father, President
Richard Everman, and had descended to his son-in-law and successor. It
was a broad, pleasant house with high ceilings and with woodwork of
solid oak. One side of the first floor was divided into library and
sitting-room and the other into dim, long double parlors. Dining-room
and kitchen were in a wing at the back.
On a level with Mrs. Lister the bedrooms opened each with an elaborately
dressed and inviting bed, dim in the pleasant light which filtered in
through bowed shutters. Above in the third story were other bedrooms and
a large, otherwise empty attic in which stood the reservoir which held
the supply of water for the house. As a little girl, she had come with
her two companions, her brother Basil and Thomasina Davis, to steal
short peeps at the tank in which they could easily have been drowned.
She was the only one of the three who was really afraid. Thomasina
insisted upon running boldly into the room and little Basil was found
afterwards there alone. Basil's desire to investigate was always keener
than his fear of danger.
Having waited for ten minutes, Mrs. Lister now returned to her post in
the hall, and raised her voice in three successive calls. At the last
impatient summons, the piano in the parlor ceased its clangor with a
series of great chords, rolling under a fine, clear touch from the
lowest of the yellowed keys to the uppermost treble. In the bass the
tones were indescribably mournful, as though the aged instrument cried
out in pain under the strong fingers of youth; in the treble they
sounded a light cackle, half childish, half senile, like the laughter
of an old man. The piano, bought years ago for Basil, resembled an old
man in many ways; its teeth were yellow, it creaked as though rheumatism
had taken a permanent abode in its joints, and it was swathed in a
covering of warm red felt. Though it was the only object in Mrs.
Lister's house which was not exactly adapted to the use to which it was
put, and though it reminded her of misery, she would not have dreamed of
selling it or of giving it away of of exchanging it for another
instrument, any more than she would have sold or given away or exchanged
an aged relative. A piano once was a piano forever, and no dismal sound
from its depths, no fierce sarcasm from Richard could depreciate it in
her eyes.
"Richard!" Before the player had righted the piano stool or had closed
the square lid over the yellowed keys, Mrs. Lister called again.
"Yes, mother!"
He took the stairway in four great leaps, the last of which his mother
stepped aside to avoid. But she did not escape the bear's hug with which
he grasped her. He was a tall, spare young fellow, scarcely more than a
lad, with crisp, light hair and dark eyes.
"Yes, mother! Yes, mother! Yes, mother!"
"Your cap and gown are there on my bed, and you must change your tie and
do it quickly."
"The procession will form in one half-hour, mother, and they can't
possibly begin till I tune up. I have half a mind to be late so I can
see 'em squirm." Richard took the tie from his mother's hand and
stationed himself before the glass in her bedroom, where the walnut
furniture was heaviest and most elaborately carved. "Think of it, my
last morning in chapel! No more eight o'clocks! No more Pol Econ, no
more Chemistry, no more worthless stuff of any sort!"
"I hope you know your speech _thoroughly_, Richard."
"I do, oh, I do!"
"I could never memorize well, and I was always frightened when I had to
say a piece in school. Aren't you at _all_ nervous?"
"Not at all. I'm cool-headed and cold-hearted. _Morituri te salutamus_,
that is, 'We, about to die, salute you!'"
"You are not going to say that, Richard!"
"No, mother, darling!" Richard folded his black gown about him. "I bow
like this, till my long wings touch the ground, and I say, '_Alius annus
cum perpetua sua agitatione abiit, et alia classis in vitæ limine est_,'
etc. Wouldn't old Jehu skin me alive if I failed? It is bad enough that
Eleanor Bent is ahead of me, of _me_, if you please--faculty family and
all that. Now, good-bye, mother. Have a little more faith in me than you
look, or I may rush to your shoulder weeping." With a "Farewell, great
Queen, live forever," and a light touch of lips on his mother's broad,
smooth cheek, he was gone, down the polished banister.
When the screen door had slammed, Mrs. Lister sat for a while quietly by
her bed. There was, now that Richard was started, plenty of time. She
had been up since six o'clock, but she was not tired, being a person of
almost inexhaustible vigor. The house was in perfect order, 'Manda was
singing in the kitchen, and she had a short breathing space. She loved
those moments in which, her tasks finished, she could sit perfectly
still, almost without thinking, yet vividly conscious of her blessings,
of her good husband, of her fine son, and of her pleasant home.
Above all, she was thankful that she was content, that she was driven by
no wild impulses as was Thomasina Davis, who often sat with her in the
morning and in the evening heard a concert in Baltimore. She visited
Baltimore--which she called "Baltimer"--in the fall and again in the
spring, after having made detailed, dignified, and long-announced plans,
and there, with the aid of a commissionnaire, made her purchases for six
months. She enjoyed these journeys, but she was always glad to get home
with her silks and linens, her little stories of the courteous
attentions of the Baltimoreans, of the baked blue-fish, and of the
stately house of her old cousin on Fayette Street.
But now, even with all her morning's work done and Richard started on
his way, she was not at peace. His playing disturbed her, not because
the piano was old and gave forth so many painful sounds, but because
music had sad associations. She believed that it roused strange passions
in the human heart, that it made men and women queer, abnormal,
sometimes even wicked. It was connected in her mind with a quality
called "genius" which animated the minds of poets and musicians and
artists and made them a little more than human and at the same time a
good deal less. It was a general conviction among quiet people of the
time that those who could write or paint or sing beyond a mere amateur
excellence were "wild," like poor Mr. Poe, about whom a tradition
lingered among her Baltimore cousins. Genius was not a necessary part of
greatness; her father and her husband were great men, but they were also
sober, dignified, comprehensible, reasonable, which geniuses were not.
Thomasina Davis had wrong ideas and she put them into Richard's head.
She had spent all but three years of her life in Waltonville, but those
three in New York, under the instruction of a famous pianist, had made
her wish to be a concert player. Fortunately family duties had called
her home, and now, those duties long since done, she lived alone in the
homestead set back in the garden on the street which led to the college.
While she condemned Thomasina, Mrs. Lister remembered with a stirring of
the heart all the hundreds of times she had pressed her latch. Thomasina
had three pupils; Cora Scott, who attained technical correctness;
Eleanor Bent, who played with all the imperfect brilliancy of one who
learns easily; and Richard, who attained both correctness and
brilliancy. Mrs. Lister explained to strangers that Thomasina did not
need to give lessons; she blushed when her quarterly bill arrived, and
shivered when she heard her talk to Richard about playing.
"You must read poetry, Richard, and _feel_ it; that is the way and the
only way for youth to gain emotional experience.
'Magic mirror thou hast none
Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own
Anguish or ardor, else no amulet.'
When you have learned to feel, then you can play."
Richard was not a genius--thank God! It seemed impossible that he should
be graduating; that he should be no longer her lovely, placid baby, who
had done so much to heal an old hurt. Though he would have to go away
for a few years for further study, he would come back to teach in the
college and would perhaps some day be its president, like his father and
grandfather. Then she could stay on in the house which was like the
outer shell of her soul, not to leave it until she left this life.
Richard might marry--ought to marry--a pretty, biddable girl like Cora
Scott. Cora would do her duty by her mother-in-law.
Mrs. Lister's life, now so uneventful, had had its great sorrow, its
unsatisfied passion. There was another love, stronger almost than that
for husband and son, because its object needed no longer the loving
affection which sought to serve him, had never, indeed, needed it while
he lived.
It was at such times as this, upon holidays, anniversaries, and other
great days, that she thought most of the past, most of her father in his
white stock and his bands, he having been a clergyman as well as a
scholar; of her mother who seemed to her dim recollection very
different from, but who was, nevertheless, very much like herself; and
most of all of her brother Basil, for whom she had the rare and
passionate affection of sister for brother of a Dorothy Wordsworth or a
Eugénie de Guerin; that affection which equals in intensity a lover's,
which brooks no rival, and which is almost certain to result in misery.
She thought of them all now, sitting in her room. She could hear the
laughter of the faculty and the boys and girls gathering for the
procession; she knew that it was time for her to go, but she could not
move. How long, long ago it all was! Yet how close they were, especially
Basil, who had been of all most vivid, most bright.
Presently, moved by an irresistible impulse, she left her chair by the
window and climbed the stairs into the low-pitched third story. There
she laid her hand upon a door. She desired intensely to go in; the touch
of the knob restored to her an old mood of grief, the phase in which one
feels that seeking, importuning, one must find. Basil was here; his
wide, bright gaze sought her eyes, as she often fancied, with reproach.
All dead persons seemed to Mrs. Lister to look like that; her father
did, as she remembered some little service unrendered, some command
forgotten. Basil's gaze was like his father's, yet different. He seemed
to reproach, not his sister, but his Creator for having laid him low,
banishing him from the sunshine when his contemporaries still had years
of life before them.
This was his room; here he had slept and idled and whistled and sung;
here had been unpacked and put away his belongings sent home after he
was dead; here lingered still an odor of disinfectants and still more
subtly an odor of tobacco, not approved of in the Lister house; here
were his pens and pencils and his books, shabby little editions of Greek
plays, lined and annotated, which he carried about with him. Here he had
sat by the window, indifferent to heat and cold, alone, doing, alas!
nothing. Surely if she entered she would find him, would hear him speak,
would see him smile! Surely--
Mrs. Lister took her hand from the knob and went down the steps. This
was Richard's Commencement Day; it was wrong to give her mind free
course in the region which invited. Basil was at peace; must be at
peace, nothing could disturb him. He was gone almost entirely from human
recollection. The old fear that the world might come to know about him,
that things might be "found out," was laid. She, too, must forget him;
that was the only way to live. Dr. Lister had said, many years ago, that
Basil's belongings should be destroyed; that this was the first step
toward her recovery. But Dr. Lister spoke of him no more and to Richard
he was a vague ghost. Changes in the faculty of the college, the death
of old friends in the town had contributed to forgetfulness. Most of
all, Mrs. Lister's own grief was of the variety which endures no mention
of the dead and which creates the oblivion which it is likely most
bitterly to resent. Basil was dead and forgotten.