Mrs. Kerby heard squealing _after_ the boy did; and pictured the horrible
situation of the poor old helpless woman writhing in anguish, and the
fire eating nearer and nearer. Great Scott! it made _me_ crawl to read
it; and I saw a crowd down-town in the park, and if one fellow wasn’t
reading your blasted blood-curdler out loud; and one woman was crying
and telling about the old party lending her money to buy her husband’s
coffin, and then letting her off paying. That made the crowd rabid.
At every sentence they let off a howl. You needn’t be grinning like a
wild-cat; it ain’t funny to that feller in jail, I bet. Is it, Amos?”
“You boys better call off your dogs, if you can get ’em,” was all the
sheriff deigned to answer, and he rose as he spoke. He did not look
disturbed, but his placid mask belied him. Better than most men he knew
what stormy petrels “the newspaper boys” were. And better than any man
he knew what an eggshell was his jail. “I’d almost like to have ’em
bust that fool door, though,” he grimly reflected, “just to show the
supervisors I knew what I was talking about. I’ll get a new jail out of
those old roosters, or they’ll have to get a new sheriff. But meanwhile—”
He fell into a perplexed and gloomy reverie, through which his five
years’ acquaintance with the lost woman drifted pensively, as a moving
car will pass, slowly revealing first one familiar face and then another.
“I suppose I’m what the lawyers would call her next friend—hereabouts,
anyhow,” he mused, “and yet you might say it was quite by accident we
started in to know each other, poor old lady!” The cause of the first
acquaintance was as simple as a starved cat which a jury of small boys
were preparing to hang just under the bluff. Amos cut down the cat, and
almost in the same rhythm, as the disciples of Delsarte would say,
cuffed the nearest executioner, while the others fled. Amos hated cats,
but this one, as if recognizing his good-will (and perhaps finding some
sweet drop in the bitter existence of peril and starvation that he knew,
and therefore loath to yield it), clung to Amos’s knees and essayed a
feeble purr of gratitude. “Well, pussy,” said Amos, “good-bye!” But
the cat did not stir, except to rub feebly again. It was a black cat,
very large, ghastly thin, with the rough coat of neglect, and a pair of
burning eyes that might have reminded Amos of Poe’s ghastly conceit were
he not protected against such fancies by the best of protectors. He could
not remember disagreeably that which he had never read. “Pussy, you’re
about starved,” said Amos. “I believe I’ve got to give you a stomachful
before I turn you loose.”
“_I’ll_ give the kitty something to eat,” said a voice in the air.
Amos stared at the clouds; then he whirled on his heel and recognized
both the voice, which had a different accent and quality of tone from
the voices that he was used to hear, and the little, shabby, gray-headed
woman who was scrambling down to him.
[Illustration: “‘_I’LL_ GIVE THE KITTY SOMETHING TO EAT’”]
“_Will_ you?” exclaimed Amos, in relief, for he knew her by repute,
although they had never looked each other in the face before. “Well,
that’s very nice of you, Miss Clark.”
“I’ll keep him with pleasure, sir,” said the old woman. “I’ve had a
bereavement lately. My cat died. She was ’most at the allotted term, I
expect, but so spry and so intelligent I couldn’t realize it. I couldn’t
somehow feel myself attracted to any other cat. But this poor fugitive——
Come here, sir!”
To Amos’s surprise, the cat summoned all its forces and, after one futile
stagger, leaped into her arms. A strange little shape she looked to him,
as she stood, with her head too large for her emaciated little body,
which was arrayed in a coarse black serge suit, plainly flotsam and
jetsam of the bargain counter, planned for a woman of larger frame. Yet
uncouth as the woman looked, she was perfectly neat.
“I’m obliged to you for saving the poor creature,” she said.
“I’m obliged to you, ma’am, for taking it off my hands,” said Amos. He
bowed; she returned his bow—not at all in the manner or with the carriage
to be expected of such a plain and ill-clad presence. Amos considered the
incident concluded. But a few days later she stopped him on the street,
nervously smiling. “That cat, sir,” she began in her abrupt way—she
never seemed to open a conversation; she dived into it with a shiver, as
a timid swimmer plunges into the water—“that cat,” said she, “that cat,
sir, is a right intelligent animal, and he has pleased the Colonel. He’s
so fastidious I was afraid, though I didn’t mention it; but they are very
congenial.”
“I’m glad they’re friendly,” says Amos; “the Colonel would make
mince-meat of an uncongenial cat. What do you call the cat?”
“I couldn’t, on account of circumstances, you know, call him after my
last cat, Miss Margaret Clark, so I call him Esquire Clark. He knows his
name already. I thank you again, sir, for saving him. I just stopped you
so as to tell you I had a lot of ripe gooseberries I’d be glad to have
you send and pick.”
“Why, that’s good of you,” said Amos. “I guess the boys at the jail would
like a little gooseberry sauce.”
She nodded and turned round; the words came over her shoulder: “Say,
sir, I expect you wouldn’t give them jam? It’s a great deal better than
sauce, and—_I_ don’t mind letting you have the extra sugar.” Amos was
more bewildered than he showed, but he thanked her, and did, in fact,
come that afternoon with a buggy. The first object to greet him was the
large white head and the large black jaws of the Colonel, chained to a
post. Amos, who is the friend of all dogs, and sometimes has an uninvited
following of stray curs, gave the snarling figure-head a nod and a
careless greeting: “All right, young feller. Don’t disturb yourself. I’m
here, all proper and legal. How are you?” The redoubtable Colonel began
to wag his tail; and as Amos came up to him he actually fawned on him
with manifestations of pleasure.
“I guess he’s safe to unloose, ma’am,” said Amos.
Old Twentypercent was looking on with a strange expression. “He likes
you, sir; I never saw him like a stranger before.”
“Well, most dogs like me,” said Amos. “I guess they understand I like
them.”
“I reckon you’re a good man,” said Old Twentypercent, solemnly. From this
auspicious beginning the acquaintance slowly but steadily waxed into a
queer kind of semi-friendship. Amos always bowed to the old woman when
he met her on the street. She sent the prisoners in the jail fruit every
Sunday during the season; and Amos, not to be churlish, returned the
courtesy with a flowering plant, now and then, in winter. But he never
carried his gifts himself, esteeming that such conduct would be an
intrusion on a lady who preferred a retired life. Esquire Clark, however,
was of a social turn. He visited the jail often. The first time he came
Amos sent him back. The messenger, Mrs. Raker, was received at the door,
thanked warmly, sent away loaded with fruit and flowers, but not asked
over the threshold, which made Amos the surer that he was right in not
going himself. Nevertheless, he did go to see Miss Clark, but hardly on
his own errand. A carpenter in the town, a good sort of thriftless though
industrious creature, came to Amos to borrow some money. He explained
that he needed it to pay interest on a debt, and that his tools were
pledged for security. The interest, he mourned, was high, and the debt of
long standing. The creditor was Old Twentypercent.
“It’s a shame I ’ain’t paid it off before, and that’s a fact,” he
concluded; “but a feller with nine children can’t pay nothing—not even
the debt of nature—for he’s ’fraid to die and leave them. And the blamed
thing’s been a-runnin’ and a-runnin’, like a ringworm, and a-eatin’ me
up. Though my wife she says we’ve more’n paid her up in interest.” Amos
had an old kindness for the man, and after a visit to his wife—he holding
the youngest two of the nine (twins) on his knees and keeping the peace
with candy—he told the pair he would ask Miss Clark to allow a third
extension, on the payment of the interest.
“Well, but I don’t know’s he’s even got that,” said the wife, anxiously.
“We’d a lot of expenses; I don’t s’pose we’d orter had the twins’
photographs taken this month, but they was so delicate I was ’fraid we
wouldn’t raise ’em; and Mamie really couldn’t go to school without new
shoes. Children’s a blessing, I s’pose, but it’s a blessing poor folks
had got to pay for in advance!”
“_So!_” says Amos. “Well, we’ll have to see to that much, I guess. I’ll
go this night.” He betook himself to his errand in a frame of mind only
half distasteful. The other half was curious. His visit fell on a summer
night, a Sunday night, when the air was soft and still and sweet with
the tiny hum of insects and the smell of drying grass and the mellow
resonance of the church-bells. Amos climbed the clay stairs. The white
porcupine blazed above the bluffs. It gave light enough to see the
color of the grass and flowers; yet not a real color, only the ghost of
scarlet and green and white, and only a ghost of the violet sky, while
all about the devouring shadows sank form and color alike in their
olive blacks. The stars were out in the sky and the south wind in the
trees. Amos stepped across the lawn—he was a light walker although a
heavy-weight—and stopped before the front door, which had long windows
on either side. He had his arm outstretched to knock; but he did not
knock, he stood and watched the green holland shade that screened the
window rise gradually. He could see the room, a large room, uncarpeted,
whereby the steps of the inmate echoed on the boards. He could see
a writing-desk, a table, and four or five chairs. These chairs were
entirely different from anything else in the room; they were of pretty
shape and extremely comfortable. Immediately the curtain descended at a
run, and the old woman’s voice called, “You’re a _bad_ cat; don’t you
do that again!” The voice went on, as if to some one present: “Did you
ever see such a trying beast? Why, he’s almost human! Now, you watch; the
minute I turn away from that window, that cat will pull up the shade.” It
appeared that she was right, for the curtain instantly rolled up again.
“No, honey,” said Miss Clark, “you mustn’t encourage the kitty to be
naughty. ’Squire, if I let that curtain stay a minute, will you behave!”
A dog’s growl emphasized this gentle reproof. “You see the Colonel
disapproves. Don’t pull the dog’s tail, honey. Oh, mercy! _’Squire!_”
Amos heard a crash, and in an instant a flame shot up in a cone; and
he, with one blow dislodging the screen from the open window, plunged
into the smoke. The cat had tipped over the lamp, and the table was in a
blaze. Amos’s quick eye caught sight of the box which served Esquire for
a bed. He huddled feather pillow and rug on the floor to invert the box
over the blaze. The fire was out in a moment, and Margaret had brought
another lamp from the kitchen. Then Amos had leisure to look about him.
There was no one in the room. Yet that was not the most pungent matter
for thought. Old Margaret, whom he had considered one of the plainest
women in the world, as devoid of taste as of beauty, was standing before
him in a black silk gown. A fine black silk, he pronounced it. She had
soft lace about her withered throat, and a cap with pink ribbons on her
gray hair, which looked silvery soft. Her skin, too, seemed fairer and
finer: and there were rings that flashed and glowed on her thin fingers.
It was not Old Twentypercent; it was a stately little gentlewoman that
stood before him. “How did you happen to come, sir?”—she spoke with
coldness.
“I came on an errand, and I was just at the door when the curtain flew up
and the cat jumped across the table.”
She involuntarily caught her breath, like one relieved; then she smiled.
“You mustn’t be too hard on ’Squire; he’s of a nervous temperament; I
think he sees things—things outside our ken.”
Meanwhile Amos was unable not to see that there had been on the table a
tumbler full of some kind of shrub, four glasses, and a decanter of wine.
And there had been wine in all the glasses. But where were the drinkers?
There were four or five plates on the table, and a segment of plum-cake
was trodden underfoot on the floor. Before she did anything else, old
Margaret carefully, almost scrupulously, gathered up the crumbs and
carried them away. When she returned she carried a plate of cake and a
glass of wine. This refreshment was proffered to Amos.
“It’s a domestic port,” she said, “but well recommended. I should be
right glad to have you sit down and have a glass of wine with me, Mr.
Sheriff.”
“Perhaps you mayn’t be so glad when you hear my errand,” said Amos.
She went white in a second, and her fingers curved inward like the
fingers of the dying; she was opening and shutting her mouth without
making a sound. He had seen a man hanged once, and that face had worn
the same ghastly stare of expectation.
“If you knew I was come to beg off one of your debtors, for instance,” he
went on; “that’s my errand, if you want to know.”
Her face changed. “It will go better after a glass of wine,” said she,
again proffering the wine by a gesture—she didn’t trust her hand to pass
the tray.
Amos was a little undecided as to the proper formula to be used, never
having taken wine with a lady before; he felt that the usual salutations
among “the boys,” such as “Here’s how!” or “Happy days!” or “Well, better
luck next time!” savored of levity if not disrespect; so he grew a little
red, and the best he could do was to mumble, “Here’s my respects to you,
madam!” in a serious tone, with a bow.
But old Margaret smiled. “It’s a long while,” said she, “since I have
taken wine with a—a gentleman outside my own kin.”
“Is that so?” Amos murmured, politely. “Well, it’s the first time I have
had that pleasure with a lady.” He was conscious that he was pleasing
her, and that she was smiling about her, for all the world (he said to
himself) as if she were exchanging glances with some one. A new idea came
to him, and he looked at her compassionately while he ate his cake,
breaking off bits and eating it delicately, exactly as she ate.
She offered him no explanation for the wineglasses or for the
conversation that he had overheard. He did not hear a sound of any other
life in the house than their own. The doors were open, and he could see
into the bedroom on one side and into the kitchen on the other. She had
lighted another lamp, enabling him to distinguish every object in the
kitchen. There was not a carpet in the house, and it seemed impossible
that any one could be concealed so quickly without making a sound.
Amos shook his head solemnly. “Poor lady!” said he.
But she, now her mysterious fright was passed, had rallied her spirits.
Of her own motion she introduced the subject of his errand. “You spoke of
a debtor; what’s the man’s name?”
Amos gave her the truth of the tale, and with some humor described the
twins.
“Well, I reckon he has more than paid it,” she said at the end. “What do
you want? Were you going to lend him the money?”
“Well, only the interest money; he’s a good fellow, and he has nine
children.”
“Who have to be paid for in advance?” She actually tittered a feeble,
surprised little laugh, as she rose up and stepped (on her toes, in the
prim manner once taught young gentlewomen) across the room to the desk.
She came back with a red-lined paper in her meagre, blue-veined hand. She
handed the paper to Amos. “That is a present to you.”
“Not the whole note?”
“Yes, sir. Because you asked me. You tell Foley that. And if he’s got a
dog or a cat or a horse, you tell him to be good to it.”
This had been a year ago; and Amos was sure that Foley’s gratitude
would take the form of a clamor for revenge. Mrs. Foley dated their
present prosperity entirely from that day; she had superadded a personal
attachment to an impersonal gratitude; she sold Miss Clark eggs, and
little Mamie had the reversion of the usurer’s shoes. Amos sighed. “Well,
I can’t blame ’em,” he muttered. From that day had dated his own closer
acquaintance.
He now occasionally paid a visit at the old gentlewoman’s home. Once she
asked him to tea. And Raker went about for days in a broad grin at the
image of Amos, who, indeed, made a very careful toilet with his new blue
sack-coat, white duck trousers, and tan-colored shoes. He told Raker that
he had had a delightful supper. Mrs. O’Shea, the char-woman, was without
at the kitchen stove, and little Mamie Foley brought in the hot waffles
and jam. Esquire Clark showed his gifts by vaulting over the grape-arbor,
trying to enter through the wire screen, bent on joining the company, and
the Colonel wept audibly outside, until Amos begged for their admission.
Safely on their respective seats, their behavior, in general, was beyond
criticism. Only once the Colonel, feeling that the frying chicken was
unconscionably long in coming his way, gave a low howl of irrepressible
feeling; and Esquire Clark (no doubt from sympathy) leaped after Mamie
and the dish.
“’Squire, I’m ashamed of you!” cried Miss Clark; “Archie, _you_ know
better!” Amos paid no visible attention to the change of name; but she
must have noticed her own slip, for she said: “I never told you the
Colonel’s whole name, did I? It’s Colonel Archibald Cary. I’d like you
never to mention it, though. And ’Squire Clark is named after an uncle of
mine who raised me, for my parents died when I was a little girl. Clark
Byng was his name, and I called the cat by the first part of it.”
Amos did not know whether interest would be considered impertinent, so he
contented himself with remarking that they were “both pretty names.”
“Uncle was a good man,” said Miss Clark. “He was only five feet four in
height, but very fond of muscular games, and a great admirer of tall men.
Colonel Cary was six feet two. I reckon that’s about your height?”
“Exactly, ma’am,” said Amos.
She sighed slightly; then turned the conversation to Amos’s own affairs.
An instinct of delicacy kept him from ever questioning her, and she
vouchsafed him no information. Once she asked him to come and see her
when he wanted anything that she could give him. “I’m at home to you
every day, except the third of the month,” said she. On reflection Amos
remembered that it was on the third that he had paid his first visit to
Miss Clark.
“Well, ma,” he remarked, walking up and down in front of his mother’s
portrait in his office, as his habit was, “it is a queer case, ain’t it?
But I’m not employed to run the poor old lady to cover, and I sha’n’t let
any one else if I can help it.”
Had Amos been vain, he would have remarked the change in his singular
friend since their friendship had begun. Old Margaret wore the decent
black gown and bonnet becoming an elderly gentlewoman. She carried a silk
umbrella. The neighbors began to address her as “Miss Clark.” Amos,
however, was not vain, and all he told his mother’s picture was that the
old lady was quality, and no mistake.
By this time, on divers occasions, she had spoken to Amos of her South
Carolina home. Once she told him (in a few words, and her voice was
quiet, but her hands trembled) of the yellow-fever time on the lonely
plantation in the pine woods, and how in one week her uncle, her brother
and his wife, and her little niece had died, and she with her own hands
had helped to bury them. “It was no wonder I didn’t see things all right
after that,” she said. Another time she showed him a locket containing
the old-fashioned yellow photograph of a man in a soldier’s uniform. “He
was considered very handsome,” said she. Amos found it a handsome face.
He would have found it so under the appeal of those piteous eyes had it
been as ugly as the Colonel’s. “He was killed in the war,” she said;
“shot while he was on a visit to us to see my sister. He ran out of the
house, and the Yan—your soldiers shot him. It was the fortune of war. I
have no right to blame them. But if he hadn’t visited our fatal roof he
might be living now; for it was in the very last year of the war. I saw
it. I fell down as if shot myself—better if I had been.”
“Well, I call that awful hard,” said Amos; “I should think you would have
gone crazy!”
“Oh no, sir, no!” she interrupted, eagerly. “My mind was perfectly clear.”
“But how you must have suffered!”
“Yes, I suffered,” said she. “I never thought to speak of it.”
A week after this conversation her nephew came. The day was September 3d.
Nevertheless, on that Wednesday night she summoned Amos. He had been out
in the country; but Mrs. Raker had heard through little Minnie Foley,
who came for some crab-apples and found Miss Clark moaning on the cellar
floor. The jail being but a few blocks away, Mrs. Raker was on the scene
almost as soon as George Washington. By the time Amos arrived the two
doctors had gone and Miss Clark was in bed, and the white bedspread or
white pillows under her head were hardly whiter than her face.
“Mrs. Raker’s making some gruel,” said she, feebly, “and if you’ll stay
here I have something to say. It’s an odd thing, you’ll think,” she
added, wistfully, when he was in the arm-chair by her bed (it was one of
the chairs from the other room, he noticed)—“an odd thing for a miserable
old woman with no kin and no friends to be loath to leave; but I’m like
a cat, I reckon. It near tore my soul up by the roots to leave the old
place, and now it’s as bad here.”
“Don’t you talk such nonsense as leaving, Miss Clark,” Amos tried to
console her. But she shook her head. And Amos, recalling what the doctors
said, felt his words of denial slipping back into his throat. He essayed
another tack. “Don’t you talk of having no friends here either. Why, poor
Mrs. O’Shea has blued all my shirts that she was washing, so they’re a
sight to see—all for grief; and little Mamie Foley ran crying all the way
down the street.”
“The poor child!”
“And why are you leaving _me_ out?”
“I don’t want to leave you out, Mr. Sheriff—”
“Oh, say Amos when you’re sick, Miss Clark,” he cried, impulsively; she
seemed so little, so feeble, and so alone.
“You’re a kind man, Amos Wickliff,” said she. “Now first tell me, would
you give the Colonel and ’Squire a home as long as they need it?”
Amos gave an inward gasp; but it may be imputed to him for righteousness
some day that there was only an imperceptible pause before he answered,
“Yes, ma’am, I will; and take good care of them, too.”
“Here’s something for you, then; take it now.” She handed him a large
envelope, sealed. “It’s for any expenses, you know. And—I’ll send ’em
over to-morrow.”
He took the package rather awkwardly. “Now you know you have a nephew—”
he began.
“I know, and I know why he’s here, too. And in that paper is my will; but
don’t you open it till I’m dead a month, will you?”
Amos promised in spite of a secret misgiving.
“And now,” she went on, in her nervous way, “I want you to do something
right kind for me—not now—when Mrs. Raker goes; she’s a good soul, and I
hope you’ll give her the envelope I’ve marked for her. Yes, sir, I want
you to do something for me when she’s gone. Move in the four chairs from
down-stairs—the pretty ones—all the rest are plain, so you can tell; and
fetch me the tray with the wineglasses and the bottle of shrub—you’ll
find the tray in the buffet with the red curtains down-stairs in my
office. Then you go into the kitchen—I feel so sorry to have to ask a
gentleman to do such things, but I do want them—and you’ll see a round
brown box with Cake marked on it in curly gilt letters, and you’ll find
a frosted cake in there wrapped up in tissue-paper; and you take it out,
and get a knife out of the drawer, and fetch all those things up to me.
And then, Amos Wickliff, all the friend I’ve got in the world, you go
and stay outside—it ain’t cold or I wouldn’t ask it of you—you stay until
you hear my bell. Will you?”
Amos took the thin hand, involuntarily outstretched, and patted it
soothingly between both his strong brown hands.
“Of course I will,” he promised. And after Mrs. Raker’s departure he did
her bidding, saying often to himself, “Poor lady!”
When the bell rang, and he came back, the wineglasses and the decanter
were empty, and the cake was half gone. He made no comment, she gave him
no explanation. Until Mrs. Raker returned she talked about releasing some
of her debtors.
The following morning he came again.