MACOCHEE
Marley had not learned of Lavinia's departure until Monday afternoon; he
had the news from Lawrence, who had it from the hackman who had taken
Judge Blair and Lavinia to the train; for whenever any of the quality go
away from Macochee they always ride to the station in the hack, though
at other times they walk without difficulty all over the town. When
Marley reached the office, and found Wade Powell, as he usually found
him, sitting with his feet on his table, smoking and reading a
Cincinnati paper, the lawyer looked up casually, but when he saw
Marley's expression he suddenly exclaimed:
"Hello! What's the matter?"
Marley shook his head.
"Something's troubling you," said Powell.
Marley shook his head again, and Powell looked at him as at a witness he
was cross-examining.
"I know better," he said.
Marley affected to busy himself at his desk, but after a while, he
turned about and said:
"Something is troubling me, Mr. Powell; my--prospects." He had been on
the point of confessing his real trouble, but with the very words on his
lips, he could not utter them, and so let the conversation take another
turn.
"Oh, prospects!" said Powell. "I can tell you all about prospects; I've
had more than any man in Gordon County. When I was your age, opinion was
unanimous in this community that my prospects were the most numerous and
the most brilliant of any one here!"
Powell laughed, a little bitterly.
"If I'd only been prudent enough to die then, Glenn," he went on, "I'd
have been mourned as a potential judge of the Supreme Court, senator and
president."
"It'll be three years before I can be admitted, won't it?" asked Marley.
"Yes," said Powell; "but that isn't long; and it isn't anything to be
admitted."
"Well, it takes time, anyway," said Marley, "and then there's the
practice after that--how long will that take?"
"Well, let's see," said Powell, plucking reflectively at the flabby skin
that hung between the points of his collar. "Let's see." His brows were
twitching humorously. "It's taken me about thirty years--I don't know
how much longer it'll take."
Powell smoked on for a few moments, and then added soberly:
"Of course, I had to fool around in politics for about twenty-five
years, and save the people."
"Do you think," Marley said, after a moment's silence that paid its own
respect to Powell's regrets, "that there's an opening for me here in
Macochee?"
"No, Glenn, I'll tell you. There's no use to think of locating in
Macochee or any other small town. The business is dead here. It's too
bad, but it's so. When I began there was plenty of real estate law to
do, and plenty of criminal law, but the land titles are all settled
now--"
"That's what Judge Blair said," interrupted Marley.
"So you've been to him, have you?"
Marley blushed.
"Well, not exactly," he said. "I heard him say that."
"Yes," mused Powell. "Well, he feathered his nest pretty well while they
were being settled. But as I was saying--the criminal business has died
out, or rather, it has changed. The criminals haven't any money any
more, that is, the old kind of criminals; the corporations have it all
now--if you want to make money, you'll have to have them for clients. Of
course, the money still goes to the criminal lawyer just as it used to."
"I like Macochee," said Marley, his spirits falling fast.
"Well, it's a nice old town to live in," Powell assented. "But the devil
of it is how're you going to live? Of course, you can study here just as
well as anywhere; better than anywhere, in fact; you have plenty of
time, and plenty of quiet. But as for locating here--why, it's utterly
out of the question for a man who wants to make anything of himself and
has to get a living while he's doing it--and I don't know any other kind
that ever do make anything out of themselves."
"I had hoped--" persisted Marley, longing for Powell to relent.
"Oh, I know," the lawyer replied almost impatiently, "but it's no use,
there's nothing in it. No one with ambition can stay here now. The town,
like all these old county-seats, is good for nothing but impecunious old
age and cemeteries. It was nothing but a country cross-roads before the
railroad came, and since then it's been nothing but a water-tank; if it
keeps on it'll be nothing but a whistling-post, and the trains won't be
bothered to stop at all. Its people are industrious in nothing but
gossip, and genuine in nothing but hypocrisy; they are so mean that they
hate themselves, and think all the time they're hating each other. Just
look at our leading citizen, Brother Dudley, over there in his bank; he
owns the whole town, and he thinks he's a bigger man than old Grant.
Sundays he sits in his pew with a black coat on, squinting at the
preacher out of his sore little eyes, and waiting for him to say
something he can get the bishop to fire him for, and he calls that
religion. Mondays he goes back to his business of skinning farmers and
poor widows out of their miserable little pennies, and he calls that
business; Does he ever look at a flower or a tree, or turn round in the
street at the laugh of a child? He's the kind of man that runs this
town, and he makes the rest of the people like it. Well, he don't run
me! God! If I'd only had some sense twenty years ago I'd have pulled out
and gone to the city and been somebody to-day."
It pained Marley to hear Powell berate Macochee; he had never heard him
rage so violently at the town, though he was always sneering at it. To
Marley the very name of Macochee meant romance; he liked the name the
Indian village had left behind when it vanished; he liked the old
high-gabled buildings about the Square; he longed to identify himself
with Macochee, to think of it as his home.
"But I'll tell you one thing," Powell went on, his tone suddenly
changing to one of angry resolution as he flung his feet heavily to the
bare floor and struck his desk a startling blow with his fist, "I'll
tell you one thing, I'm through working for nothing; they've got to pay
me! I'm going to squeeze the last cent out of them after this, same as
old Dudley does, same as old Bill Blair did before he went on the bench;
that's what I'm going to do. I'm getting old and I've got to quit
running a legal eleemosynary institution."
Powell's eyes flamed, but a shadow fell in the room, and Powell and
Marley glanced at the door.
"Well, what do you want?" said Powell.
An old woman, bareheaded in the hurry of a crisis, was on the threshold.
"Oh, Mr. Powell," she began in a wailing voice, "would you come quick!"
"What for?"
"Charlie's in ag'in."
"Got any money?" demanded Powell, in the angry resolution of a moment
before. He clenched his fist again on the edge of his table. Marley
glanced at him in surprise, and then at the old woman.
The woman hung her head and stammered:
"Well, you know--I hain't just now, but by the week's end, when I get
the money for my washin'--"
"Oh, that's all right," said Powell, getting to his feet, "that's all
right. We won't talk of that now. I beg your pardon. We'll walk down to
the calaboose and see the boy; we can talk it over with him and see
what's to be done."
He picked up his slouch hat and clapped it on his head.
"What's he been doing this time?" he said to the old woman as they went
out the door.
Marley watched them as they passed the open window and disappeared. A
smile touched his lips an instant, and then he became serious and
depressed once more.
He had had no word from Lavinia, and her going away immediately after
his scene with Judge Blair confused him. He tried to think it out, but
he could reach no conclusion save that it was all at an end. Lavinia's
sudden, unexplained departure proved that. And yet he could not, he
would not, think that she had changed; no, her father had borne her
away--that was it--forcibly and cruelly borne her away. For a long while
he sat there finding a certain satisfaction in the melancholy that came
over him, and then suddenly he was aroused by the boom of the town
clock. The heavy notes of the bell rolled across to him, and he counted
them--five. It was time to go. And Powell had not returned. It was not
surprising; Powell often went out that way and did not come back, and,
often, somehow to Marley's chagrin, men and women sat and waited long
hours in the dumb patience of the poor and then went away with their
woes still burdening them. They must have been used to woes, they
carried them so silently.
Marley was walking moodily down Main Street, feeling that he had no part
in the bustling happiness of the people going home from their day's
work, when, lifting his head, he saw Mrs. Blair in her surrey. Instantly
she jerked the horse in toward the curb and beckoned to him.
"Why, Glenn! I'm so glad I met you!" she said, her face rosy with its
smile. "I have something for you."
She raised her eyebrows in a significant way and began fumbling in her
lap. Presently she leaned out of the surrey and pressed something into
his hand.
"Just between ourselves, you know!" she said, with the delicious mystery
of a secret, and then gathering up her reins, she clucked at her lazy
horse.
He looked after her a moment, then at the thick envelope he held in his
hand. On it was written in the long Anglican characters of a young girl,
these words:
"For Glenn."