BEFORE Sunday Caleb’s settlement of his first case was celebrated in
Eshcol. Judge Hollis got the facts from Juniper and spread the story
abroad. It was too good to keep. The cockerel was valued at three
dollars, being rare, and the pullets cost seventy-five cents each. The
attorney for the defendant had paid the costs without pleading the case
at the bar.
The judge asked if he intended to settle all difficulties on the same
plane? If so, he could send him enough clients to form a line down
the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans. Juniper was telling it
too, without grasping the judge’s point of view. As a lawyer, Juniper
claimed that Caleb Trench could out-Herod Herod. He protested that
the mere paying for the fowls had saved Lysander from being tarred
and feathered; for Aaron Todd’s indignant threats were magnified by
memory, and no one but Mr. Trench would have thought of so simple and
efficacious a remedy.
The settlement of Lysander’s difficulties coming after the famed
Cresset speech created a sensation between wrath and merriment among
Caleb’s political opponents. What manner of man was he? Caleb Trench,
Quaker, posted on his door might have explained him to some, but to the
majority it would have remained Greek. Besides, Caleb was not orthodox;
he had always leaned to his mother’s religion, and she had been an
Episcopalian; between the two creeds he had found no middle course, but
he had a profound respect for the faith that brought Diana to her knees
with the simplicity of a child in the little old gray stone church
where the new curate had installed a boy choir.
It was long past church time, and after the early Sunday dinner, when
he sat on the porch with Colonel Royall at Broad Acres. The colonel
was a delightful host, and this time he did not discuss politics; he
talked, instead, about his father’s plantation in Virginia before the
war, a subject as safe as the Satires of Horace, yet Trench fidgeted a
little in his chair. He was conscious that Diana was passing through
the hall behind him, and that, after her first correctly courteous
greeting, she had avoided the piazza. He was, in fact, distinctly the
colonel’s guest.
Diana was more vividly aware of social distinctions than her father,
and less forgetful of them; she was only twenty-three, and the time was
not yet when she could forgive a man for doing anything and everything
to earn his bread. There were so many ways, she thought, that did
not embrace the village yardstick! Besides, she rather resented the
Cresset speech. Jacob Eaton was her cousin, three times removed it was
true, but still her cousin, and that held. Diana could not reconcile
herself to the freedom of political attacks, and Caleb Trench’s cool,
unbiased criticisms of Eaton and his methods seemed to her to be mere
personalities, and she had gone as far as quarreling with the colonel
for asking him to call.
“I don’t like his attack on Jacob, pa,” she had said hotly; “he’s no
gentleman to make it!”
The colonel meditated, his eyes twinkling. “He’s a good deal of a man
though, Di.”
And Diana had turned crimson, though she did not know why, unless she
remembered suddenly her own impression of him in his little office,
when the flare of the burning wood fell on his face. All these things
made her angry and she had received him with an air that reminded
Trench of the receipt for six cents, yet Diana was superbly courteous.
Neither Mrs. Eaton nor Jacob appeared; they lived about three miles
away, and Mrs. Eaton had refused absolutely to visit Cousin David on
Sunday if he intended to entertain the lower classes. She had only a
very nebulous idea of the political situation, but she thought that
Trench had vilified Jacob.
But with the colonel Caleb was happily at home; even the colonel’s
slow drawl was music in his ears, and he liked the man, the repose of
his manner, the kindly glance of his sad eyes, for his eyes were sad
and tender as a woman’s. Yet Colonel Royall had shot a man for a just
cause thirty years before, and it was known that he carried and could
use his revolver still. The fire of the old-time gentleman sometimes
sent the quick blood up under his skin and kindled his glance, but his
slow courtesy made him ever mindful of others. Sitting together, with
the sun slanting across the lawns and the arch of the horse-chestnuts
shadowing the driveway, Caleb told the colonel the story of his
father’s failure and, more lightly, something of his own struggles.
Then he got down to reading law with Judge Hollis.
“A pretty costly business for you, sir,” the colonel said wickedly, and
then laughed until the blue veins stood out on his forehead.
Caleb laughed too, but colored a little. “Juniper is an old rogue,” he
said amusedly. “I should have bribed him to hold his tongue.”
Colonel Royall straightened his face and rubbed his eyeglasses on a
dollar bill, which, he held, was the only way to clean them. “Lysander
is the rogue,” he said, “and old Aunt Charity has been known to steal
Juniper’s clothes for him to wear. She dressed him in Juniper’s best
last year and sent him to the fair with all the money from her washing.
Meanwhile the old man had nothing but his blue jeans and a cotton
undershirt, and wanted to go to the fair, too. There was a great
row. Of course Lysander got drunk and was sent up for thirty days
in Juniper’s Sunday clothes. Lordy!” the colonel laughed heartily,
“you could hear the noise down at the embankment. Juniper wanted a
‘divorcement’ and his clothes, principally his clothes. Judge Hollis
and I had to fit him out, but he and Aunt Charity didn’t speak until
there was another funeral; that brings niggers together every time;
there’s a chaste joy about a funeral that melts their hearts.”
The colonel laughed again reminiscently, but Caleb, being a young man
and human, was aware that Diana had crossed the hall again, and that
she must have heard her father laughing at him. It was not long after
this that he made his adieux, and he did not ask to see Miss Royall.
The colonel walked with him to the gate and pointed out the magnificent
promise of grapes on his vines.
“It will be a plentiful season, Mr. Trench,” he said, “and I hope a
good harvest; let us have peace.”
Caleb understood the tentative appeal, and he liked the old man, but
to a nature like Trench’s truth is the sling of David; he must smite
Goliath. “Colonel Royall,” he said, “no man desires peace more than I
do, but--peace with honor.”
Colonel Royall stood in the center of his own gateway, his thumbs in
the armholes of his waistcoat, his white head bare. “Mr. Trench,” he
said, “I understand that we are not to have peace.”
Thursday night Kitty Broughton gave her ball. Her father was dead, and
Judge Hollis stood beside her mother to help Kitty receive her guests.
Everybody who was anybody in the city came out, and all Eshcol was
there. Mrs. Eaton declared that it was the most mixed affair she ever
saw, when she recognized Caleb Trench. She told all her friends not to
allow any presuming person to present him to her, and in an hour she
had made all the guests painfully aware that there was a black sheep in
the fold. Then Kitty Broughton added fuel to the fire by dancing the
first dance with him, and it was discovered, by all the girls present,
that he danced exceedingly well, and quite as if he had always gone to
entertainments. This surprised those who criticized Mrs. Broughton for
asking him; yet not to have had him would have been to have the banquet
without the salt. For Jacob Eaton was there, too, and though he wore an
inscrutable face, it was exciting to wonder how he felt, and what would
happen if they met?
Meanwhile, the dancing went on, and Mrs. Broughton had presented Trench
to several of the young girls from the city, who admired his dancing,
so he had partners; but he was aware of the frigidity of the atmosphere
and he had not asked Miss Royall to dance. Instead, Diana had danced
twice with her cousin and once with young Jack Cheyney, a nephew of
the doctor. She was very beautiful. Trench looked across the ballroom
at her and thought that no sculptured figure of nymph or dryad had
ever excelled the beauty of her tall young figure, its slender but
perfect lines, and the proud pose of her head. She wore a white brocade
flowered with pink, like apple-blossoms, and Trench thought of her and
the spring buds in his lonely office. The splendid diamond that shone
like a star above her forehead reminded him of the wide divergence in
their fates.
Judge Hollis found him and laid a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “Glad
to see you out, Caleb,” he said heartily; “a change will do you good.
Mouldy old law-books and old men pall on a young fellow like you. I saw
you lead off with Kitty. The minx is pretty and dances well. Have you
asked Diana to dance?”
“No,” said Trench; “Miss Royall has too many partners to accept
another, I fancy.”
“Better ask her,” counseled the judge; “the lady is something of a
tyrant. Don’t get on her black books too early, sir; besides, courtesy
demands it. Didn’t she accept your care and hospitality?”
“She had to,” said Trench dryly.
“Precisely,” smiled the judge; “now ask her to dance and give her the
chance to say ‘no,’ then she’ll forgive you.”
“I fancy there are more things to forgive than that,” replied Caleb
musingly; “Mrs. Eaton has let me feel the weight of my social position.”
“My dear boy, Jinny is the biggest cad in the world,” said the judge,
drinking a glass of punch; “go and do as I tell you or I’ll drop your
acquaintance. By the way, Caleb, how much are cockerels now?” and the
old man’s laughter drew all eyes.
But it was after supper that, very much against his determinations,
Caleb found himself asking Diana to dance. He has never known how it
happened, unless it was the compelling power of her beauty in the
corner of the ballroom when the music began again.
“May I have the honor?” he asked.
Diana hesitated the twentieth part of a second; it was almost
imperceptible, but it sent the blood to the young man’s forehead. Then
she smiled graciously. “With pleasure,” she said in a clear voice.
It happened that they swept past Eaton, her skirt brushing against him,
and in another moment they were going down the old ballroom together.
All eyes followed them and returned to Jacob Eaton, who was standing
discomfited for an instant. It was only one instant; the next Jacob was
more suave and smiling than ever, and an heiress from Lexington danced
with him. However, in that one instant, his face had startled the
groups nearest him. People suddenly remembered that it was said that
Eaton carried firearms at all times, and was one of the straightest
shots that side of the Mississippi.
Later, when Diana was driving home with her father, she spoke her mind.
“I wish you’d make Jacob Eaton behave himself, pa,” she said; “he acts
as if I belonged to him and he could choose my--my friends! I don’t
like his manners up at Broad Acres, either; he said the other day that
the cold grapery should be pulled down, and that he didn’t believe in
owning a race-horse.”
Colonel Royall rubbed the back of his head thoughtfully; his eyes were
troubled.
“His manners are becoming insufferable,” Diana went on, without heeding
the silence.
“If he’s rude to you, Diana,” the colonel said quietly, “just say so
and I’ll thrash him.”
“I sometimes wish you would!” she retorted wrathfully, and then,
reaching up in the dim carriage, she patted the colonel’s cheek.
“You’re an old dear,” she said fondly, “but you do get imposed on, and
Jacob never does!”