The Boss of Little Arcady Part 23

"That's different," I said; "they were probably raised together."

"And that afternoon, I thought something of the sort was necessary; do you know, they seemed rather cold to me at that other meeting--and of course there wasn't enough of it to hurt them."

"Your intentions were amiable, I concede, but your carelessness was criminal--nothing short of it. You laid the train for a scandal that would have shaken Sloc.u.m County to its remotest outlying cornfield, and even made itself felt over this whole sovereign state."

I was gratified to see that she shuddered.

"I shall never learn," she pleaded; "their life is so different."

"Let them at least live it out to its natural end, such as it is," I urged.

Hereupon, confessing herself unnerved, Miss Caroline led me to the dining room, and in a gla.s.s of Madeira from a cask forwarded by Second-cousin Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey, C.S.A., she pledged herself to preserve the decencies as these had been codified in Little Arcady by the Sons and Daughters of Temperance. For my part I drank to her continuance in the wondrous favor of Heaven.

Thereafter, I am bound to say, Miss Caroline conducted herself with a discretion that was admirable. Upon more than one occasion I was made to notice this. One of them was at an evening entertainment at the Eubanks home that autumn, to which it was my privilege to escort her. "A large and brilliant company was present," to quote from a competent authority, and the refreshments were "recherche," to quote again, this being, I believe, the first of our social functions at which j.a.panese paper napkins were handed around. Eustace Eubanks entertained "one and all" by exhibiting and describing lantern views of important scenes in the Holy Land; Marcella sang "Comin' Thro' the Rye" with such iron restraint that the most fastidious among us could have found no cause for offence, and Eustace sang an innocent song of war and bloodshed and death. All went well until Eustace, being pressed for more, ventured a drinking song.

Whether this had been censored by his household I have never learned.

Perhaps there had been demurs--there were almost certain to have been; and possibly Eustace had held out for the thing because of the rare opportunity it afforded for the exercise of his lowest tones. Perhaps it had been deemed wise to indulge him in this, lest in rebellion he break all bonds of propriety and revert to the "Bedouin Love Song." At any rate he sang "Drinking," a song that lauds the wine-cup as chiefest of G.o.dless joys, and terminating in "drinking" thrice reiterated, of which each individual one finishes so much lower than it begins that the last one seems to expire in the bottomless pit.

Many of those present appeared to enjoy this song. Even Marcella Eubanks seemed for once to have soared above mere principle into the unmoral realm of "Art for Art's sake." But it falls to be said, and I say it with a pride which I think should not excite cavil, that Miss Caroline frowned splendidly from the first moment that the song's true character was revealed. She superbly evinced uneasiness, moreover, when the thing was done, as if to say, "One can't tell _what_ may occur in a place where _that_ is permitted!" And her performance was not observed by myself alone. Marcella saw it and sped to her brother, who, after listening to hurried words from her, dashed into "The Lost Chord" with a swift and desperate fervor, as if to allay all alarm in the mind of this sensitive guest. Eustace was at heart as earnestly well meaning as any Eubanks that ever lived, and his vagaries in song were attributable solely to a trusting nature capriciously endowed with a dash of the artistic temperament. It was only a dash, however. Beyond doubt, had his family but known, he could have sung the "Bedouin Love Song," and been none the worse for it.

If Miss Caroline's eloquent pantomime at this time aroused a suspicion that she had been maligned, as to her habits of drink, her behavior on a subsequent evening, when Mrs. Judge Robinson entertained, left no one to doubt it. There was music, too, on this occasion--described elsewhere as "a gala occasion"--after Eustace had concluded his part of the entertainment and gotten his lantern out of the way,--music by a quartet consisting of Messrs. Fancett and Eubanks, first and second ba.s.s, and Messrs. Upd.y.k.e and G. Brown, first and second tenor. In excellent accord these tenors and ba.s.ses, so blameless in their living, lifted up their voices and sang they "would that the wavelets of ocean were wavelets of sparkling champagne!" It was a blithe and rippling morceau if one could forget the well-nigh cosmic depravity of it; but Miss Caroline, it appeared, was not able to forget. She confided as much to Marcella Eubanks and Aunt Delia McCormick, intimating that while she was doubly desirous to be pleased because of her position as an outsider, she was, nevertheless, a silly old woman, encrusted with prejudice, and she could not deny that she found this song _suggestive_. Her eyes glistened when she said it, and Marcella felt like pinning a white ribbon to her then and there.

Escorting Miss Caroline to her home that night, I listened to her account of this colloquy and found myself wis.h.i.+ng that matters had been different. It seemed to me that I must ultimately become the victim of a romantic pa.s.sion for her, and I told her as much when we parted.

Gossip, the yellow-tongued dragon, had been tracked to its lair and done to death, or at least that one of its heads had been smitten off which babbled slander of Miss Caroline.

Thenceforth she and I were free to think upon other matters. And there were these other matters in both our lives.

As to most of them we did not hold speech together. Our intimacy as yet lay quite within a circle so charmed that it might not be entered by things too personal to either of us. By a kind of tacit treaty we brought thither none but those affairs which invited a not too serious tone. Our late common life had provided an abundance of these, and they had been hailed by my friend with an unfailing levity which the widow of J. Rodney Potts, for one, would have found it impossible to condone. "I am a light old woman," she had said to me; "I laugh at the world even when I fear it most." There was a desperate sprite of banter in her eye when she made this confession, a sprite that leaped forth to be gay when I shrived her. But, though we sacredly observed all mirthful conventions in our dallying, I knew that Miss Caroline had more than enough to ponder of matters weighty. I knew that she was likely to have regretted a too-ready sharing of Clem's easy enthusiasm over industrial conditions in the North.

Clem believed by instinct not only that the evil thereof is sufficient unto the day, but that the incidental good sufficeth also. His quality of faith would have seemed a pointed rebuke to the common run of believers in a Providence that watches and sends. Confronted by the spectre of present want he could exorcise it neatly by the device of beholding, in a contrary vision, future limitless pullets of a marketable immaturity, or endless acres of garden produce ripe and ready to sell. Moreover, his experience with "gold money" was as yet insufficient to acquaint him with its truly volatile character. All sums greater than a hundred dollars were blessedly alike to him--equally prodigious. Two hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands sent the same rays of light through the spectrum of his poetic mind, and a bank was an inst.i.tution of such abiding grace that, having once established a connection with it, one possessed forever a stout prop in time of need.

I was sure indeed that Miss Caroline had defined these limitations of Clem as a financier. It was one of those enjoyable topics which we had been free to discuss. That she had discovered how lamentably his resources had been reduced by freight tolls on her furniture I could only infer. But I knew, at least, that she was aware of the blistering, rainless summer that had laid Clem's high hopes of a garden in dust and cut off half his revenue. Plainly, Miss Caroline had more than enough of matters fit to engage her graver moments.

For my own part I, too, had matters to dwell upon of an equal gravity in their own poor way; though perhaps, too, I could not have defined them as understandingly as I did the perplexities of my neighbor.

Happily the feat need not be attempted; I had the game, in which troubles may be played away at least beyond the necessity for a.n.a.lyzing them--the game which requires two decks and is to be played alone--the most efficacious of those devices for the solitary which cards afford.

I had been made acquainted with its scheme and with some of its cruder virtues by a certain ill.u.s.trious soldier whom I was once much thrown with. He confessed to me that he played it before a battle to inspire him with coolness, and after a battle to learn wise behavior under victory or defeat, as it might have been.

I was persuaded to learn more of it. I played the thing at first, to be sure, as I have noticed that novices always do, with a mind so bent upon "getting it" that I was insensible of its curative and refining agencies.

"You haven't the secret yet," said my mentor, who watched me as I won for the first time, and was moved to warn me by my unconcealed pride in this achievement. "After you've played it a few years, you'll learn that the value of it lies chiefly in losing. You'll try like the devil to win, of course, but you'll learn not to wish for it. To win is nothing but an endless piling up of the right cards, beginning with the ace and ending with the king, and it only means more shuffling for next time.

But every time you lose you will learn things about everything."

It was even as he said,--it took me years to learn this true merit of the game; and still, as he had said, I learned much from it of life.

There is a fine moment at the last shuffling of the cards, a moment when free will and fatalism are indistinguishably merged.

I am ready to lay down eight cards in a horizontal row off my double deck. Who will say that the precise number of shuffles I have given to it was preordained?

"I do," exclaimed an obliging fatalist. "The sequence of every one of those cards was determined when we were yet star-dust."

I bring confusion to him by performing half a dozen other shuffles. I am thus far the master of my unborn game--another last shuffle to prove it, though I shuffle clumsily enough.

I glance disdainfully at the fatalist whom I have refuted, and prepare again to lay down the first row of cards. But the fellow comes back with, "Those last shuffles were also determined, as was this challenge--"

"Very well!" and I prepare for still another rearrangement. But here I reflect that this could be endless and not at all interesting.

I dismiss the fatalist as a quibbler and play on. Now there is no dispute, unless there be other quibblers. Fixed is the order in which the cards shall fall, eight at a time. There is pure fatalism. But in the movings after each eight are dealt, I shall consciously choose and judge, which is pure free will--or an imitation of it sufficiently colorable to satisfy any, but quibblers. There, for me, is the fatalism of body, the free will of soul. Of these I learn when I play the game.

Now my first eight cards are down in a horizontal row. There are two kings among them, which is auspicious, for kings must be placed sometime at the top. There is a red queen, also auspicious, to be placed on one of the black kings. There is an ace of diamonds and its deuce. Good, again! The ace is placed above the row, beginning a row of aces to be placed there as fast as they fall, and the deuce is placed atop of it, for in that row the suits will be built _up_, each in its kind. In the lower rows the suits are to be built down and crossed, as when I played the red queen on the black king, so that only the top of his crowned head can be seen. Then I play a red eight on a black nine and a black seven on the red eight. I am now left most fortunately with five s.p.a.ces when I deal off my second row of eight,--five s.p.a.ces into which, it may be, a king or two shall happily fall.

The game usually becomes intense after the third eight cards are played.

By that time a choice must be made. Shall this black six or the other be played on the red seven? One must be wise, for either will release important cards.

The game has started so well that it promises to play out too easily--which is one of its tricks. Presently a deuce will be covered by a king for which no s.p.a.ce is ready, a dark queen will be buried under a succession of smaller cards, crowding along with apparent carelessness, but relentlessly. Now a s.p.a.ce is opened for the king that covers the deuce, but the king has meantime been covered by an insignificant but unmanageable four-spot, and cannot be reached. The game is not so absurdly easy as it promised to be. Still it may be won by clever playing. There follow eight cards that prove to be immovable, and the issue is almost in doubt. Now the last eight cards are down, and the game is suddenly seen to be lost. One small other shuffle might have won it; if that tray of spades had fallen one place to the right or left, the thing would now be easy; if it were a deuce or a four, the thing were easy. One spot on the card has brought ruin. The game has foiled us with its own peculiar cleverness.

But then, we learn to expect failure; and, most important of all, we learn to succeed while failing. We learn to see our cards fall wretchedly without a tremor. We learn to take small gains that offer, and to watch unmoved while splendid chances come to naught. We learn to live life and to waste no energy in vain wis.h.i.+ng that we had shuffled differently. We learn even to marvel admiringly at the un.o.btrusive cunning which thwarts us of our dream's own--to wonder that cards ever should come right for any player in that maze of chances and faulty judgments. And we learn, above all, to brush the things together without loss of time and to play a new hand with the same old hope.

As I studied the cards, making sure of my defeat--one must be most careful to do that; a way is sometimes to be found--it was not strange that I fell to thinking of the face on my neighbor's wall.

I had mused often upon it since that first night. It seemed, curiously enough, to be a face that had long been mistily afloat in my shut eyes, a girl's face that had a trick of blending from time to time with the face of another I had better reason to know. Unaccountably they had come and gone, one followed by the other. Of that last new face in my vision I could make nothing, save that some one seemed to have painted it over there in the other house. How I had come by my own mind copy of it was a mystery to me beyond solution.

I played the game again to still this perplexity which had a way of seizing me at odd moments. It is an especially good game for a man who has had to believe that life will always beat him.

CHAPTER XIX

A WORTHLESS BLACK HOUND

After an autumn speciously benign came our season of cold and snow. It proved to be a season of unwonted severity, every weather expert in town, from Uncle William McCormick, who had kept a diary record for thirty years, to Grandma Steck, who had foretold its coming from a goose-bone, agreeing that the cold was most unusual. The editor of the _Argus_ not only spoke of "Nature's snowy mantle," but coined another happy phrase about Little Arcady being "locked in the icy embrace of winter." This was admitted to be accurately literal, in spite of its poetic daring.

Miss Caroline confessed homesickness to me after the first heavy snow.

She spoke as lightly of it as she should have done, but I could see that her own land pulled at her heart with every blast that shook her cas.e.m.e.nts. No longer, however, was there even a second-cousin whose hospitality she was free to claim, for Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey, C.S.A., now slept with his fathers in far-off Virginia, leaving behind him only traditions and a little old sherry. The former Miss Caroline had always shared with him, and a cask of the latter he bequeathed to her with his love. And the valley being now void of her kin, she was doubly an exile.

Such new desolation as she must have felt was masked under jesting dispraise of our execrable Northern climate. Surely a land permitted to congeal so utterly had forfeited the grace of its Maker.

Clem's lack of executive genius also earned a meed of my neighbor's disparagement. He was a worthless, trifling "boy," an idling dreamer, an irresponsible, inconsequent visionary, in whose baseless fancies it was astounding that a woman of her years should fatuously place reliance.

I must confess that I was more than once guilty of irritation when Miss Caroline spoke thus slightingly of her "boy"--of one who had been unable to view himself as other than her personal property. Again and again it seemed to me that, fine little creature that she was, her tone toward Clem lacked the right feeling. I should not have demanded grat.i.tude precisely; at least no bald expression of it. But a manner of speech denoting, if not wording, a recognition of his unswerving loyalty would have accorded better with the estimate I had otherwise formed of her character. The absence of any tone or word that even one so devoted as I could construe to her advantage was puzzling in the extreme.

Still, feeling toward her as I did, I was compelled to excuse her as best I might by attributing her hardness to an evil system now happily abolished. But the nerves in my lost arm seemed to tingle with a secret satisfaction when I thought of Clem's empty reward for his life-work and remembered that I had helped, though ever so little, to free him and his kind from a bond so unfortunate for each of the parties to it.

The winter deepened about us, chill and bleak and ravaging. The smoke from our chimneys went up in tall columns that lost themselves in the gray sky. The snow shut us in, and presently the wind lay in wait to blast us when we dared the drifts.

Yet Miss Caroline throve, despite her nostalgia. She was even jaunty in her recital of the weather's minor hards.h.i.+ps. To its rigors she brought a front of resolute gayety. A new stove graced the parlor, a stove with the proud nickeled t.i.tle of "Frost King"; a t.i.tle seen to be deserved when Clem had it properly gorged with dry wood. Within its tropic radiations Miss Caroline bloomed and was hale of being, like some hardy perennial.