A Certain Rich Man Part 19

As they pa.s.sed through Main Street it was deserted, save in the billiard halls, and as no one seemed inclined to talk, the colonel took up the subject of Barclay: "Say we call it five million--five million in round numbers; that's a good deal of money for a man to have and haggle a month over seventy-five dollars the way he did with me when he sold me his share of College Heights. But," added the colonel, "I suppose if I had that much I'd value it more." The women were thinking of other things, and the colonel addressed the night: "Man gets an appet.i.te for money just as he does for liquor--just like the love for whiskey, I may say." He shook his sides as he meditated aloud: "But as for me--I guess I've got so I can take it or let it alone. Eh, ma?"

"I didn't catch what you were saying, pa," answered his wife. "I was just thinking whether we had potatoes enough to make hash for breakfast; have we, Molly?"

As the women were discussing the breakfast, two men came out of a cross street, and the colonel, who was slightly in advance of his women, hailed the men with, "h.e.l.lo there, Bob--you and Jake out here carrying on your illicit friends.h.i.+p in the dark?"

The men and the Culpeppers stopped for a moment at the corner. Molly Brownwell's heart throbbed as they met, and she thought of the rising moon, and in an instant her brain was afire with a hope that shamed her. Three could not walk abreast on the narrow sidewalk up the hill, and when she heard Hendricks say after the group had parleyed a moment, "Well, Jake, good night; I'll go on home with the colonel,"

she managed the pairing off so that the young man fell to her, and the colonel and Mrs. Culpepper walked before the younger people, and they all talked together. But at Lincoln Avenue, the younger people disconnected themselves from the talk of the elders, and finally lagged a few feet behind. When they reached the gate the colonel called back, "Better come in and visit a minute, Bob," and Molly added, "Yes, Bob, it's early yet."

But what she said with her voice did not decide the matter for him. It was her eyes. And what he said with his voice is immaterial--it was what his eyes replied that the woman caught. What he said was, "Well, just for a minute, Colonel," and the party walked up the steps of the veranda, and Bob and Molly and the colonel sat down.

Mrs. Culpepper stood for a moment and then said, "Well, Bob, you must excuse me--I forgot to set my sponge, and there isn't a bit of bread in the house for Sunday." Whereupon she left them, and when the colonel had talked himself out he left them, and when the two were alone there came an awkward silence. In the years they had been apart a thousand things had stirred in their hearts to say at this time, yet all their voices spoke was, "Well, Molly?" and "Well, Bob?" The moon was in their faces as it shone through the elm at the gate. The man turned his chair so that he could look at her, and after satisfying his eyes he broke the silence with, "Seven years."

And she returned, "Seven years the thirteenth of April."

The man played a tune with his fingers and a foot and said nothing more. The woman finally spoke. "Did you know it was the thirteenth?"

"Yes," he replied, "father died the ninth. I have often counted it up." He added shortly after: "It's a long time--seven years! My! but it has been a long time!"

"I have wondered if you have thought so," a pause, "too!"

Their hearts were beating too fast for thoughts to come coherently.

The fever of madness was upon them, and numbed their wills so that they could not reach beneath the surface of their consciousnesses to find words for their emotions. Then also there was in each a deadening, flaming sense of guilt. Shame is a dumb pa.s.sion, and these two, who in the fastnesses of a thousand nights had told themselves that what they sought was good and holy, now found in each other's actual presence a gripping at the tongue's root that held them dumb.

"Yes, I--" the man mumbled, "yes, I--I fancied you understood that well enough."

"But you have been busy?" she asked; "very busy, Bob, and oh, I've been so proud of all that you've done." It was the woman's tongue that first found a sincere word.

The man replied, "Well--I--I am glad you have."

It seemed to the woman a long time since her father had gone. Her conscience was making minutes out of seconds. She said, "Don't you think it's getting late?" but did not rise.

The man looked at his watch and answered, "Only 10.34." He started to rise, but she checked him breathlessly.

"Oh, Bob, Bob, sit down. This isn't enough for these long years. I had so many things to say to you." She hesitated and cried, "Why are we so stupid now--now when every second counts?"

He bent slightly toward her and said in a low voice, "So that's why your lilacs have never bloomed again."

She looked at her chair arm and asked, "Did you know they hadn't bloomed?"

"Oh, Molly, of course I knew," he answered, and then went on: "Every thirteenth of April I have slipped through the fence and come over here, rain or s.h.i.+ne, at night, to see if they were blooming. But I didn't know why they never bloomed!"

The woman rose and walked a step toward the door, and turned her head away. When she spoke it was after a sob, "Bob, I couldn't bear it--I just couldn't bear it, Bob!"

He groaned and put his hands to his forehead and rested his elbow on the chair arm. "Oh, Molly, Molly, Molly," he sighed, "poor, poor little Molly." After a pause he said: "I won't ever bother you again.

It doesn't do any good." A silence followed in which the woman turned her face to him, tear-stained and wretched, with the seams of her heart all torn open and showing through it. "It only hurts," the man continued, and then he groaned aloud, "Oh, G.o.d, how it hurts!"

She sank back into her chair and buried her face in the arm farthest from him and her body shook, but she did not speak. He stared at her dry-eyed for a minute, that tolled by so slowly that he rose at the end of it, fearful that his stay was indecorously long.

"I think I should go now," he said, as he pa.s.sed her.

"Oh, no!" she cried. "Not yet, not just yet." She caught his arm and he stopped, as she stood beside him, trembling, haggard, staring at him out of dead, mad eyes. There was no colour in her blotched face, and in the moonlight the red rims of her eyes looked leaden, and her voice was unsteady. At times it broke in sobbing croaks, and she spoke with loose jaws, as one in great terror. "I want you to know--" she paused at the end of each little hiccoughed phrase--"that I have not forgotten--" she caught her breath--"that I think of you every day--" she wiped her eyes with a limp handkerchief--"every day and every night, and pray for you, though I don't believe--" she whimpered as she shuddered--"that G.o.d cares much about me."

He tried to stop her, and would have gone, but she put a hand upon his shoulder and pleaded: "Just another minute. Oh, Bob," she cried, and her voice broke again, "don't forget me. Don't forget me. When I was so sick last year--you remember," she pleaded, "I raved in delirium a week." She stopped as if afraid to go on, then began to shake as with a palsy. "I raved of everything under G.o.d's sun, and through it all, Bob--not one word of you. Oh, I knew that wouldn't do." She swayed upon his arm. "I kept a little corner of my soul safe to guard you."

She sank back into her chair and chattered, "Oh, I guarded you."

She was crying like a child. He stood over her and touched her dishevelled hair with the tips of his fingers and said: "I oughtn't to stay, Molly."

And she motioned him away with her face hidden and sobbed, "No--I know it."

He paused a moment on the step before her and then said, "Good-by, Molly--I'm going now." And she heard him walking down the yard on the gra.s.s, so that his footsteps would not arouse the house. It seemed to them both that it was midnight, but time had moved slowly, and when the spent, broken woman crept into the house, and groped her way to her room, she did not make a light, but slipped into bed without looking at her scarred, shameful face.

CHAPTER XVIII

In the suns.h.i.+ne of that era of world-wide prosperity in the eighties, John Barclay made much hay. He spent little time in Sycamore Ridge, and his private car might be found in Minnesota to-day and at the end of the week in California. As president of the Corn Belt Road and as controlling director in the North Lake Line, he got rates on other railroads for his grain products that no compet.i.tor could duplicate.

And when a compet.i.tor began to grow beyond the small fry cla.s.s, Barclay either bought him out or built a mill beside the offender and crushed him out. Experts taught him the value of the chaff from the grain. He had a dozen mills to which he s.h.i.+pped the refuse from his flour and heaven only knows what else, and turned the stuff into various pancake flours and breakfast foods. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising--in a day when large appropriations for advertising were unusual. And the words "Barclay's Best" glared at the traveller from crags in the Rocky Mountains and from the piers of all the great harbour bridges. He used Niagara to glorify the name of Barclay, and "Use Barclay's Best" had to be washed off the statue of the G.o.ddess of Liberty in New York Harbour. The greenish brown eyes of the little man were forever looking into s.p.a.ce, and when he caught a dream, instead of letting it go, he called a stenographer and made it come true. In those days he was beginning to realize that an idea plus a million dollars will become a fact if a man but says the word, whereas the same idea minus a million remains a dream. The great power of money was slowly becoming part of the man's consciousness. During the years that were to come, he came to think that there was nothing impossible. Any wish he had might be gratified.

Such a consciousness drives men mad.

But in those prosperous days, while the millions were piling up, Barclay kept his head. All the world was buying then, but wherever he could Barclay sold. He bought only where he had to, and paid cash for what he bought. He did not owe a dollar for anything. He had no equities; his t.i.tles were all good. And as he neared his forties he believed that he could sell what he had at forced sale for many millions. He was supposed to be much richer than he was, but the one thing that he knew about it was that scores of other men had more than he. So he kept staring into s.p.a.ce and pressing the b.u.t.ton for his stenographer, and at night wherever his work found him, whether in Boston or in Chicago or in San Francisco, he hunted up the place where he could hear the best music, and sat listening with his eyes closed.

He always kept his note-book in his hand, when Jane was not with him, and when an idea came to him inspired by the music, he jotted it down, and the next day, if it stood the test of a night's sleep, he turned the idea into an event.

In planning his work he was ruthless. He learned that by bribing men in the operating department of any railroad he could find out what his compet.i.tors were doing. And in the main offices of the National Provisions Company two rooms full of clerks were devoted to considering the duplicate way-bills of every car of flour or grain or grain product not s.h.i.+pped by the Barclay companies. Thus he was able to delay the cars of his compet.i.tors, and get his own cars through on time. Thus he was able to bribe buyers in wholesale establishments to push his products. And with Lige Bemis manipulating the railroad and judiciary committees in the legislatures of ten states, no laws were enacted which might hamper Barclay's activities.

"Do you know, Lucy," said General Ward to his wife one night when they were discussing Barclay and his ways and works, "sometimes I think that what that boy saw at Wilson's Creek,--the horrible bloodshed, the deadly spectacle of human suffering at the hospital wagon, some way blinded his soul's eye to right and wrong. It was all a man could stand; the picture must have seared the boy's heart like a fire."

Mrs. Ward, who was mending little clothes in the light of the dining-room lamp, put down her work a moment and said: "I have always thought the colonel had some such idea. For once when he was speaking of the way John stole that wheat land, he said, 'Well, poor John, he got a wound at Wilson's Creek that never will heal,' and when I asked if he meant his foot, the colonel smiled like a woman and said gently, 'No, Miss Lucy, not there--not there at all; in his heart, my dear, in his heart!'"

And the general's eyes met the eyes of a mother wandering toward a boy of nine sleeping, tired out, on a couch near by; he was a little boy with dark hair, and red tanned cheeks, and his mouth--such a soft innocent mouth--curved prettily, like the lips of children in old pictures, and as he slept he smiled, and the general, meeting the mother's eyes coming back from the little face, wiped his gla.s.ses and nodded his head in understanding; in a moment they both rose and stood hand in hand over their child, and the mother said in a trembling voice, "And his mother prayed for him, too--she has told me so--so many times."

But the people of Sycamore Ridge and of the Mississippi Valley did not indulge in any fine speculations upon the meaning of life when they thought of John Barclay. He had become considerable of a figure in the world, and the Middle West was proud of him. For those were the days of tin cornices, false fronts, vain pretences, and borrowed plumes bought with borrowed money. Other people's capital was easy to get, and every one was rich. Debt was regarded as an evidence of prosperity, and the town ran mad with the rest of the country. It is not strange then that Mrs. Watts McHurdie, she who for four years during the war dispensed "beefsteak--ham and eggs--breakfast bacon--tea--coffee--iced tea--or--milk" at the Thayer House, and for ten years thereafter sold dry-goods and kept books at Dorman's store, should have become tainted with the infection of the times. But it is strange that she could have inoculated so sane a little man as Watts. Still, there were Delilah and Samson, and of course Samson was a much larger man than Watts, and Nellie McHurdie was considerably larger than Delilah; and you never can tell about those things, anyway. Also it must not be forgotten that Nellie McHurdie since her marriage had become Grand Preceptress in one lodge, Worthy Matron in another, Senior Vice Commander in a third, and Wors.h.i.+pful Benefactress in a fourth, to say nothing of positions as corresponding secretary, delegate to the state convention, Keeper of the Records and Seals, Scribe,--and perhaps Pharisee,--in half a dozen others, all in the interests of her husband's political future; and with such obvious devotion before him, it is small wonder after all that he succ.u.mbed.

But he would not run for office. He had trouble every spring persuading her, but he always did persuade her, that this wasn't his year, that conditions were wrong, and that next year probably would be better. But he allowed her to call their home "The Bivouac," and have the name cut in stone letters on the horse-block; and he sat by meekly for many long years at lodges, at church entertainments, at high school commencement exercises, at public gatherings of every sort, and heard her sing a medley of American patriotic songs which wound up with the song that made him famous. It was five drinks in Jake Dolan that stopped the medley, when the drinks aforesaid inspired him to rise grandly from his chair at the front of the hall at an installation of officers of Henry Schnitzler Post of the Grand Army, and stalk majestically out of the room, while the singing was in progress, saying as he turned back at the door, before thumping heavily down the stairs, "Well, I'm getting pretty d.a.m.n tired of that!" Mrs. McHurdie insisted that Watts should whip Dolan, and it is possible that at home that night Watts did smite his breast and shake his head fiercely, for in the morning the neighbours saw Mrs. McHurdie walk to the gate with him, talking earnestly and holding his arm as if to restrain him; moreover, when Watts had turned the corner of Lincoln Avenue and had disappeared into Main Street, she hurried over to the Culpeppers' to have the colonel warn Dolan that Watts was a dangerous man. But when Dolan, sober, walked into the harness shop that afternoon to apologize, the little harness maker came down the aisle of saddles in his shop blinking over his spectacles and with his hand to his mouth to strangle a smile, and before Dolan could speak, Watts said, "So am I--Jake Dolan--so am I; but if you ever do that again, I'll have to kill you."

It happened in the middle eighties--maybe a year before the college was opened--maybe a year after, though Gabriel Carnine, talking of it some twenty years later, insists that it happened two years after the opening of the college. But no one ever has mentioned the matter to Watts, so the exact date may not be recorded, though it is an important date in the uses of this narrative, as will be seen later.

All agree--the colonel, the general, Dolan, Fernald, and perhaps two dozen old soldiers who were at the railroad station waiting for the train to take them to the National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic,--that it was a fine morning in September. Of course John Barclay contributed the band. He afterwards confessed to that, explaining that Nellie had told him that Watts never had received the attention he should receive either in the town or the state or the nation, and so long as Watts was a National Delegate for the first time in his life, and so long as she had twice been voted for as National President of the Ladies' Aid, and might get it this time, the band would be, as she put it, "so nice to take along"; and as John never forgot the fact that Nellie asked him to sing at her wedding, he hired the band. Thus are we bound to our past. But the band was not what caused the comrades to gasp, though its going was a surprise. And when they heard it turn into Main Street far up by Lincoln Avenue, playing the good old tune that the town loved for Watts' sake and for the sake of the time and the place and the heroic deeds it celebrated,--when they heard the band, the colonel asked the general, "Where's Watts?" and they suspected that the band might be bringing him to the depot.

Heaven knows the town had bought uniforms and new horns for the band often enough for it to do something public-spirited once in a while without being paid for it. So the band did not come to the town as a shock in and of itself. Neither for that matter did the hack--the new glistening silver-mounted hack, with the bright spick-and-span hea.r.s.e harness on the horses; in those bustling days a quarter was nothing, and you can ride all over the Ridge for a quarter; so when the comrades at the depot, in their blue soldiers' clothes their campaign hats, and their delegates' badges, saw the band followed by the hack, they were of course interested, but that was all. And when some of the far-sighted ones observed that the top of the hack was spread back royally, they commented upon the display of pomp, but the comment was not extraordinary. But when from the street as the band stopped, there came cheers from the people, the boys at the station felt that something unusual was about to come to them. So they watched the band march down the long sheet-iron-covered station walk, and the hack move along beside the band boys; and the poet's comrades-in-arms saw him sitting beside the poet's wife,--the two in solemn state. And then the old boys beheld Watts McHurdie,--little Watts McHurdie, with his grizzled beard combed, with his gold-rimmed Sunday gla.s.ses far down on his nose so that he could see over them, and--wonder of wonders, they saw a high s.h.i.+ny new silk hat wobbling over his modest head.

He stumbled out of the open hack with his hand on the great stiff awkward thing, obviously afraid it would fall off, and she that was Nellie Logan, late of the Thayer House and still later of Dorman's store, and later still most wors.h.i.+pful, most potent, most gorgeous and most radiant archangel of seven secret and mysterious covenants, conclaves, and inner temples, stood beaming at the pitiful sight, clearly proud of her shameless achievement. Watts, putting his hand to his mouth to cover his smile, grabbed the s.h.i.+ny thing again as he nodded cautiously at the crowd. Then he followed her meekly to the women's waiting room, where the wives and sisters of the comrades were a.s.sembled--and they, less punctilious than the men, burst forth with a scream of joy, and the agony was over.

And thus Watts McHurdie went to his greatest earthly glory. The delegation from the Ridge, with the band, had John Barclay's private car; that was another surprise which Mrs. McHurdie arranged, and when they got to Was.h.i.+ngton, where the National Encampment was, opinions differ as to when Watts McHurdie had his high tide of happiness. The colonel says that it was in the great convention, where the Sycamore Ridge band sat in front of the stage, and where Watts stood in front of the band and led the great throng,--beginning with his cracked little heady tenor, and in an instant losing it in the awful diapason of ten thousand voices singing his old song with him; and where, when it was over, General Grant came down the platform, making his way rather clumsily among the chairs, and at last in front of the whole world grasped Watts McHurdie's hands, and the two little men, embarra.s.sed by the formality of it all, stood for a few seconds looking at each other with tears glistening in their speaking eyes.

But Jake Dolan, who knows something of human nature, does not hold to the colonel's view about the moment of McHurdie's greatest joy. "We were filing down the Avenue again, thousands and ten thousands of us, as we filed past the White House nearly twenty years before. And the Sycamore Ridge band was cramming its lungs into the old tune, when up on the reviewing stand, beside all the big bugs and with the President there himself, stood little Watts, plug hat in hand, bowing to the boys. 'Twas a lovely sight, and he had been there for two mortal hours before we boys got down--there was the Kansas boys and the Iowa boys and some from Missouri, carrying the old flag we fought under at Wilson's Creek. Watts saw us down the street and heard the old band play; a dozen other bands had played that tune that day; but Billy Dorman's tuba had its own kind of a rag in it, and Watts knew it. I seen him a-waving his hat at the boys, almost as soon as they saw him, and as the band came nearer and nearer I saw the little man's face begin to crack, and as he looked down the line and saw them Kansas and Iowa soldiers, I seen him give one whoop, and throw that plug hat h.e.l.lwards over the crowd and jump down from that band stand like a wild man and make for the gang. He was blubbering like a calf when he caught step with me, and he yelled so as to reach my ears above the roar of the crowds and the blatting of the bands--yelled with his voice ripped to shreds that fluttered out ragged from the torn bosom of him, 'Jake--Jake--how I would like to get drunk--just this once!' And we went on down the avenue together--him bareheaded, hay-footing and straw-footing it the same as in the old days."

Jake always paused at this point and shook his head sorrowfully, and then continued dolefully: "But 'twas no use; he was caught and took away; some says it was to see the pictures in the White House, and some says it was to a reception given by the Relief Corps to the officers elect of the Ladies' Aid, where he was pawed over by a lot of old girls who says, 'Yes, I'm so glad--what name please--oh, --McHurdie, surely not _the_ McHurdie; O dear me--Sister McIntire, come right here, this is _the_ McHurdie--you know I sang your song when I was a little girl'--which was a lie, unless Watts wrote it for the Mexican War, and he didn't. And then some one else comes waddling up and says, 'O dear me, Mr. McHurdie--you don't know how glad I am to see the author of "Home, Sweet Home,"' and Watts blinks his eyes and pleads not guilty; and she says, 'O dear, excuse the mistake; well, I'm sure you wrote something?' And Watts, being sick of love, as Solomon says in his justly celebrated and popular song, Watts looks through his Sunday gla.s.ses and doesn't see a blame thing, and smiles and says calmly, 'No, madam, you mistake--I am a simple harness maker.' And she sidles off looking puzzled, to make room for the one from Ma.s.sachusetts, who stares at him through her gla.s.ses and says, 'So you're Watts McHurdie--who wrote the--' 'The same, madam,' says Watts, courting favour. 'Well,' says the high-browed one, 'well--you are not at all what I imagined.' And 'Neither are you, madam,' returns Watts, as sweet as a dill pickle; and she goes away to think it over and wonder if he meant it that way. No--that's where Nellie made her mistake. It wouldn't have hurt him--just once. But what's done's done, and can't be undone, as the man said when he fished his wife out of the lard vat."