A Certain Rich Man Part 27

"And you love her with all your life--don't you, Nealie?" The son was gazing intently at the miniature and nodded. At length the father sighed. "My poor, poor boy--my poor, poor boy." He walked to the table on which were his books and papers, and then stood looking at the girl's face. "You couldn't explain it to her, I suppose?" he asked.

"No," replied the son. "No; she adores her father; to her he is perfect. And I don't blame her, for he is good--you can't know how good, to her." Again they stood in silence. The son looked up from the picture and said, "And you know, father, what the world would think of me--a spy, an informer--an ingrate?"

The old man did not reply, and the son shook his head and his face twitched with the struggle that was in him. Suddenly the father walked to the son and cried: "And yet you must, Neal Ward--you must. Is there any confidence in G.o.d's world so sacred as your duty to mankind?

Is there any tie, even that of your wife, so sacred as that which binds you to humanity? I left your mother, my sweetheart, and went out to fight, with the chance of never seeing her again. I went out and left her for the same country that is calling you now, Neal!" The boy looked up with agony on his face. The father paused a moment and then went on: "Your soul is your soul--not John Barclay's, my boy--not Jeanette Barclay's--but yours--yours, Neal, to blight or to cherish, as you will." A moment later he added, "Don't you see, son--don't you see, Neal?" The son shook his head and looked down, and did not answer. The father put his arm about the son. "Boy, boy," he cried, "boy, you've got a a man's load on you now--a man's load. To-morrow you can run away like a coward; you can dodge and lie like a thief, or you can tell the simple truth, as it is asked of you, like a man--the simple truth like a man, Neal."

"Yes, I know, father--I see it all--but it is so hard--for her sake, father."

The old man was silent, while the kitchen clock ticked away a minute and then another and a third. Then he took his arm away from his son, and grasped the boy's hand. "Oh, little boy--little boy," he cried, "can't I make you see that the same G.o.d who has put this trial upon you will see you through it, and that if you fail in this trial, your soul will be crippled for life, and that no matter what you get in return for your soul--you will lose in the bargain? Can't you see it, Nealie--can't you see it? All my life I have been trying to live that way, and I have tried to make you see it--so that you would be ready for some trial like this."

The son rose, and the two men stood side by side, clasping hands. The boy suddenly tore himself loose, and throwing his hands in the air, wailed, "Oh, G.o.d--it is too hard--I can't, father--I can't."

And with the miniature in his hand he walked from the room, and Philemon Ward went to his closet and wrestled through the night. At dawn his son sat reading and re-reading a letter. Finally he pressed another letter to his lips, and read his own letter again. It read:--

"MY DARLING GIRL: This is the last letter I shall ever mail to you, perhaps. I can imagine no miracle that will bring us together again.

My duty, as I see it, stands between us. The government inspector is going to put me under oath to-morrow--unless I run, and I won't--and question me about your father's business. What I must tell will injure him--maybe ruin him. I am going to tell your father what I am going to do before I do it. But by all the faith I have been taught in a G.o.d--and you know I am not pious, and belong to no church--I am forced to do this thing. Oh, Jeanette, Jeanette--if I loved you less, I would take you for this life alone and sell my soul for you; but I want you for an eternity--and in that eternity I want to bring you an unsoiled soul. Good-by--oh, good-by.

NEAL."

The next morning when Neal Ward went out of the office at the mill, John Barclay sat s.h.i.+vering with wrath and horror. Every second stamped him with its indelible finger, as a day, or a month, puts its stain on other men.

Another morning, a week later, as he sat at his desk, a telegram from his office manager in the city fluttered in his hands. It read: "We are privately advised that you were indicted by the federal grand jury last night--though we do not know upon what specific charge--our friend B. will advise us later in the day."

It was a gray December day, and a thin film of ice covered the mill-pond. Barclay looked there and shuddered away from the thought that came to him. He was alone in the mill. He longed for his wife and daughter, and yet when he thought of their homecoming to disgrace, he shook with agony. Over and over again he whispered the word "indicted." The thought of his mother and her sorrow broke him down.

He locked the door, dropped heavily into his chair, and bowed his head on his crossed arms. And then--

What, tears? Tears for Mr. Barclay?--for himself? Look back along the record for his life: there are many tears charged to his account, but none for his own use. Back in the seventies there are tears of Miss Culpepper, charged to Mr. Barclay, and one heart-break for General Hendricks. Again in the eighties there is sorrow for Mr. Robert Hendricks, and more tears for Mrs. Brownwell, that was Miss Culpepper--all charged to the account of Mr. Barclay; and in the early nineties there are some manly tears for Martin F. Culpepper, also charged to Mr. Barclay--but none before for his own use. Are they, then, tears of repentance? No, not tears for the recording angel, not good, man's size, soul-was.h.i.+ng tears of repentance, but miserable, dwarf, useless, self-pitying, corroding tears--tears of shame and rage, for the proud, G.o.d-mocking, man-cheating, powerful, faithless, arrogant John Barclay, dealer in the Larger Good.

And so with his head upon his arms, and his arms upon his desk,--a gray-clad, gray-haired, slightly built, time-racked little figure,--John Barclay strained his soul and wrenched his body and tried in vain to weep.

CHAPTER XXV

Down comes the curtain. Only a minute does John Barclay sit there with his head in his arms, and then, while you are stretching your legs, or reading your programme, or looking over the house to see who may be here, up rises John Barclay, and while the stage carpenters are setting the new scene, he is behind there telephoning to Chicago, to Minneapolis, to Omaha, to Cleveland, to Buffalo,--he fairly swamps the girl with expensive long-distance calls,--trying to see if there is not some way to stop the filing of that indictment. For to him the mere indictment advertises to mankind that money is not power, and with him and with all of his caste and cla.s.s a confession of weakness is equivalent to a confession of wrong. For where might makes right, as it does in his world, weakness spells guilt, and with all the people jeering at him, with the press saying: "Aha, so they have got Mr. Barclay, have they? Well, if all his money and all his power could not prevent an indictment, he must be a pretty tough customer,"--with the public peering into his private books and papers in a lawsuit, confirming as facts all that they had read in the newspapers, in short with the gold plating of respectability rubbed off his moral bra.s.s, he feels the crus.h.i.+ng weight of the indictment, as he limps up and down his room at the mill and frets at the long-distance operator for being so slow with his calls.

But he is behind the scenes now; and so is Neal Ward, walking the streets of Chicago, looking for work on a newspaper, and finally finding it. And so are Mrs. Jane Barclay and Miss Barclay, as they sail away on their ten days' cruise of the Mediterranean. And while the orchestra plays and the man in the middle of row A of the dress circle edges out of his seat and in again, we cannot hear John Barclay sigh when the last telephone call is answered, and he finds that nothing can be done. And he is not particularly cheered by the knowledge that the a.s.sociated Press report that very afternoon is sending all over the world the story of the indictment. But late in the afternoon Judge Bemis, in whose court the indictment was found, much to his chagrin, upon evidence furnished by special counsel sent out from Was.h.i.+ngton--Judge Bemis tells him, as from one old friend to another, that the special counsellor isn't much of a lawyer. The pleasant friendly little rip-saw laugh of the judge over the telephone nearly a thousand miles away is not distinct enough to be heard across the stage even if the carpenters were not hammering, and the orchestra screaming, and the audience buzzing; but that little laugh of his good friend, Judge Bemis, was the sweetest sound John Barclay had heard in many a day. It seemed curious that he should so a.s.sociate it, but that little laugh seemed to drown the sound of a clicking key in a lock--a large iron lock, that had been rattling in his mind since noon. For even in the minds of the rich and the great, even in the minds of men who fancy they are divinely appointed to parcel out to their less daring brethren the good things of this world, there is always a child's horror of the jail. So when Mr. Barclay, who was something of a lawyer himself, heard his good friend, Judge Bemis, laugh that pleasant little friendly laugh behind the scenes, the heart of Mr.

Barclay gave a little pulse-beat of relief if not of joy.

But an instant later the blight of the indictment was over him again.

Hammer away, and scream away, and buzz away with all your might, you noises of the playhouse; let us not hear John Barclay hastening across the bridge just before the early winter sunset comes, that he may intercept the _Index_ and the _Banner_ in the front yard of the Barclay home, before his mother sees them. Always heretofore he has been glad to have her read of his achievements, in the hope that she would come to approve them, and to view things as he saw them--his success and his power and his glory. But to-night he hides the paper under his gray coat and slips into the house. She and her son sit down to dinner alone. This must be a stage dinner they are eating--though it is all behind the scenes; for Mr. Barclay is merely going through the empty form of eating. "No, thank you," for the roast. "Why, Mr.

Barclay did not touch his soup!" "Well," says the cook, tasting it critically, "that's strange." And "No, thank you" for the salad, and "Not any pie to-night, Clara." "What--none of the mince pie, John?

Why, I went out in the kitchen and made it for you myself." "Well, a little."

Heigh-ho! We sigh, and we drum on our table-cloth with our fingers, and we are trying to find some way to tell something. We have been a bad boy, maybe--a bad little boy, and must own up; that is part of our punishment--the hardest part perhaps, even with the curtain down, even with the noise in front, even with the maid gone, even when a mother comes and strokes our head, as we sit idly at the organ bench, unable to sound a key. Shall the curtain go up now? Shall we sit gawking while a boy gropes his way out of a man's life, back through forty years, and puts his head in shame and sorrow against a mother's breast? How he stumbles and falters and halts, as the truth comes out--and it must come out; on the whole the best thing there is to say of John Barclay on that fateful December day in the year of our Lord 1903 is that he did not let his mother learn the truth from any lips but his. And so it follows naturally, because he was brave and kind, that instead of having to strengthen her, she sustained him--she in her seventies, he in his fifties.

"My poor dear child," she said, "I know--I know. But don't worry, John--don't worry. I don't mind. Jane won't mind, I am sure, and I know Jennie will understand. It isn't what even we who love you think of you, John--it is what you are that counts. Oh, Johnnie, Johnnie, maybe you could serve your country and humanity in jail--by showing the folly and the utter uselessness of all this money-getting, just as your father served it by dying. I would not mind if it made men see that money isn't the thing--if it made you see it, my boy; if you could come out of a jail with that horrible greed for money purged from you--"

But no--we will not peep behind the curtain; we will not dwell with John Barclay as he walked all night up and down the great living room of his home. And see, the footlights have winked at the leader of the orchestra, to let him know he is playing too long; observe, how quickly the music dies down--rather too quickly, for the clatter of cast iron is heard on the stage, and the sound of hurried footsteps is audible, as of some one moving rapidly about behind the curtain. The rattling iron you hear is the stove in Watts McHurdie's shop; they have just set it up, and got it red hot; for it is a cold day, that fifteenth day of December, 1903, and the footsteps you hear are those of the members of the harness shop parliament.

Ah! There goes the curtain, and there sits Watts astraddle of his bench, working with all his might, for he has an order to sew sleigh-bells on a breast strap, for some festivity or another; and here sits the colonel, and over there the general, and on his home-made chair Jacob Dolan is tilted back, warming his toes at the stove. They are all reading--all except Watts, who is working; on the floor are the Chicago and St. Louis evening papers, and the Omaha and Kansas City morning papers. And on the first pages of all of these papers are pictures of John Barclay. There is John Barclay in the _Bee_, taken in his Omaha office by the _Bee's_ own photographer--a new picture of Mr. Barclay, unfamiliar to the readers of most newspapers. It shows the little man standing by a desk, smiling rather benignly with his sharp bold eyes fixed on the camera. There is a line portrait of Mr. Barclay in the _Times_, one of recent date, showing the crow's-feet about the eyes, the vertical wrinkle above the nose, and the furtive mouth, hard and naked, and the square mean jaw, that every cartoonist of Barclay has emphasized for a dozen years. And there are other pictures of Mr. Barclay in the papers on the floor, and the first pages of the papers are filled with the news of the Barclay indictment. All over this land, and in Europe, the news of that indictment caused a sensation. In the _Times_, there on the floor, is an editorial comment upon the indictment of Barclay cabled from London, another from Paris, and a third from Berlin. It was a big event in the world, an event of more than pa.s.sing note--this sudden standing up of one of the richest men of his land, before the front door of a county jail. Big business, and little business that apes big business, dropped its jaw. The world is not accustomed to think of might making wrong, so when a Charles I or a Louis XVI or a John Barclay comes to harm, the traditions of the world are wrenched. Men say: "How can these things be--if might makes right? Here is a case where might and right conflict--how about it? Jails are for the poor, not for the rich, because the poor are wrong and the rich are right, and no just man made perfect by a million should be in jail."

And so while the members of the parliament in Watts McHurdie's shop read and were disturbed at the strange twist of events, the whole world was puzzled with them, and in unison with Jacob Dolan, half the world spoke, "I see no difference in poisoning breakfast foods and poisoning wells, and it's no odds to me whether a man pinches a few ounces out of my flour sack, or steals my chickens."

And the other half of the world was replying with Colonel Culpepper, "Oh, well, Jake, now that's all right for talk; but in the realms of high finance men are often forced to be their own judges of right and wrong, and circ.u.mstances that we do not appreciate, cannot understand, in point of fact, nor comprehend, if I may say so, intervene, and make what seems wrong in small transactions, trivial matters and pinch-penny business, seem right in the high paths of commerce."

The general was too deeply interested in reading what purported to be his son's testimony before Commissioner Smith, to break into the discussion at this point, so Dolan answered, "From which I take it that you think that Johnnie down at the mill keeps a private G.o.d in his private car."

The colonel was silent for a time; he read a few lines and looked into s.p.a.ce a moment, and then replied in a gentle husky voice: "Jake, what do we know about it? The more I think how every man differs from his neighbour, and all our sins are the result of individual weakness at the end of lonely struggles with lonely temptations--the more I think maybe there is something in what you say, and that not only John but each of us--each of us under this s.h.i.+ning sun, sir--keeps his private G.o.d."

"You'll have to break that news gently to the Pope," returned Dolan.

"I'll not try it. Right's right, Mart Culpepper, and wrong's wrong for me and for Johnnie Barclay, white, black, brown, or yellow--'tis the same."

"There's nothing in your theory, Mart," cut in the general, folding his paper across his knee; "not a thing in the world. We're all parts of a whole, and the only way this is an individual problem at all--this working out of the race's destiny--is that the whole can't improve so long as the parts don't grow. So long as we all are like John Barclay save in John's courage to do wrong, laws won't help us much, and putting John in jail won't do so very much--though it may scare the cowards until John's kind of crime grows unpopular. But what we must have is individual--"

Tinkle goes the bell over Watts McHurdie's head--the bell tied to a cord that connects with the front door. Down jumps Watts, and note the play of the lights from the flies, observe that spot light moving toward R. U. E., there by the door of the shop. Yes, all ready; enter John Barclay. See that iron smile on his face; he has not surrendered.

He has been clean-shaven, and entering that door, he is as spick and span as though he were on a wedding journey. Give him a hand or a hiss as you will, ladies and gentlemen, John Barclay has entered at the Right Upper Entrance, and the play may proceed.

"Well," he grinned, "I suppose you are talking it over. Colonel, has the jury come to a verdict yet?"

What a suave John Barclay it was; how admirably he held his nerve; not a quiver in the face, not a ruffle of the voice. The general looked at him over his spectacles, and could not keep the kindness out of his eyes. "What a brick you are!" he said to himself, and Jake Dolan, conquered by the simplicity of it, surrendered.

"Oh, well, John, I suppose we all have our little troubles," said Jake. Only that; the rack of the inquisitor grew limp. And Colonel Culpepper rose and gave Barclay his hand and spoke not a word. The silence was awkward, and at the end of a few moments the colonel found words.

"How," he asked in his thick asthmatic voice, mushy with emotion, "how in the world did this happen, John? How did it happen?"

Barclay looked at the general; no, he did not glare, for John Barclay had grown tame during the night, almost docile, one would say. But he did not answer at first, and Watts McHurdie, bending over his work, chuckled out: "Ten miles from Springfield, madam--ten miles from Springfield." And then John sloughed off thirty years and laughed. And the general laughed, and the colonel smiled, and Jake Dolan took John Barclay's hand from the colonel, and said:--

"The court adjudges that the prisoner at the bar pay the a.s.sembled company four of those cigars in his inside pocket, and stand committed until the same is paid."

And then there was a scratching of matches, and a puffing, and Barclay spoke: "I knew there was one place on earth where I was welcome. The mill is swarming with reporters, and I thought I'd slip away. They'll not find me here." The parliament smoked in silence, and again Barclay said, "Well, gentlemen, it's pretty tough--pretty tough to work all your life to build up an industry and in the end--get this."

"Well, John," said the general, as he rolled up his newspaper and put it away, "I'm sorry--just as sorry as Mart is; not so much for the indictment, that is all part of the inevitable consequence of your creed; if it hadn't been the indictment, it would have been something else, equally sad--don't you see, John?"

"Oh, I know what you think, General," retorted Barclay, bitterly. "I know your idea; you think it's retribution."

"Not exactly that either, John--just the other side of the equation.

You have reaped what you sowed, and I am sorry for what you sowed. G.o.d gave you ten talents, John Barclay--ten fine talents, my boy, and you wrapped them in a napkin and buried them in the ground, buried them in greed and cunning and love of power, and you are reaping envy and malice and cruelty. You were efficient, John; oh, if I had been as efficient as you, how much I could have done for this world--how much--how much!" he mused wistfully.

Barclay did not reply, but his face was hard, and his neck was stiff, and he was not moved. He was still the implacable Mr. Barclay, the rich Mr. Barclay, and he would have no patronage from old Phil Ward--Phil Ward the crank, who was a nation's joke. Ting-a-ling went the bell over Watts McHurdie's head, and the little man climbed down from his bench and hurried into the shop. But instead of a customer, Mr. J. K. Mercheson, J. K. Mercheson representing Barber, Hanc.o.c.k, and Kohn,--yes, the whip trust; that's what they call it, but it is really an industrial organization of the trade,--Mr. J. K. Mercheson of New York came in. No, McHurdie did not need anything at present, and he backed into the shop. He had all of the goods in that line that he could carry just now; and he sidled toward his seat. The members of the parliament effaced themselves, as loafers do in every busy place when business comes up; the colonel got behind his paper, Barclay hid back of the stove, Dolan examined a bit of harness, and the general busied himself picking up the litter on the floor, and folding the papers with the pictures of Barclay inside so that he would not be annoyed by them. But Mr. Mercheson knew how to get orders; he knew that the thing to do is to stay with the trade.

So he leaned against the work bench and began:--

"This is a great town, Mr. McHurdie; we're always hearing from Sycamore Ridge. When I'm in the East they say, 'What kind of a town is that Sycamore Ridge where Watts McHurdie and your noted reformer, Robert Hendricks, who was offered a place in the cabinet, and this man John Barclay live?'"

Mr. Mercheson paused for effect. Mr. McHurdie smiled and went on with his work.

"Say," said Mr. Mercheson, "your man Barclay is in all the papers this morning. I was in the smoker of the sleeper last evening coming out of Chicago, and we got to talking about him--and Lord, how the fellows did roast him."