A Woman Named Smith Part 6

"When the clamor quieted and sane questions began to be asked, suspicion fastened upon Richard Hynds. His affairs were chaotic, his needs imperative and desperate. He had been heard to ask his mother if she intended wearing what he called 'the Hynds fortune' at Freeman's ball. He knew, of course, where they were kept--in the anteroom of his mother's apartment. It was not only possible but easy for him to gain access to them.

"Let us consider the case without prejudice: Here is a young man--a gambler, a wastrel--with pressing debts, and clamoring creditors threatening what might be considered dishonor. Within reach of this young man's hand are certain very valuable properties which he might even consider his own, since they would in time descend to him. His mother's resources are exhausted, his father's heart steeled against further advancements. Cause and effect, you see--debts: missing jewels.

"The case not only formed two factions in public opinion; it split the Hynds family itself. His two sisters, and his cousin Jessamine, raised in this house, believed him guilty. His mother and his wife believed in his innocence and refused to hear a word against him.

These two things only did Richard Hynds salvage in that utter wreck and catastrophe--his mother's faith and his wife's love.

"He lost his father's. This was a man, who, under his pleasant exterior of a landed gentleman, was rigid and inflexible. He had already borne a great deal, remember; but this was disgrace, an indelible stain upon a stainless name. Therefore this father, who was at the same time a just and good man, disinherited his favorite child and eldest son. House, slaves, lands, money, the great position of the head of a powerful family, came to Freeman Hynds, my late client's father, born five years later than his brother, on the twentieth day of September, 1785--a long time ago! a long time ago!

"Richard was disgraced, and a beggar. And it seemed that the rod that had lain in pickle for the Hyndses for their pride, was brought forth to scourge them all. For Richard, desperate, distracted, careless of what happened to him, rode out one day through a pelting rain. Result, congested lungs; the poor wastrel, who had no wish to live, was soon satisfactorily dead.

"When James Hampden got that news, he rose up from his chair, laid the book he had been reading--it was Baxter's 'Saint's Rest'--down on the library table and fell as if lightning had struck him.

Apoplexy, it was said; a thrust through the heart, I should call it.

Richard the sinner was none the less Richard his first-born.

"Hard upon the heels of these two disasters came a third, the case of Jessamine Hynds. This Jessamine--a highly gifted, imperious creature, proud as Lucifer, after the manner of the Hyndses--was an orphan, reared in Hynds House. She was some several years older than her cousins, to whom she was greatly attached. The trouble so preyed upon her that she became melancholy, and one fine day disappeared and was never afterward found. There was great hue and cry made for her, and men riding hither and yon, for this was a Hynds woman, and her story touched popular imagination, so that she is supposed,"

said the lawyer dryly, "to wander around Hynds House o' nights, crying for Richard and searching for the lost jewels.

"After the death of James Hampden Hynds, it was discovered that he had added a singular enough codicil to his will. This codicil provided that in the event the jewels were found intact, and Richard Hynds's innocence thereby incontrovertibly established, Hynds House as it stood should revert to him as eldest son, after the custom of the family. _But_ until the jewels were recovered, Richard and his heirs were to have exactly--nothing. And nothing is what Richard and his heirs got."

"And was he really guilty?" breathed Alicia. Her sympathy was instantly with Richard. That is exactly like Alicia, who is sorry for the fatted calf, and the Egyptians drowned in the Red Sea, and Esau swindled out of his birthright; had she been one of the wise virgins she would have trimmed the lamps of all the foolish ones and waked them up in time.

"In theory," said the judge, "a man is innocent until he is proved guilty. In practice, he is guilty until he can prove his innocence."

"And was nothing, absolutely nothing, ever heard or known further?--nothing that would justify his mother's faith, or comfort his poor young wife's heart?"

"There was but one incident to which even the most credulous could attach the slightest importance. You shall judge for yourself whether it deserved any. Freeman Hynds, riding about the plantation after his habit, was thrown from his horse and died from the injuries sustained. He recovered consciousness for a few minutes before he died; some said he never really regained it. Be that as it may, the dying man cried out, in a voice of great anguish and affliction: '_Richard! Brother Richard! The jewels--the jewels!_' He struggled to say more, and failed; looked into the concerned faces around him, with the awful look of the soul about to depart; struggled to raise himself; and fell back upon his pillow a corpse.

"Some--they were in the majority--said, sensibly enough, that the pain and disgrace of his brother's downfall had haunted the poor gentleman's death-bed, and occasioned that last sad cry. Some few said he had wished to confess a thing heavy upon his conscience, who had taken his brother's place as Jacob took Esau's. Richard's wife, of course, was of these latter. She went to her grave a pa.s.sionate believer in the innocence of her husband, whom she averred to have been a deeply wronged and cruelly used man; and, for heaven's sake, who do you suppose she claimed had wronged him? Freeman! She couldn't prove anything; she hadn't the ghost of a clue to hang the ghost of an accusation upon; yet, womanlike, she clung to her notion, and she taught it to her son as one teaches a holy creed.

"The Hyndses were excellent haters. Freeman's daughter, born into an atmosphere of family disruption, abhorred the very memory of her uncle, and hated her uncle's wife, the woman who doubted and led others to doubt her father's honesty. This hatred she discovered for Richard's son, who, as he grew older, referred to Freeman as 'my Uncle Judas.'

"This second Richard became in time a highly successful physician, a man honored and beloved by this community. There was no wildness in _him_, nor in his son, the third Richard. His granddaughter Sarah Hynds married Professor Doctor Max Jelnik, the celebrated Viennese alienist, whom she met abroad. Your next-door neighbor is Sarah's son, born somewhere in Hungary, I believe. Both the young man's parents are dead, and I understand he has led a vagrant and irresponsible life, preferring to rove about rather than follow his father's profession, to which he was educated.

"My late client, indeed, held that he had inherited the deplorable characteristics of the first Richard. She a.s.serted--she allowed herself great freedom of speech--that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. It displeased her that he should come to Hyndsville. She thought it showed a malignant nature and a peculiar shamelessness that he chose to reside next door to Hynds House, from which his great-great-grandfather had been so ignominously driven.

Her first meeting with the young man bred in her an ineradicable dislike."

Now what really happened is this: The fences having been neglected, and in consequence fallen down, and the hedge broken in many places, Mr. Jelnik, just come to Hyndsville, thoughtlessly and perhaps ignorantly crossed the sacred Scarlett boundaries. Up-stairs behind her blind, like an ancient spider in her web, the old lady spied him. She flung open the window and leaned out.

"Who are you that prowl about other peoples' yards like a thievish cat?" she demanded peremptorily.

The young man looked up, uncovering his beautiful head.

"I am Nicholas Jelnik. And I pray your pardon, Madame: I did not mean to intrude," and he made as if to go.

"Jelnik!" said she, in a hoa.r.s.e and croaking voice. "Jelnik! Aha! I know your breed! I smell the blood in you--bad blood! rotten bad blood! You've a bad face, young man: a scoundrelly face, the face of a fellow whose grandfather robbed his house and shamed his name! And why have you come near Hynds House, at this hour of the day? He, he, he! _I_ know, _I_ know!"

Lost in astonishment, Jelnik remained staring up at her. The apparition of this venerable vixen, who had hated Richard's son and now hated him of a later generation, who had seen those that had talked to Richard himself in his ill-fated lifetime, so stirred his imagination that it deprived him of utterance. All he could do was to stand still and stare and stare and stare. He had never seen anybody so old--she was nearly a hundred, and looked a thousand--and he stared at the old, old, wrinkled, yellow face, the unhuman face, in which the beady black eyes burned with wicked fire; at the nearly bald head, thinly covered with a floating wisp or so of wool-like white hair; at the claw-like, shriveled, yellow hands, the stringy neck, the whole s.e.xless meager wreck of what had been a woman. It was a stare made up of wonder, and instinctive dislike, and human pity, and young disgust. She raised her voice:

"Did you not see those signs? Scoundrel, puppy, foreign-born poacher, didn't you see my sign-boards?" And as she looked down at him--Richard's blood alive and red in a youthful and beautiful body: and _she_ what she was--she fell into one of those futile and dreadful fits of rage to which the evil old are subject; and mumbled with her skinny bags of lips, and shook and nodded her deathly head, and waved her claw-like hands, screeching insults and abuse.

The pity died out of Jelnik's face. He regarded her with his father's eyes, the calm, impersonal, pa.s.sionless gaze of the trained alienist. She was an unlovely exhibition, to be studied critically.

In some subtle manner she understood, for she jerked herself out of her anger, and fell silent, regarding him with a glance as brilliantly, deadly bright as a tarantula's. The cold, relentless hate of that glance chilled him. He forced himself to bow to her again, and to beat a dignified retreat, when his inclination was to take to his heels like a school-boy caught pilfering apples.

The next morning a bailiff presented Mr. Nicholas Jelnik with a notice forbidding him to enter the grounds of Hynds House without the written permission of the owner, and threatening prosecution should he disobey.

"The Hyndses, as I have said, are good haters," finished Judge Gatch.e.l.l.

"And so she left Hynds House to me," said I without, I am afraid, much grat.i.tude.

"It was hers, to dispose of as she chose." The lawyer spoke crisply.

"If you have any scruples, dismiss them. My late client understood that it was far better for the estate to fall into the hands of a sensible woman like yourself than into the keeping of a young man with what foolish people like to call the artistic temperament, which in plain English means a person who can't earn his salt in any useful, sensible business.

"You doubt this? Let us consider this same artistic temperament and its results," continued the judge, making a wry face. "Once or twice it has been my bad fortune to meet it. One trifling scamp I have in mind, painted. A house, a fence, a barn, even a sign-board? Not at all, but messes he called 'The Sea,' one doesn't know why, save that the things slightly resembled raw oysters. However, the women raved over him. His laundress and his landlady had good cause to rave!

"He wrote, too. A text-book, a t.i.tle, a will, a deed, a business letter? Far from it! He wrote _poetry_, if you please! The little wretch wrote _poetry_! That's what the artistic temperament leads a man to! Bah! I hate, I despise, I abhor, the artistic temperament!"

We looked at the judge, open-mouthed. "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?"

"There have been times," admitted the judge, subsiding, "when I radically disagreed with my late client; when I opposed her strongly. But when she willed her whole estate to you, Miss Smith, instead of to Nicholas Jelnik, I heartily approved. Understand, I have no personal bias, no animosity against this young man; but he is, I am told, more or less of an artist, and one might as well leave an estate to an anarchist at once. I have expressed this opinion to the town at large, and I seldom express my opinion publicly," finished the old jurist stiffly.

I heard that opinion with mingled emotions.

"But we like Mr. Jelnik," I said at last. "The injunction against him doesn't hold water. Personally, I feel like apologizing to him."

"Oh, no! One can't afford to cuddle an old vendetta, as Abis.h.a.g dry-nursed old King David. I always _hated_ Abis.h.a.g!" Alicia said navely.

"My late client," said the judge enigmatically, "hadn't counted on _you_." He almost succeeded in looking human when he said it, and his eyes upon Alicia weren't at all frosty. Then he folded his papers, replaced them in his wallet, wiped his gla.s.ses, shot his cuffs, hoped we'd find Hynds House all we'd hoped, hoped the town would be to our liking, hoped he could be of further service to us, bowed creakily, and took his departure.

"Sophy," said Alicia, after a long pause, "if ever I had to rechristen this house, I'd call it Hornets' Nest."

We had not attended church on our first Sunday, because we were too tired. But on our second Sunday we plucked up heart of grace and went to St. Polycarp's.

The old town wore an air of Sabbath peace and quietness infinitely soothing to the spirit. People pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed us. We knew they knew who we were. The old gentlemen, indeed, bowed to us with stately uncoverings of the head; the rest regarded us with the sort of impersonal and perfunctory interest one bestows upon uninteresting pa.s.sing strangers. n.o.body spoke to us, though the eyes of the young men were not unaware of Alicia's fairness.

In a great city, of course, one takes that sort of thing for granted; but in this small town, where everybody knew and spoke to everybody else, the effect was chilling.

"Talk about the sunny South!" murmured Alicia. "Why, my teeth want to chatter!"

During the services I was conscious of covert glances in our direction, but whenever a pair of feminine eyes met mine, they slid off like lizards and glided another way, with calculated Christian indifference. They weren't hostile, nor unfriendly: they were just deliberately indifferent. n.o.body had the faintest notion of being heedful of us strangers among them; and I should be sorry for angels who expected to be entertained unawares in South Carolina!

When the congregation had filed out and gone about its leisurely business, the minister and his wife came forward to greet us. They were a bit nervous, remembering the diabolic uproar about Faith, Hope, and Charity. Mr. Haile was a mild-mannered little man of the saved-sheep type, with box-plaited teeth and a bleating voice. His wife had the worried face and the anxious eyes of the minister's helpmeet, and the painfully ready smile for newcomers who might, or might not, prove desirable paris.h.i.+oners.

She wanted to be nice to us as a Christian woman to women, but not too nice as the minister's wife of a church whose members looked upon us as interlopers. I had deputed Judge Gatch.e.l.l to inform the trustees that the suit was dropped. I suppose Mrs. Haile was timid about broaching the delicate subject, for she ignored it with a nervous intensity that made me feel sorry for her. She and Mr. Haile would call just as soon as it was convenient for us to receive visitors; and then they shook hands with us, and I think they breathed a sigh of relief.

"Oh, Sophy! And we've got to keep on going there!--next Sunday, and Sunday after next Sunday, and maybe every Sunday after that until we die! Perhaps after a while some of them will bow to us, or maybe even say, 'How do you do?' _but_ we'll feel as if we'd been put in cold storage every time we enter that door!" wailed Alicia.