CHAPTER X
It was a cold raw day in March, 1874. Colonel Culpepper was sitting in the office of Ward and Barclay over the Exchange National Bank waiting for the junior member of the firm to come in; the senior member of the firm, who had just brought up an arm load of green hickory and dry hackberry stove wood, was standing beside the box-shaped stove, abstractedly brushing the sawdust and wormwood from his sleeves and coat front. The colonel was whistling and whittling, and the general kept on brushing after the last speck of dust had gone from his shiny coat. He walked to the window and stared into the ugly brown street.
Two or three minutes passed, and Colonel Culpepper, anxious for the society of his kind, spoke. "Well, General, what's the trouble?"
"Nothing in particular, Martin. I was just questioning the reality of matter and the existence of the universe as you spoke; but it's not important." The general shivered, and turned his kind blue eyes on his friend in a smile, and then bethought him to put the wood in the stove.
While he was jamming in a final stick, Colonel Culpepper inquired, "Well, am I an appearance or an entity?"
The general put the smoking poker on the floor, and turned the damper in the pipe as he answered: "That's what I can't seem to make out. You know old Emerson says a man doesn't amount to much as a thinker until he has doubted the existence of matter. And I just got to thinking about it, and wondering if this was a real world after all—or just my idea of one." The two men smiled at the notion, and Ward went on: "All right, laugh if you want to, but if this is a real world, whose world isit, your world or my world? Here is John Barclay, for instance. Sometimes I get a peek at his world." Ward picked up the poker and sat down and hammered the toe of a boot with it as he went on: "John's world is the Golden Belt Wheat Company, wheat pouring a steady stream into boundless bins, and money flowing in golden ripples over it all. Sometimes Bob Hendricks' head rises above the tide long enough to gasp or cry for help and beg to come home, but John's golden flood sweeps over him again, and he's gone. And here's your world, Martin, wherein every one is kind and careless, and generous and good, and full of smiles and gayety. And there's Lige Bemis' world, full of cunning and hypocrisy, and meanness and treachery and plotting—a hell of a world it is, with its foundations on hate and deceit—but it's his world, and he has the same right to it that I have to mine. And there's old Watts' world—" The general sighted along the poker over his toe to the stove side whereon a cornucopia wriggled out of nothing and poured its richness of fruit and grain into nothing. "There's Watts' world, full of stuffed Personifications, Virtue, Pleasure, Happiness, Sin, Sorrow, and God knows what of demigods, with the hay of his philosophy sticking out of their eyeholes. You know about his maxims, Mart; he actually lives by 'em, and no matter how common sense yells at him to get off the track, old Watts just goes on following his maxims, and gets butted into the middle of next week."
The colonel was making a hole in the stick in his hands, and his attention was fixed on the whittling, but he added, "And your own world, General—how about your own world?"
"My world," replied the general, as he pulled at the bows of his rather soiled white tie, and evened them, "My world—" the general jabbed the poker spear-like into the floor, "I guess I'm a kind of a transcendentalist!"
The colonel blew the chips through the hole in his stick; he bored it round in the pause that followed before he spoke.
"A transcendentalist, eh? Well, pintedly, General, that is what I may call a soft impeachment, as the poet says—a mighty soft impeachment. I've heard you called a lot worse names than that—and I may say," here the crow's-feet began scratching for a smile around the colonel's eyes, "proved, sir, with you as the prosecuting witness."
The two men chuckled. Then the general, balancing himself, with the poker point on the floor, as he tilted back went on: "My world, Mart Culpepper, is a world in which the ideal is real—a world in a state of flux with thoughts of to-day the matter of to-morrow; my world is a world of faith that God will crystallize to-day's aspirations into to-morrow's justice; my world," the general rose and waved his poker as if to beat down the forces of materialism about him, "my world is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen." He paused. "As I was saying," he continued at last, "if this is a real world, if matter actually exists and this world is not a dream of my consciousness, whose world is it, my world, your world, Watts McHurdie's world, Lige's world, or John's world? It can't be all of 'em." He put the poker across the stove hearth, and sank his hands deeply into his pockets as he continued: "The question that philosophy never has answered is this: Am I a spectre and you an essence, or are you a spectre and am I an essence? Is it your world or mine?"
The two men looked instinctively at the rattling doorknob, and John Barclay limped into the room. His face was red with the cold and the driving mist. He walked to the stove and unbuttoned his ulster, while the colonel put the subject of the debate before him. The general amended the colonel's statement from time to time, but the young man only smiled tolerantly and shook his head. Then he went to his desk and pulled a letter from a drawer.
"Colonel, I've got a letter here from Bob. The thing doesn't seem to be moving. He only sold about a thousand dollars' worth of stock last month—a falling off of forty per cent, and we must have more or we can't take upour leases. He's begging like a dog to come home for a week, but I can't let him. We need that week." He limped over to the elder and put his hand on the tall man's arm as he said: "Now, Colonel, that was what I sent for you about. You kind of speak to Molly and have her write him and tell him to hold on a little while. It's business, you know, and we can't afford to have sentiment interfere with business."
The colonel, standing by the window, replied, after a pause: "I can see where you are right, John. Business is business. You got to consider that." He looked into the street below and saw General Hendricks come shuddering into the cold wind. "How's he getting on?" asked Culpepper, nodding towards Hendricks, who seemed unequal to the gale.
"Oh, I don't know, Colonel,—times are hard."
"My, how he's aging!" said the colonel, softly.
After a silence Barclay said: "There's one thing sure—I've got it into his hard old head that Bob is doing something back there, and he couldn't earn his salt here. Besides," added Barclay, as if to justify himself against an accusing conscience, "the old man does all the work in the bank now, with time to spare."
It was the day of army overcoats, and the hard times had brought hundreds of them from closets and trunks. General Hendricks, fluttering down the street in his faded blue, made a rather pathetic figure. The winter had whitened his hair and withered his ruddy face. His unequal struggle with the wind seemed some way symbolical of his life, and the two men watched him out of sight without a word. The colonel turned toward his own blue overcoat which lay sprawling in a chair, and Barclay said as he helped the elder man squeeze into it, "Don't forget to speak to Molly, Colonel," and then ushered him to the door. For a moment Colonel Culpepper stood at the bottom of the stairs, partly hesitating to go into the windy street, and partly trying to think of some way in which he could get the subject on his mind before his daughter in the right way. Then as he stood on the threshold withhis nose in the storm, he recalled General Ward's discourse about the different worlds, and he thought of Molly's world of lovers' madness, and that brought up his own youth and its day-dreams, and Molly flew out of his mind and her mother came in, and he saw her blue-eyed and fair as she stood before him on their wedding-day. With that picture in his heart he breasted the storm and went home whistling cheerfully, walking through his world like a prince.
When the colonel left the office of Ward and Barclay, the partners retired into their respective worlds and went sailing through space, each world upon its own axis. The general in a desultory way began writing letters to reformers urging them to prepare for the coming struggle; but John was head over heels in the business of the Golden Belt Wheat Company, and in an hour had covered two sheets of foolscap with figures and had written a dozen letters. The scratch, scratch of his pen was as regular as the swish of a piston. On the other hand, the general often stopped and looked off into space, and three times he got up to mend the fire. At the end of the afternoon Mrs. Ward came in, her cheeks pink with the cold; she had left the seven-year-old to care for the one-year-old, and the five-year-old to look after the three-year-old, and had come scurrying through the streets in a brown alpaca dress with a waterproof cape over her shoulders. She and the general spoke for a few moments in their corner, and she hurried out again. The general finished the letter he was writing and wrote another, and then backed up to the stove with his coat tails in front of him and stood benignly watching Barclay work. Barclay felt the man's attention, and whirling about in his chair licking an envelope flap, he said, "Well, General—what's on your mind?"
"I was just thinking of Lucy—that's all," replied the general. Barclay knew that the Wards had gone through the winter on less than one hundred dollars, and it occurred to the younger man that times might be rather hard in the Ward household. So he asked, "Are you worried about money matters, General?"
The general's smile broadened to a grin. "Well, to be exact, Lucy and I just counted cash—it's in her pocketbook, and we find our total cash assets are eight dollars and thirty-nine cents, and it's got to tide us over till grass." He stroked his lean chin, and ran his hands through his iron-gray hair and went on, "That's plenty, the way we've figured it out—Lucy and I only eat one meal a day anyway, and the children seem to eat all the time and that averages it up." He smiled deprecatingly and added: "But Lucy's got her heart set on a little matter, and we've decided to spend eighty-seven cents, as you might say riotously, and get it. That's what we were talking about."
Barclay entered into the spirit of Ward's remarks and put in: "But the National debt, General—if you have all that money to spare, why don't you pay it off? Practise what you preach, General."
The smile faded from Ward's face. He was not a man to joke on what he regarded as sacred things. He replied: "Yes, yes, that's just it. My share of the interest on that debt this winter was just seventy-five cents, and if it wasn't for that, we would have had enough to get them; as it is, we are going to cut out meat for a week—we figured it all out just now—and get them anyway. She's down at the store buying them."
"Buying what?" asked Barclay.
The general's face lighted up again with a grin, and he replied: "Now laugh—dog-gone you—buying flower seeds!" They heard a step at the bottom of the stairs, and the general strode to the door, opened it, and called down, "All right, Lucy—I'm coming," and buttoning up his coat, he whisked himself from the room, and Barclay, looking out of the window, watched the two forms as they disappeared in the dusk. But appearances are so deceptive. The truth is that what he saw was not there at all, but only appeared on his retina; the two forms that he seemed to see were not shivering through the twilight, but were walking among dahlias and coxcombs and four-o'clocks and petunias and poppies and hollyhocks on awide lawn whereon newly set elm trees were fluttering their faint green foliage in the summer breeze. Yet John Barclay would have sworn he saw them there in the cold street, with the mist beating upon them, and curiously corroborative of this impression is a memory he retained of reflecting that since the general's blue overcoat had disappeared the winter before, he had noticed that little Thayer had a blue Sunday suit and little Elizabeth Cady Stanton had appeared wrapped in a blue baby coat. But that only shows how these matter-of-fact people are fooled. For though the little Wards were caparisoned in blue, and though the general's blue overcoat did disappear about that time, the general and Lucy Ward have no recollection of shivering home that night, but instead they know that they walked among the flowers.
And John, looking into the darkening street, must have seen something besides the commonplace couple that he thought he saw; for as he turned away to light his lamp and go to work again, he smiled. Surely there was nothing to smile at in the thing he saw. Perhaps God was trying to make him see the flowers. But he did not see them, and as it was nearly an hour before six o'clock, he turned to his work under the lamp and finished his letter to Bob Hendricks. When it was written, he read it over carefully, crossing his "t's" and dotting his "i's," and as no one was in the room he mumbled it aloud, thus:—
"Dear Bob:—Don't get blue; it will be all right. Stick to it. I am laying a wire that will get you an audience with Jay Gould. Make the talk of your life there. You may be able to interest him—if just for a few dollars. Offer him anything. Give him the stock if he will let us use his name."Don't get uneasy about Molly, Bob. Jane and I see that she goes to everything, and we've scared her up a kind of brevet beau—an old rooster named Brownwell—Adrian Pericles Brownwell, who has blown in here and bought theBannerfrom Ezra Lane. Brownwell is from Alabama. Do you remember, Bob, that day at Wilson's Creek after we got separated in the Battle I ran into a pile of cavalry writhing in a road? Well, there was one face in that awful struggling mass that I always remembered—and I never expect to see such a look of fear on a man's face again—he was a young fellow then, but now he's thirty-five or so. Well—that was this man Brownwell. I askedhim about it the other day. How he ever got out alive, I don't know; but the fact that he should turn up here proves that this is a small world. Brownwell also is a writer from Writersville. You should see the way he paints the lily in theBannerevery week. You remember old Cap Lee—J. Lord Lee of the Red Legs—and Lady Lee, as they called her when she was a sagebrush siren with the 'Army of the Border' before the War? Well, read this clipping from theBannerof this week: 'The wealth, beauty, and fashion of Minneola—fairest village of the plain—were agog this week over the birth of a daughter to Lord and Lady Lee, whose prominence in our social circles makes the event one of first importance in our week's annals. Little Beatrix, for so they have decided to christen her, will some day be a notable addition to our refined and gracious circles. Welcome to you, little stranger.'"Now you know the man! You needn't be jealous of him. However, he has frozen to the Culpeppers because they are from the South, and clearly he thinks they are the only persons of consequence in town. So he beaus Molly around with Jane and me to the concerts and sociables and things. He is easily thirty-five, walks with a cane, struts like a peacock, and Molly and Jane are having great sport with him. Also he is the only man in town with any money. He brought five thousand dollars in gold, real money,—his people made it on contraband cotton contracts during the War, they say,—and he has been the only visible means of support the town has had for three months. But in the meantime don't worry about Molly, Bob, she's all right, and business is business, you know, and you shouldn't let such things interfere with it. But in another six months we'll be out of the woods and on our way to big money."
Now another strange thing happened to John Barclay that evening, and this time it was what he saw, not what he failed to see, that puzzled him. For just as he sealed the letter to his friend, and thumped his lean fist on it to blot the address on the envelope and press the mucilage down, he looked around suddenly, though he never knew why, and there, just outside the rim of light from his lampshade, trembled the image of Ellen Culpepper with her red and black checked flannel dress at her shoe tops and his rubber button ring upon her finger. She smiled at him sweetly for a moment and shook her head sadly, and her curls fluttered upon her shoulders, and then she seemed to fade into the general's desk by the opposite wall. John was pallid and frightened for a moment; then as he looked at the great pile of letters before him he realized how tired and worn he was. But the face and the eyes hauntedhim and brought back old memories, and that night he and Jane and Molly Culpepper went to Hendricks', and he played the piano for an hour in the firelight, and dreamed old dreams. And his hands fell into the chords of a song that he sang as a boy, and Molly came from the fire and stood beside him while they hummed the words in a low duet:—
"Let me believe that you love as you lovedLong, long ago—long ago."
But when he went out into the drizzling night, and he and Jane left Molly at home, he stepped into the whirling yellow world of gold and grain, and drafts and checks, and leases and mortgages, and Heaven knows what of plots and schemes and plans. So he did not heed Jane when she said, "Poor—poor little Molly," but replied as he latched the Culpepper gate, "Oh, Molly'll be all right. You can't mix business and pleasure, you know. Bob must stay."
And when Molly went into the house, she found her mother waiting for her. The colonel's courage had failed him. The mother took her daughter's hand, and the two walked up the broad stairs together.
"Molly," said the mother, as the girl listlessly went about her preparations for bed, "don't grieve so about Bob. Father and John need him there. It's business, you know."
The daughter answered, "Yes, I know, but I'm so lonesome—so lonesome." Then she sobbed, "You know he hasn't written for a whole week, and I'm afraid—afraid!"
When the paroxysm had passed, the mother said: "You know, my dear, they need him there a little longer, and he wants to come back. Your father told me that John sent word to-day that you must not let him come." The girl's face looked the pain that struck her heart, and she did not answer. "Molly dear," began the mother again, "can't you write to Bob to-morrow and urge him to stay—for me? For all of us? It is so much to us now—for a little while—to have Bob there, sending back moneyfor the company. I don't know what father would do if it wasn't for the company—and John."
The daughter held her mother's hand, and after gasping down a sob, promised, and then as the sob kept tilting back in her throat, she cried: "But oh, mother, it's such a big world—so wide, and I am so afraid—so afraid of something—I don't know what—only that I'm afraid."
But the mother soothed her daughter, and they talked of other things until she was quiet and drowsy.
But when she went to sleep, she dreamed a strange dream. The next day she could not untangle it, save that with her for hours as she went about her duties was the odour of lilacs, and the face of her lover, now a young eager face in pain, and then, by the miracle of dreams, grown old, bald at the temples and brow, but fine and strong and clean—like a boy's face. The face soon left her, but the smell of the lilacs was in her heart for days—they were her lilacs, from the bushes in the garden. As days and weeks passed, the dream blurred into the gray of her humdrum life and was gone. And so that day and that night dropped from time into eternity, and who knows of all the millions of stars that swarmed the heavens, what ones held the wandering souls of the simple people of that bleak Western town as they lay on their pillows and dreamed. For if our waking hours are passed in worlds so wide apart, who shall know where we walk in dreams?
It is thirty years and more now since John Barclay dreamed of himself as the Wheat King of the Sycamore Valley, and in that thirty years he had considerable time to reflect upon the reasons why pride always goeth before destruction. And he figured it out that in his particular case he was so deeply engrossed in the money he was going to make that first year, that he did not study the simple problem of wheat-growing as he should have studied it. In those days wheat-growing upon the plains had not yet become the science it is to-day, and many Sycamore Valley farmers planted their wheat in the fall, and failed to make it pay, and many other Sycamore Valley farmersplanted their wheat in the spring, and failed, while many others succeeded. The land had not been definitely staked off and set apart by experience as a winter wheat country, and so the farmers operating under the Golden Belt Wheat Company, in the spring of 1874, planted their wheat in March.
That was a beautiful season on the plains. April rains came, and the great fields glowed green under the mild spring sun. And Bob Hendricks, collecting the money from his stock subscriptions, poured it into the treasury of the company, and John Barclay spent the money for seed and land and men to work the land, and so confident was he of the success of the plan that he borrowed every dollar he could lay his hands on, and got leases on more land and bought more seed and hired more men, in the belief that during the summer Hendricks could sell stock enough to pay back the loans. To Colonel Culpepper, Barclay gave a block of five thousand dollars' worth of the stock as a bonus in addition to his commission for his work in securing options, and the colonel, feeling himself something of a capitalist, and being in funds from the spring sale of lots in College Heights addition, invested in new clothes, bought some farm products in Missouri, and went up and down the earth proclaiming the glories of the Sycamore Valley, and in May brought two car-loads of land seekers by stages and wagons and buggies to Sycamore Ridge, and located them in Garrison County. And in his mail when he came home he found a notice indicating that he had overdrawn his account in the bank five hundred dollars, and that his note was due for five hundred more on the second mortgage which he had given the previous fall.
For two days he was plunged in gloom, and Barclay, observing his depression and worming out of the colonel the cause, persuaded General Hendricks to put the overdraft and the second mortgage note into one note for a thousand dollars plus the interest for sixty days until the colonel could make a turn, and after that the colonel was happy again. He forgot for a moment the responsibilityof wealth and engaged himself in the task of making the Memorial Day celebration in Sycamore Ridge the greatest event in the history of the town. Though there were only five soldiers' graves to decorate, the longest procession Garrison County had ever known wound up the hill to the cemetery, and Colonel Martin Culpepper in his red sash, with his Knights Templar hat on, riding up and down the line on an iron-gray stallion, was easily the most notable figure in the spectacle. Even General Hendricks, revived by the pomp of the occasion, heading the troop of ten veterans of the Mexican War, and General Ward, in his regimentals, were inconsequential compared with the colonel. And his oration at the graves, after the bugles had blown taps, kept the multitude in tears for half an hour. John Barclay's address at the Opera House that afternoon—the address on "The Soldier and the Scholar"—was so completely overshadowed by the colonel's oratorical flight that Jane teased her husband about the eclipse for a month, and never could make him laugh. Moreover, theBannerthat week printed the colonel's oration in full and referred to John's address as "a few sensible remarks by Hon. John Barclay on the duty of scholarship in times of peace." But here is the strange thing about it—those who read the colonel's oration were not moved by it; the charm of the voice and the spell of the tall, handsome, vigorous man and the emotion of the occasion were needed to make the colonel's oratory move one. Still, opinions differ even about so palpable a proposition as the ephemeral nature of the colonel's oratory. For theBannerthat week pronounced it one of the classic oratorical gems of American eloquence, and the editor thereof brought a dozen copies of the paper under his arm when he climbed the hill to Lincoln Avenue the following Sunday night, and presented them to the women of the Culpepper household, whom he was punctilious to call "the ladies," and he assured Miss Molly and Mistress Culpepper—he was nice about those titles also—that their father and husband had a great future before him in the forum.
It may be well to pause here and present so punctilious a gentleman as Adrian Pericles Brownwell to the reader somewhat more formally than he has been introduced. For he will appear in this story many times. In the first place he wore mustaches—chestnut-coloured mustaches—that drooped rather gracefully from his lip to his jaw, and thence over his coat lapels; in the second place he always wore gloves, and never was without a flower in his long frock-coat; and thirdly he clicked his cane on the sidewalk so regularly that his approach was heralded, and the company was prepared for the coming of a serious, rather nervous, fiery man, a stickler for his social dues; and finally in those days, those sombre days of Sycamore Ridge after the panic of '73, when men had to go to the post-office to get their ten-dollar bills changed, Brownwell had the money to support the character he assumed. He had come to the Ridge from the South,—from that part of the South that carried its pistol in its hip pocket and made a large and serious matter of its honour,—that was obvious; he had paid Ezra Lane two thousand dollars for theBanner, that was a matter of record; and he had marched with some grandeur into General Hendricks' bank one Saturday and had clinked out five thousand dollars in gold on the marble slab at the teller's window, and that was a matter attested to by a crowd of witnesses. Watts McHurdie used to say that more people saw that deposit than could be packed into the front room of the bank with a collar stuffer.
But why Adrian Brownwell had come to the Ridge, and where he had made his money—there myth and fable enter into the composition of the narrative, and one man's opinion is as good as another's. Curiously enough, all who testify claim that they speak by the authority of Mr. Brownwell himself. But he was a versatile and obliging gentleman withal, so it is not unlikely that all those who assembled him from the uttermost parts of the earth into Sycamore Ridge for all the reasons in the longer catechism, were telling the simple truth as they have reason to believe it. What men know of a certainty is that he came, thathe hired the bridal chamber of the Thayer House for a year, and that he contested John Barclay's right to be known as the glass of fashion and the mould of form in Garrison County for thirty long years, and then—but that is looking in the back of the book, which is manifestly unfair.
It is enough to know now that on that Sunday evening after Memorial Day, in 1874, Adrian P. Brownwell sat on the veranda of the Culpepper home slapping his lavender gloves on his knee by way of emphasis, and told the company what he told General Beauregard and what General Beauregard told him, at the battle of Shiloh; also what his maternal grandfather, Governor Papin, had said to General Jackson, when his grandmother, then Mademoiselle Dulangpré, youngest daughter of the refugee duke of that house, had volunteered to nurse the American soldiers in Jackson's hospital after the battle of New Orleans; also, and with detail, what his father, Congressman Brownwell, had said on the capitol steps in December, 1860, before leaving for Washington to resign his seat in Congress; and also with much greater detail he recounted the size of his ancestral domain, the number of the ancestral slaves and the royal state of the ancestral household, and then with a grand wave of his gloves, and a shrug of which Madam Papin might well have been proud, "But 'tis all over; and we are brothers—one country, one flag, one God, one very kind but very busy God!" And he smiled so graciously through his great mustaches, showing his fine even teeth, that Mrs. Culpepper, Methodist to the heart, smiled back and was not so badly shocked as she knew she should have been.
"Is it not so?" he asked with his voice and his hands at once. "Ah," he exclaimed, addressing Mrs. Culpepper dramatically, "what better proof would you have of our brotherhood than our common bondage to you? However dark the night of our national discord—to-day, North, South, East, West, we bask in the sunrise of some woman's eyes." He fluttered his gloves gayly toward Molly and continued:—
"'O when did morning ever break,And find such beaming eyes awake.'"
And so he rattled on, and the colonel had to poke his words into the conversation in wedge-shaped queries, and Mrs. Culpepper, being in due and proper awe of so much family and such apparent consequence, spoke little and smiled many times. And if it was "Miss Molly" this and "Miss Molly" that, when the colonel went into the house to lock the back doors, and "Miss Molly" the other when Mrs. Culpepper went in to open the west bedroom windows; and even if it was "Miss Molly, shall we go down town and refresh ourselves with a dish of ice-cream?" and even if still further a full-grown man standing at the gate under the May moon deftly nips a rose from Miss Molly's hair and holds the rose in both hands to his lips as he bows a good night—what then? What were roses made for and brown eyes and long lashes and moons and May winds heavy with the odour of flowers and laden with the faint sounds of distant herd bells tinkling upon the hills? For men are bold at thirty-five, and maidens, the best and sweetest, truest, gentlest maidens in all the world, are shy at twenty-one, and polite to their elders and betters of thirty-five—even when those elders and betters forget their years!
As for Adrian P. Brownwell, he went about his daily task, editing theBanner, making it as luscious and effulgent as a seed catalogue, with rhetorical pictures about as florid and unconvincing. To him the town was a veritable Troy—full of heroes and demigods, and honourables and persons of nobility and quality. He used no adjective of praise milder than superb, and on the other hand, Lige Bemis once complained that the least offensive epithet he saw in theBannertacked after his name for two years was miscreant. As for John Barclay, he once told General Ward that a man could take five dollars in to Brownwell and come out a statesman, a Crœsus or a scholar, as the exigencies of the case demanded, and for ten dollars he could combine the three.
Yet for all that Brownwell ever remained a man apart. No one thought of calling him "Ade." Sooner would one nickname a gargoyle on a tin cornice. So the editor of theBannernever came close to the real heart of Sycamore Ridge, and often for months at a time he did not know what the people were thinking. And that summer when General Hendricks was walking out of the bank every hour and looking from under his thin, blue-veined hand at the strange cloud of insects covering the sky, and when Martin Culpepper was predicting that the plague of grasshoppers would leave the next day, and when John Barclay was getting that deep vertical crease between his eyes that made him look forty while he was still in his twenties, Adrian P. Brownwell was chirping cheerfully in theBannerabout the "salubrious climate of Garrison County," and writing articles about "our phenomenal prospects for a bumper crop." And when in the middle of July the grasshoppers had eaten the wheat to the ground and had left the corn stalks stripped like beanpoles, and had devoured every green thing in their path, theBannercontained only a five-line item referring to the plague and calling it a "most curious and unusual visitation." But that summer theBannerwas filled with Brownwell's editorials on "The Tonic Effect of the Prairie Ozone," "Turn the Rascals Out," "Our Duty to the South," and "The Kingdom of Corn." As a writer Brownwell was what is called "fluent" and "genial." And he was fond of copying articles from the Topeka and Kansas City papers about himself, in which he was referred to as "the gallant and urbane editor of theBanner."
But then we all have our weaknesses, and be it said to the everlasting credit of Adrian Brownwell that he understood and appreciated Watts McHurdie and Colonel Culpepper better than any other man in town, and that he printed Watts' poems on all occasions, and never referred to him as anything less than "our honoured townsman," or as "our talented and distinguished fellow-citizen," and he never laughed at General Ward. But the besthe could do for John Barclay—even after John had become one of the world's great captains—was to wave his gloves resignedly and exclaim, "Industry, thy name is Barclay." And Barclay in return seemed never to warm up to Brownwell. "Colonel," replied John to some encomium of his old friend's upon the new editor, "I'll say this much. Certainly your friend is a prosperous talker!"
CHAPTER XI
The twenty-fifth of July, 1874, is a memorable day in the life of John Barclay. For on that day the grasshoppers which had eaten off the twenty thousand acres of wheat in the fields of the Golden Belt Wheat Company, as though it had been cropped, rose and left the Missouri Valley. They will never come back, for they are ploughed under in the larva every year by the Colorado farmers who have invaded the plains where once the "hoppers" had their nursery; but all this, even if he had known it, would not have cheered up John that day. For he knew that he owed one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Eastern stockholders of the company, and he had not a dollar to show for it. He had expected to borrow the money needed for the harvesting in the fall, and over and over and over again he had figured with paper and pencil the amount of his debt, and again and again he had tried to find some way to pay even the interest on the debt at six per cent, which the bank had guaranteed. While the locusts were devouring the vegetation, he walked the hemp carpet that ran diagonally across his office, and chased phantom after phantom of hope that lured him up to the rim of a solution of the problem, only to push him back into the abyss. He walked with his hands deep in his trousers pockets and his head down, and as General Ward was out organizing the farmers in a revolt against the dominant party in the state, Barclay was alone most of the time. The picture of that barren office, with its insurance chromos, with its white, cobweb-marked walls, with its dirty floor partly covered with an "X" of red-bordered hemp carpet reaching from the middle to the four corners, the picture of the four tall unwashed windows letting in the merciless afternoon sun to fade the grimy black and white lithograph of WilliamLloyd Garrison above the general's desk, never left John Barclay's memory. It was like a cell on a prisoner's mind.
As he paced the room that last day of the visit of the grasshoppers, General Hendricks came in. His hair had whitened in the summer. The panic and the plague of the locusts had literally wrung the sap out of his nerves. Old age was pressing inexorably upon him, palsying his hands on its rack, tripping his feet in its helpless mazes. His dimmed eyes could see only ruin coming, coming slowly and steadily toward him. In the panic, it came suddenly and inspired fight in him. But this year there was something diabolical in its resistless approach. So he shrank from his impending fate as a child trembles at some unknown terror. But Barclay did not swerve. He knew the affairs of the bank fairly well. He was a director who never signed the quarterly statement without verifying every item for himself. He had dreaded the general's visit, yet he knew that it must come, and he pulled toward the general a big hickory chair. The old man sank into it and looked helplessly into the drawn hard face of the younger man and sighed, "Well, John?"
Barclay stood before him a second and then walked down one arm of the "X" of the carpet and back, and up another, and then turned to Hendricks with: "Now, don't lose your nerve, General. You've got to keep your nerve. That's about all the asset we've got now, I guess."
The general replied weakly: "I—I, I—I guess you're right, John. I suppose that's about it."
"How do you figure it out, General?" asked Barclay, still walking the carpet.
The general fumbled for a paper in his pocket and handed it to Barclay. He took it, glanced at it a moment, and then said: "I'm no good at translating another man's figures—how is it in short?—Right down to bed-rock?"
Hendricks seemed to pull himself together and replied: "Well, something like ten thousand in cash against seventy thousand in deposits, and fifty thousand of that time deposits, due next October, you know, on the year's agreement. Of the ten thousand cash, four thousand belongsto Brownwell, and is on check, and you have two thousand on check."
"All right. Now, General, what do you owe?"
"Well, you know that guarantee of your and Bob's business—that nine thousand. It's due next week."
"And it will gut you?" asked Barclay.
The old man nodded and sighed. Barclay limped carefully all over his "X," swinging himself on his heels at the turns; his mouth was hardening, and his eyes were fixed on the old man without blinking as he said: "General—that's got to come. If it busts you—it will save us, and we can save you after. That has just absolutely got to be paid, right on the dot."
The old man could not have turned paler than he was when he entered the room, but he rose halfway in his chair and shook his leonine head, and then let his hands fall limply on his knees as he cried: "No—no, John—I can't. I can't."
Barclay put his hand on the back of the old man's chair, and he could feel the firm hard grip of the boy through his whole frame. Then after a moment's pause Barclay said: "General, I'm in earnest about that. You will either mail those dividend certificates according to your guarantee on the first, or as sure as there is a God in heaven I'll see that you won't have a dollar in your bank on the night of the second."
The old man stood gasping. The eyes of the two men met. Barclay's were bold and green and blazing.
"Boy! Boy! Boy!—" the old man faltered. "Don't ruin me! Don't ruin me—" he did not finish the sentence, but sank into his chair, and dropped his face to his breast and repeated, "Don't, don't, don't," feebly for a few times, without seeming to realize what he was saying. From some outpost of his being reinforcements came. For he rose suddenly, and shaking his haggard fist at the youth, exclaimed in a high, furious, cracking voice as he panted and shook his great hairy head: "No—by God, no, by God, no! You damned young cut-throat—you can break my bank, but you can't bulldoze me. No, by God—no!"He started to leave the room. Barclay caught the old man and swung him into a chair. The flint that Barclay's nature needed had been struck. His face was aglow as with an inspiration.
"Listen, man, listen!" Barclay cried. "I'm not going to break your bank, I'm trying to save it." He knew that the plan was ripe in his head, and as he talked it out, something stood beside him and marvelled at its perfection. As its inherent dishonesty revealed itself, the old man's face flinched, but Barclay went on unfolding his scheme. It required General Hendricks to break the law half a dozen ways, and to hazard all of the bank's assets, and all of its cash. And it required him to agree not to lend a dollar to any man in the county except as he complied with the demands of the Golden Belt Wheat Company and mortgaged his farm to Barclay. The plan that Barclay set forth literally capitalized the famine that had followed the grasshopper invasion, and sold the people their own need at Barclay's price. Then for an hour the two men fought it out, and at the end Barclay was saying: "I am glad you see it that way, and I believe, as you do, that they will take it a little better if we also agree to pay this year's taxes on the land they put under the mortgage. It would be a great sweetener to some of them, and I can slip in an option to sell the land to us outright as a kind of a joker in small type." His brassy eyes were small and beady as his brain worked out the details of his plan. He put his hands affectionately on General Hendricks' shoulders as he added, "You mustn't forget to write to Bob, General; hold him there whatever comes."
At the foot of the stairs the two men could hear the heavy tread of Colonel Culpepper. As Hendricks went down the stairs John heard the colonel's "Mornin', General," as the two men passed in the hallway.
"Mornin', Johnnie—how does your corporocity sagashiate this mornin'?" asked the colonel.
Barclay looked at the colonel through little beady green eyes and replied,—he knew not what. He merely dipped an oar into the talk occasionally, he did not steer it, andnot until he emerged from his calculations twenty minutes after the colonel's greeting did Barclay realize that the colonel was in great pain. He was saying when Barclay's mind took heed: "And now, sir, I say, now, having forced his unwelcome and, I may say, filthy lucre upon me, the impudent scalawag writes me to-day to say that I must liquidate, must—liquidate, sir; in short, pay up. I call that impertinence. But no matter what I call it, he's going to foreclose." Barclay's eyes opened to attention. The colonel went on. "The original indebtedness was a matter of ten thousand—you will remember, John, that's what I paid for my share of the College Heights property, and while I have disposed of some,—in point of fact sold it at considerable profit,—yet, as you know, and as this scoundrel knows, for I have written him pointedly to that effect, I have been temporarily unable to remit any sum substantial enough to justify bothering him with it. But now the scamp, the grasping insulting brigand, notifies me that unless I pay him when the mortgage is due,—to be plain, sir, next week,—he proposes to foreclose on me."
The colonel's brows were knit with trouble. His voice faltered as he added: "And, John—John Barclay, my good friend—do you realize that that little piece of property out on the hill is all I have on earth now, except the roof over my head? And may—" here his voice slid into a tenor with pent-up emotion—"maybe the contemptible rapscallion will try to get that." The colonel had risen and was pacing the floor. "What a damn disreputable business your commerce is, anyway! John, I can't afford to lose that property—or I'd be a pauper, sir, a pauper peddling organs and sewing-machines and maybe teaching singing-school." The colonel's face caught a rift of sunshine as he added, "You know I did that once before I was married and came West—taught singing-school."
"Well, Colonel—let's see about it," said Barclay, absently. And the two men sat at the table and figured up that the colonel's liabilities were in the neighbourhood of twelve thousand, of which ten thousand were pressing and the rest more or less imminent. At the end of theirconference, Barclay's mind was still full of his own affairs. But he said, after looking a moment at the troubled face of the big black-eyed man whose bulk towered above him, "Well, Colonel, I don't know what under heavens I can do—but I'll do what I can."
The colonel did not feel Barclay's abstraction. But the colonel's face cleared like a child's, and he reached for the little man and hugged him off his feet. Then the colonel broke out, "May the Lord, who heedeth the sparrow's fall and protects all us poor blundering children, bless you, John Barclay—bless you and all your household." There were tears in his eyes as he waved a grand adieu at the door, and he whistled "Gayly the Troubadour" as he tripped lightly down the stairs. And in another moment the large white plumes were dancing in his eyes again. This time they waved and beckoned toward a subscription paper which the colonel had just drawn up when the annoying letter came from Chicago, reminding him of his debt. The paper was for the relief of a farmer whose house and stock had been burned. The colonel brought from his hip pocket the carefully folded sheet of foolscap which he had put away when duty called him to Barclay. He paused at the bottom of the stair, backed the paper on the wall, and wrote under the words setting forth the farmer's destitution, "Martin Culpepper—twenty-five dollars." He stood a moment in the stairway looking into the street; the day was fair and beautiful; the grasshoppers were gone, and with them went all the vegetation in the landscape; but the colonel in his nankeen trousers and his plaited white shirt and white suspenders, under his white Panama hat, felt only the influence of the genial air. So he drew out the subscription paper again and erased the twenty-five dollars and put down thirty-five dollars. Then as Oscar Fernald and Daniel Frye came by with long faces the colonel hailed them.
"Boys," he said, "fellow named Haskins down in Fairview, with nine children and a sick wife, got burnt out last night, and I'm kind of seeing if we can't get him some lumber and groceries and things. I want you boys," thecolonel saw the clouds gathering and smiled to brush them away, "yes, I want you boys to give me ten dollars apiece."
"Ten dollars!" cried Fernald.
"Ten dollars!" echoed Frye. "My Lord, man, there isn't ten dollars in cash between here and the Missouri River!"
"But the man and his children will starve, and his wife will die of neglect."
"That's the Lord's affair—and yours, Mart," returned Fernald, as he broke away from the colonel's grasp; "you and He brought them here." Frye went with Oscar, and they left the colonel with his subscription paper in his hand. He looked up and down the street and then drew a long breath, and put the paper against the wall again and sighed as he erased the thirty-five dollars and put down fifty dollars after his name. Then he started for the bank to see General Hendricks. The large white plumes were still dancing in his eyes.
But so far as Barclay is concerned the colonel never reached the bottom of the stairs, for Barclay had his desk covered with law-books and was looking up contracts. In an hour he had a draft of a mortgage and option to buy the mortgaged land written out, and was copying it for the printer. He took it to theBanneroffice and asked Brownwell to put two men on the job, and to have the proof ready by the next morning.
Brownwell waved both hands magnificently and with much grace, and said: "Mr. Barclay, we will put three men on the work, sir, and if you will do me the honour, I will be pleased to bring the proof up Lincoln Avenue to the home of our mutual friend, Colonel Culpepper, where you may see it to-night." Barclay fancied that a complacent smile wreathed Brownwell's face at the prospect of going to the Culpeppers', and the next instant the man was saying: "Charming young lady, Miss Molly! Ah, the ladies, the ladies—they will make fools of us. We can't resist them." He shrugged and smirked and wiggled his fingers and played with his mustaches. "Wine andwomen and song, you know—they get us all. But as for me—no wine, no song—but—" he finished the sentence with another flourish.
Barclay did what he could to smile good-naturedly and assent in some sort of way as he got out of the room. That night, going up the hill, he said to Jane: "Brownwell is one of those fellows who regard all women—all females is better, probably—as a form of vice. He's the kind that coos like a pouter pigeon when he talks to a woman."
Jane replied: "Yes, we women know them. They are always claiming that men like you are not gallant!" She added, "You know, John, he's the jealous, fiendish kind—with an animal's idea of honour." They walked on in silence for a moment, and she pressed his arm to her side and their eyes met in a smile. Then she said: "Doubtless some women like that sort of thing, or it would perish, but I don't like to be treated like a woman—a she-creature. I like to be thought of as a human being with a soul." She shuddered and continued: "But the soul doesn't enter even remotely into his scheme of things. We are just bodies."
The Barclays did not stay late at the Culpeppers' that night, but took the proofs at early bedtime and went down the hill. An hour later they heard Molly Culpepper and Brownwell loitering along the sidewalk. Brownwell was saying:—
"Ah, but you, Miss Molly, you are like the moon, for—
"'The moon looks on many brooks,The brook can see no moon but this.'
"And I—I am—"
The Barclays did not hear what he was; however, they guessed, and they guessed correctly—so far as that goes. But Molly Culpepper did hear what he was and what he had been and what he would be, and the more she parried him, the closer he came. There were times when he forgot the "Miss" before the "Molly," and there were other times when she had to slip her hand from his ever sodeftly. And once when they were walking over a smooth new wooden sidewalk coming home, he caught her swiftly by the waist and began waltzing and humming "The Blue Danube." And at the end of the smooth walk, she had to step distinctly away from him to release his arm. But she was twenty-one, and one does not always know how to do things at twenty-one—even when one intends to do them, and intends strongly and earnestly—that one would do at forty-one, and so as they stood under the Culpepper elm by the gate that night,—under the elm, stripped gaunt and naked by the locusts,—and the July moon traced the skeleton of the tree upon the close-cropped sod, we must not blame Molly Culpepper too much even if she let him, hold her hand a moment too long after he had kissed it a formal good night; for twenty-one is not as strong as its instincts. It is such a little while to learn all about a number of important things in a big and often wicked world that when a little man or a little woman, so new to this earth as twenty-one years, gets a finger pinched in the ruthless machinery, it is a time for tears and mothering and not for punishment. And so when Adrian Brownwell pulled the little girl off her feet and kissed her and asked her to marry him all in a second, and she could only struggle and cry "No, no!" and beg him to let her go—it is not a time to frown, but instead a time to go back to our twenty-ones and blush a little and sigh a little, and maybe cry and lie a little, and in the end thank God for the angel He sent to guard us, and if the angel slept—thank God still for the charity that has come to us.
The next day John Barclay had Colonel Martin Culpepper and Lige Bemis in his office galvanizing them with his enthusiasm and coaching them in their task. They were to promise three dollars an acre, August 15, to every farmer who would put a mortgage on his land for six dollars an acre. The other three dollars was to cover the amount paid by Barclay as rent for the land the year before. They were also to offer the landowner a dollar and a half an acre to plough and plant the land by September 15, and another dollar to cultivate itready for the harvest, and the company was to pay the taxes on the land and furnish the seed. Barclay had figured out the seed money from the sale of the mortgages. The man was a dynamo of courage and determination, and he charged the two men before him until they fairly prickled with the scheme. He talked in short hard sentences, going over and over his plan, drilling them to bear down on the hard times and that there would be no other buyers or renters for the land, and to say that the bank would not lend a dollar except in this way. Long after they had left his office, Barclay's voice haunted them. His face was set and his eyes steady and small, and the vertical wrinkle in his brow was as firm as an old scar. He limped about the room quickly, but his strong foot thumped the floor with a thud that punctuated his words.
They left, and he sat down to write a letter to Bob Hendricks telling him the plan. He had finished two pages when General Hendricks came in a-tremble and breathless. The eyes of the two men met, and Hendricks replied:—
"It's Brownwell—the fat's in the fire, John. Brownwell's going!"
"Going—going where?" asked the man at the desk, blankly.
"Going to leave town. He's been in and given notice that he wants his money in gold day after to-morrow."
"Well—well!" exclaimed Barclay, with his eyes staring dumbly at nothing on the dingy white wall before him. "Well—don't that beat the Jews? Going to leave town!" He pulled himself together and gripped his chair as he said, "Not by a damn sight he ain't. He's going to stay right here and sweat it out. We need that four thousand dollars in our business. No, you don't, Mr. Man—" he addressed a hypothetical Brownwell. "You're roped and tied and bucked and gagged, and you stay here." Then he said, "You go on over to the bank, General, and I'll take care of Brownwell." Barclay literally shoved the older man to the door. As he opened it he said, "Send me up a boy if you see one on the street."
In ten minutes Brownwell was running up the stairs to Barclay's office in response to his note. He brought a copy of the mortgage with, him, and laid it before Barclay, who went over it critically. He found a few errors and marked them, and holding it in his hands turned to the editor.
"Hendricks says you are going to leave town. Why?" asked Barclay, bluntly. He had discovered even that early in life that a circuitous man is generally knocked off his guard by a rush. Brown well blinked and sputtered a second or two, scrambling to his equilibrium. Before he could parry Barclay assaulted him again with: "Starving to death, eh? Lost your grip—going back to Alabama with the banjo on your knee, are you?"
"No, sir—no, sir, you are entirely wrong, sir—entirely wrong, and scarcely more polite, either." Brown well paused a minute and added: "Business is entirely satisfactory, sir—entirely so. It is another matter." He hesitated a moment and added, with the ghost of a smirk, "A matter of sentiment—for—
"'The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers,Is always the first to be touched by the thorns.'"
Brownwell sat there flipping his gloves, exasperatingly; Barclay screwed up his eyes, put his head on one side, and suddenly a flash came into his face and he exclaimed, "Come off, you don't mean it—not Molly!"
The rejected one inclined his head. Barclay was about to laugh, but instead he said, "Well, you are not a quitter; why don't you go ahead and get her?" He glanced instinctively at his letter to Bob Hendricks, and as if to shield what he was going to say, put a paper over the page, and then the seriousness of the situation came over him. "You know women; cheer up, man—try again. Stick to it—you'll win," cried Barclay. The fool might go for so small a reason. It was no time for ribaldry. "Let me tell you something," he went on. His eyes opened again with a steady ruthless purpose in them, that the man before him was too intent on his own pose to see.Barclay put a weight upon the white sheet of paper that he had spread over his letter to Bob Hendricks and then went on. "Say, Brownwell, let me tell you something. This town is right in the balance; you can help." Something seemed to hold Barclay back, but he took the plunge. "You can stay here and help. We need men like you." Then he took a blind shot in the dark before going on—perhaps to give himself another chance. "Have you got any more of that buried money—I mean more than you gave General Hendricks—the kind that you dug up after the war and scratched the mould off the eagles?"
Brownwell flushed and replied, as he put one hand in his coat and the other, with his stick and hat and gloves, behind him: "That is my affair, sir. However, I will say that I have."
"I thought so," retorted Barclay. "Now look here, bring it to the Ridge. Here's the place to invest it and now's the everlasting time. You jump in here and help us out, help build up the town, and there's nothing too good for you." Barclay was ready for it now. He did not flinch, but went on: "Also here's your chance to help Colonel Culpepper. He's to be closed out, and ten thousand would save him. You know the kind of a man the colonel is. Stay with the game, Mr. Man, stay with the game." He saw Brownwell's eyes twitch. Barclay knew he had won. He added slowly, "You understand?"
Brownwell smiled benignly. Barclay looked nervously at the unfinished letter on the table. Brownwell waved his arms again dramatically, and replied: "Ah, thank you—thank you. I shall play my hand out—and hearts are trumps—are they not?" And he went out almost dancing for joy.
When the man was gone Barclay shuddered; his contempt for Brownwell was one of the things he prided himself on, and the intrigue revolted him. He stood a moment at the window looking into the street absently. He became conscious that some one was smiling at him on the crossing below. Then automatically he heard himself say, "Oh, Molly, can you run up a minute?" And a moment later shewas in the room. She was a bewitching little body in her wide skirts and her pancake of a hat with a feather in it as she sat there looking at her toes that morning, with her bright eyes flashing up into his like rockets. But there were lines under the eyes, and the rims of the eyelids were almost red—as red as pretty eyelids ever may be. Barclay went right to the midst of the matter at once. He did not patronize her, but told her in detail just the situation—how the Golden Belt Wheat Company's interest must be met by the bank under its guarantee, or Bob and his father would be worse than bankrupts, they would be criminals. He put Bob always in the foreground. Barclay unfolded to her all the plans for going ahead with the work, and he told her what they were doing for her father by giving him employment. He marched straight up to the matter in hand without flinching.
"Molly," he began without batting his eyes, "here is where you come in. That fellow Brownwell was up here this morning. Oh, you needn't shiver—I know all about it. You had the honour of refusing him last night." To her astonished, hurt face he paid no heed, but went on: "Now he's going to leave town on account of you and pull out four thousand dollars he's got in the bank. If he does that, we can't pay our guarantee. You've got to call him back." She flared up as if to stop him, but he went on: "Oh, I know, Molly Culpepper—but this is no game of London Bridge. It's bad enough, but it's business—cold clammy business, and sometimes we have to do things in this world for the larger good. That roan simply can't leave this town and you must bold him. It's ruin and perhaps prison to Bob and his father if he goes; and as for your own father and mother—it makes them paupers, Molly. There's no other way out of it." He paused a moment.
The girl's face blanched, and she looked at the floor and spoke, "And Bob—when can he come back?"
"I don't know, Molly—but not now—he never was needed there as he is now. It's a life-and-death matter, Molly Culpepper, with every creature on earth that's nearest and dearest to you—it makes or breaks us.It's a miserable business, I know well—but your duty is to act for the larger good. You can't afford to send Bob to jail and your people to the poorhouse just because—"
The girl looked up piteously and then cried out: "Oh, John—don't, don't—I can't. It's awful, John—I can't."
"But, Molly," he replied as gently as he could, "you must. You can't afford to be squeamish about this business. This is a woman's job, Molly, not a child's."
She rose and looked at him a fleeting moment as if in search of some mercy in his face. Then she looked away. He stood beside her, barring her way to the door. "But you'll try, Molly, won't you—you'll try?" he cried. She looked at him again with begging eyes and stepped around him, and said breathlessly as she reached the door: "Oh, I don't know, John—I don't know. I must think about it."
She felt her way down the stairs, and stopped a minute to compose herself before she crossed the street and walked wearily up the hill.
That night at supper Colonel Culpepper addressed the assembled family expansively. "The ravens, my dears, the ravens. Behold Elijah fed by the sacred birds. By Adrian P. Brownwell, to be exact. This morning I went down town with the sheriff selling the roof over our heads. This afternoon who should come to me soliciting the pleasure of lending, me money—who, I say, but Adrian P. Brownwell?"
"Well, I hope you didn't keep him standing," put in Buchanan.
"My son," responded the colonel, as he whetted the carving knife on the steel—a form which was used more for rhetorical effect than, culinary necessity, as there were pork chops on the platter, "my son, no true gentleman will rebuke another who is trying to lend him money. Always remember that." And the colonel's great body shook with merriment, as he proceeded to fill up the plates. But one plate went from the table untouched, and Molly Culpepper went about her work with a leaden heart. For the world had become a horrible phantasm to her, a placeof longing and of heartache, a place of temptation and trial, lying under the shadow of tragedy. And whose world was it that night, as she sat chattering with her father and the man she feared, whose world was it that night, if this is a real world, and not the shadow of a dream? Was it the colonel's gay world, or John's golden world, or Ward's harmonious world, or poor little Molly's world—all askew with miserable duties and racking heartaches, and grinning sneering fears, with the relentless image of the Larger Good always before her? Surely it was not all their worlds, for there is only one world. Then whose was it? God who made it and set it in the heavens in His great love and mercy only knows. Watts McHurdie once wrote some query like this, and the whole town smiled at his fancy. In that portion of his "Complete Poetical and Philosophical Works" called "Fragments" occur these lines:—
"The wise men sayThis world spins 'round the universe of which it is a part;But anyway—The only world I know about is spun from out my heart."
And perhaps Watts, sewing away in his harness shop, had deciphered one letter in the riddle of the Sphinx.