The house seemed too little for Marcia's happiness, and after dinner she did not let Bartley forget his last night's engagement. She sent him off to get his horse at the hotel, and ran up to her room to put on her wraps for the drive. Her mother cleared away the dinner things; she pushed the table to the side of the room, and then sat down in her feather-cushioned chair and waited her husband's pleasure to speak. He ordinarily rose from the Sunday dinner and went back to his office; to-day he had taken a chair before the stove. But he had mechanically put his hat on, and he wore it pushed off his forehead as he tilted his chair back on its hind legs, and braced himself against the hearth of the stove with his feet.
A man is master in his own house generally through the exercise of a certain degree of brutality, but Squire Gaylord maintained his predominance by an enlightened absenteeism. No man living always at home was ever so little under his own roof. While he was in more active business life, he had kept an office in the heart of the village, where he spent all his days, and a great part of every night; but after he had become rich enough to risk whatever loss of business the change might involve, he bought this large old square house on the border of the village, and thenceforth made his home in the little detached office.
If Mrs. Gaylord had dimly imagined that she should see something more of him, having him so near at hand, she really saw less: there was no weather, by day or night, in which he could not go to his office, now. He went no more than his wife into the village society; she might have been glad now and then of a little glimpse of the world, but she never said so, and her social life had ceased, like her religious life. Their house was richly furnished according to the local taste of the time; the parlor had a Brussels carpet, and heavy chairs of mahogany and hair-cloth; Marcia had a piano there, and since she had come home from school they had made company, as Mrs. Gaylord called it, two or three times for her; but they had held aloof from the festivity, the Squire in his office, and Mrs. Gaylord in the family room where they now sat in unwonted companionship.
“Well, Mr. Gaylord,” said his wife, “I don't know as you can say but whatMarcia's suited well enough.”
This was the first allusion they had made to the subject, but she let it take the argumentative form of her cogitations.
“M-yes,” sighed the Squire, in long, nasal assent, “most too well, if anything.” He rasped first one unshaven cheek and then the other, with his thin, quivering hand.
“He's smart enough,” said Mrs. Gaylord, as before.
“M-yes, most too smart,” replied her husband, a little more quickly than before. “He's smart enough, even if she wasn't, to see from the start that she was crazy to have him, and that isn't the best way to begin life for a married couple, if I'm a judge.”
“It would killed her if she hadn't got him. I could see 't was wearin' on her every day, more and more. She used to fairly jump, every knock she'd hear at the door; and I know sometimes, when she was afraid he wa' n't coming, she used to go out, in hopes 't she sh'd meet him: I don't suppose she allowed to herself that she did it for that—Marcia's proud.”
“M-yes,” said the Squire, “she's proud. And when a proud girl makes a fool of herself about a fellow, it's a matter of life and death with her. She can't help herself. She lets go everything.”
“I declare,” Mrs. Gaylord went on, “it worked me up considerable to have her come in some those times, and see by her face 't she'd seen him with some the other girls. She used tolookso! And then I'd hear her up in her room, cryin' and cryin'. I shouldn't cared so much, if Marcia'd been like any other girl, kind of flirty, like, about it. But she wa' n't. She was just bowed down before her idol.”
A final assent came from the Squire, as if wrung out of his heart, and he rose from his chair, and then sat down again. Marcia was his child, and he loved her with his whole soul. “M-well!” he deeply sighed, “all that part's over, anyway,” but he tingled in an anguish of sympathy with what she had suffered. “You see, Miranda, how she looked at me when she first came in with him,—so proud and independent, poor girl! and yet as if she was afraid Imightn'tlike it?”
“Yes, I see it.”
He pulled his hat far down over his cavernous eyes, and worked his thin, rusty old jaws.
“I hope 't she'll be able to school herself, so 's t' not show out her feelings so much,” said Mrs. Gaylord.
“I wish she could school herself so as to not have 'em so much; but I guess she'll have 'em, and I guess she'll show 'em out.” They were both silent; after a while he added, throwing at the stove a minute fragment of the cane he had pulled off the seat of his chair: “Miranda, I've expected something of this sort a good while, and I've thought over what Bartley had better do.”
Mrs. Gaylord stooped forward and picked up the bit of wood which her husband had thrown down; her vigilance was rewarded by finding a thread on the oil-cloth near where it lay; she whipped this round her finger, and her husband continued: “He'd better give up his paper and go into the law. He 's done well in the paper, and he's a smart writer; but editing a newspaper aint any work for aman. It's all well enough as long as he's single, but when he's got a wife to look after, he'd better get down towork. My business is in just such a shape now that I could hand it over to him in a lump; but come to wait a year or two longer, and this young man and that one 'll eat into it, and it won't be the same thing at all. I shall want Bartley to push right along, and get admitted at once. He can do it, fast enough. He's bright enough,” added the old man, with a certain grimness. “M-well!” he broke out, with a quick sigh, after a moment of musing; “it hasn't happened at any very bad time. I was just thinking, this morning, that I should like to have my whole time, pretty soon, to look after my property. I sha'n't want Bartley to dothatfor me. I'll give him a good start in money and in business; but I'll look after my property myself. I'll speak to him, the first chance I get.”
A light step sounded on the stairs, and Marcia burst into the room, ready for her drive. “I wanted to get a good warm before I started,” she explained, stooping before the stove, and supporting herself with one hand on her father's knee. There had been no formal congratulations upon her engagement from either of her parents; but this was not requisite, and would have been a little affected; they were perhaps now ashamed to mention it outright before her alone. The Squire, however, went so far as to put his hand over the hand she had laid upon his knee, and to smooth it twice or thrice.
“You going to ride after that sorrel colt of Bartley's?” he asked.
“Of course!” she answered, with playful pertness. “I guess Bartley can manage the sorrel colt! He's never had any trouble yet.”
“He's always been able to give his whole mind to him before,” said the Squire. He gave Marcia's hand a significant squeeze, and let it go.
She would not confess her consciousness of his meaning at once. She looked up at the clock, and then turned and pulled her father's watch out of his waistcoat pocket, and compared the time. “Why, you're both fast!”
“Perhaps Bartley's slow,” said the Squire; and having gone as far as he intended in this direction, he permitted himself a low chuckle.
The sleigh-bells jingled without, and she sprang lightly to her feet. “I guess you don't think Bartley's slow,” she exclaimed, and hung over her father long enough to rub her lips against his bristly cheek. “By, mother,” she said, over her shoulder, and went out of the room. She let her muff hang as far down in front of her as her arms would reach, in a stylish way, and moved with a little rhythmical tilt, as if to some inner music. Even in her furs she was elegantly slender in shape.
The old people remained silent and motionless till the clash of the bells died away. Then the Squire rose, and went to the wood-shed beyond the kitchen, whence he reappeared with an armful of wood. His wife started at the sight. “Mr. Gaylord, whatbeyou doin'?”
“Oh, I'm going to make 'em up a little fire in the parlor stove. I guess they won't want us round a great deal, when they come back.”
Mrs. Gaylord said, “Well, I never did!” When her husband returned from the parlor, she added, “I suppose some folks'd say it was rather of a strange way of spendin' the Sabbath.”
“It's a very good way of spending the Sabbath. You don't suppose that any of the people in church are half as happy, do you? Why, old Jonathan Edwards himself used to allow 'all proper opportunity' for the young fellows that come to see his girls, 'and a room and fire, if needed.' His 'Life' says so.”
“I guess he didn't allow it on the Sabbath,” retorted Mrs. Gaylord.
“Well, the 'Life' don't say,” chuckled the Squire. “Why, Miranda, I do it for Marcia! There's never but one first day to an engagement. You know that as well as I do.” In saying this, Squire Gaylord gave way to his repressed emotion in an extravagance. He suddenly stooped over and kissed his wife; but he spared her confusion by going out to his office at once, where he stayed the whole afternoon.
Bartley and Marcia took the “Long Drive,” as it was called, at Equity. The road plunged into the darkly wooded gulch beyond the house, and then struck away eastward, crossing loop after loop of the river on the covered bridges, where the neighbors, who had broken it out with their ox-teams in the open, had thickly bedded it in snow. In the valleys and sheltered spots it remained free, and so wide that encountering teams could easily pass each other; but where it climbed a hill, or crossed a treeless level, it was narrowed to a single track, with turn-outs at established points, where the drivers of the sleighs waited to be sure that the stretch beyond was clear before going forward. In the country, the winter which held the village in such close siege was an occupation under which Nature seemed to cower helpless, and men made a desperate and ineffectual struggle. The houses, banked up with snow almost to the sills of the windows that looked out, blind with frost, upon the lifeless world, were dwarfed in the drifts, and seemed to founder in a white sea blotched with strange bluish shadows under the slanting sun. Where they fronted close upon the road, it was evident that the fight with the snow was kept up unrelentingly; spaces were shovelled out, and paths were kept open to the middle of the highway, and to the barn; but where they were somewhat removed, there was no visible trace of the conflict, and no sign of life except the faint, wreathed lines of smoke wavering upward from the chimneys.
In the hollows through which the road passed, the lower boughs of the pines and hemlocks were weighed down with the snow-fall till they lay half submerged in the drifts; but wherever the wind could strike them, they swung free of this load and met in low, flat arches above the track. The river betrayed itself only when the swift current of a ripple broke through the white surface in long, irregular, grayish blurs. It was all wild and lonesome, but to the girl alone in it with her lover, the solitude was sweet, and she did not wish to speak even to him. His hands were both busy with the reins, but it was agreed between them that she might lock hers through his arm. Cowering close to him under the robes, she laid her head on his shoulder and looked out over the flying landscape in measureless content, and smiled, with filling eyes, when he bent over, and warmed his cold, red cheek on the top of her fur cap.
The moments of bliss that silence a woman rouse a man to make sure of his rapture. “How do you like it, Marsh?” he asked, trying at one of these times to peer round into her face. “Are you afraid?”
“No,—only of getting back too soon.”
He made the shivering echoes answer with his delight in this, and chirruped to the colt, who pushed forward at a wilder speed, flinging his hoofs out before him with the straight thrust of the horn trotter, and seeming to overtake them as they flew. “I should like this ride to last forever!”
“Forever!” she repeated. “That would do for a beginning.”
“Marsh! What a girl you are! I never supposed you would be so free to let a fellow know how much you cared for him.”
“Neither did I,” she answered dreamily. “But now—now the only trouble is that I don't knowhowto let him know.” She gave his arm to which she clung a little convulsive clutch, and pressed her head harder upon his shoulder.
“Well, that's pretty much my complaint, too,” said Bartley, “though I couldn't have expressed it so well.”
“Oh,youexpress!” she murmured, with the pride in him which implied that there were no thoughts worth expressing to which he could not give a monumental utterance. Her adoration flattered his self-love to the same passionate intensity, and to something like the generous complexion of her worship.
“Marcia,” he answered, “I am going to try to be all you expect of me. And I hope I shall never do anything unworthy of your ideal.”
She could only press his arm again in speechless joy, but she said to herself that she should always remember these words.
The wind had been rising ever since they started but they had not noticed it till now, when the woods began to thin away on either side, and he stopped before striking out over one of the naked stretches of the plain,—a white waste swept by the blasts that sucked down through a gorge of the mountain, and flattened the snow-drifts as the tornado flattens the waves. Across this expanse ran the road, its stiff lines obliterated here and there, in the slight depressions, and showing dark along the rest of the track.
It was a good half-mile to the next body of woods, and midway there was one of those sidings where a sleigh approaching from the other quarter must turn out and yield the right of way. Bartley stopped his colt, and scanned the road.
“Anybody coming?” asked Marcia.
“No, I don't see any one. But if there's any one in the woods yonder, they'd better wait till I get across. No horse in Equity can beat this colt to the turn-out.”
“Oh, well, look carefully, Bartley. If we met any one beyond the turn-out, I don't know what I should do,” pleaded the girl.
“I don't know whattheywould do,” said Bartley. “But it's their lookout now, if they come. Wrap your face up well, or put your head under the robe. I've got to hold my breath the next half-mile.” He loosed the reins, and sped the colt out of the shelter where he had halted. The wind struck them like an edge of steel, and, catching the powdery snow that their horse's hoofs beat up, sent it spinning and swirling far along the glistening levels on their lee. They felt the thrill of the go as if they were in some light boat leaping over a swift current. Marcia disdained to cover her face, if he must confront the wind, but after a few gasps she was glad to bend forward, and bury it in the long hair of the bearskin robe. When she lifted it, they were already past the siding, and she saw a cutter dashing toward them from the cover of the woods. “Bartley!” she screamed, “the sleigh!”
“Yes,” he shouted. “Some fool! There's going to be trouble here,” he added, checking his horse as he could. “They don't seem to know how to manage—It's a couple of women! Hold on! hold on!” he called. “Don't try to turn out! I'll turn out!”
The women pulled their horse's head this way and that, in apparent confusion, and then began to turn out into the trackless snow at the roadside, in spite of Bartley's frantic efforts to arrest them. They sank deeper and deeper into the drift; their horse plunged and struggled, and then their cutter went over, amidst their shrieks and cries for help.
Bartley drove up abreast of the wreck, and, saying, “Still, Jerry! Don't be afraid, Marcia,”—he put the reins into her hands, and sprang out to the rescue.
One of the women had been flung out free of the sleigh, and had already gathered herself up, and stood crying and wringing her hands; “Oh, Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Hubbard! Help Hannah! she's under there!”
“All right! Keep quiet, Mrs. Morrison! Take hold of your horse's head!” Bartley had first of all seized him by the bit, and pulled him to his feet; he was old and experienced in obedience, and he now stood waiting orders, patiently enough. Bartley seized the cutter and by an effort of all his strength righted it. The colt started and trembled, but Marcia called to him in Bartley's tone, “Still, Jerry!” and he obeyed her.
The girl, who had been caught under the overturned cutter, escaped like a wild thing out of a trap, when it was lifted, and, plunging some paces away, faced round upon her rescuer with the hood pulled straight and set comely to her face again, almost before he could ask, “Any bones broken, Hannah?”
“No!” she shouted. “Mother! mother! stop crying! Don't you see I'm not dead?” She leaped about, catching up this wrap and that, shaking the dry snow out of them, and flinging them back into the cutter, while she laughed in the wild tumult of her spirits. Bartley helped her pick up the fragments of the wreck, and joined her in making fun of the adventure. The wind hustled them, but they were warm in defiance of it with their jollity and their bustle.
“Why didn't you let me turn out?” demanded Bartley, as he and the girl stood on opposite sides of the cutter, rearranging the robes in it.
“Oh, I thought I could turn out well enough. You had a right to the road.”
“Well, the next time you see any one past the turn-out, you better not start from the woods.”
“Why, there's no more room in the woods to get past than there is here,” cried the girl.
“There's more shelter.”
“Oh, I'm not cold!” She flashed a look at him from her brilliant face, warm with all the glow of her young health, and laughed, and before she dropped her eyes, she included Marcia in her glance. They had already looked at each other without any sign of recognition. “Come, mother! All right, now!”
Her mother left the horse's head, and, heavily ploughing back to the cutter, tumbled herself in. The girl, from her side, began to climb in, but her weight made the sleigh careen, and she dropped down with a gay shriek.
Bartley came round and lifted her in; the girl called to her horse, and drove up into the road and away.
Bartley looked after her a moment, and continued to glance in that direction when he stood stamping the snow off his feet, and brushing it from his legs and arms, before he remounted to Marcia's side. He was excited, and talked rapidly and loudly, as he took the reins from Marcia's passive hold, and let the colt out. “That girl is the pluckiest fool, yet! Wouldn't let me turn out because I had the right of way! And she wasn't going to let anybody else have a hand in getting that old ark of theirs afloat again. Good their horse wasn't anything like Jerry! How well Jerry behaved! Were you frightened, Marsh?” He bent over to see her face, but she had not her head on his shoulder, and she did not sit close to him, now. “Did you freeze?”
“Oh, no! I got along very well,” she answered, dryly, and edged away as far as the width of the seat would permit. “It would have been better for you to lead their horse up into the road, and then she could have got in without your help. Her mother got in alone.”
He took the reins into his left hand, and, passing his strong right around her, pulled her up to his side. She resisted, with diminishing force; at last she ceased to resist, and her head fell passively to its former place on his shoulder. He did not try to speak any word of comfort; he only held her close to him; when she looked up, as they entered the village, she confronted him with a brilliant smile that ignored her tears.
But that night, when she followed him to the door, she looked him searchingly in the eyes. “I wonder if you really do despise me, Bartley?” she asked.
“Certainly,” he answered, with a jesting smile. “What for?”
“For showing out my feelings so. For not even trying to pretend not to care everything for you.”
“It wouldn't be any use your trying: I should know that you did, anyway.”
“Oh, don't laugh, Bartley, don't laugh! I don't believe that I ought to. I've heard that it makes people sick of you. But I can't help it,—I can't help it! And if—if you think I'm always going to be so,—and that I'm going to keep on getting worse and worse, and making you so unhappy, why, you'd better break your engagement now—while you have a chance.”
“What have you been making me unhappy about, I should like to know? I thought I'd been having a very good time.”
She hid her face against his breast. “It almostkilledme to see you there with her. I was so cold,—my hands were half frozen, holding the reins,—and I was so afraid of the colt I didn't know what to do; and I had been keeping up my courage on your account; and you seemed so long about it all; and she could have got in perfectly well—as well as her mother did—without your help—” Her voice broke in a miserable sob, and she clutched herself tighter to him.
He smoothed down her hair with his hand. “Why, Marsh! Did you think that made me unhappy?Ididn't mind it a bit. I knew what the trouble was, at the time; but I wasn't going to say anything. I knew you would be all right as soon as you could think it over. You don't suppose I care anything for that girl?”
“No,” answered a rueful sob. “But Iwishyou didn't have anything to do with her. I know she'll make trouble for you, somehow.”
“Well,” said Bartley, “I can't very well turn her off as long as she does her work. But you needn't be worried about making me unhappy. If anything, I rather liked it. It showed how much youdidcare for me.” He bent toward her, with a look of bright raillery, for the parting kiss. “Now then: once, twice, three times,—and good night it is!”
The spectacle of a love affair in which the woman gives more of her heart than the man gives of his is so pitiable that we are apt to attribute a kind of merit to her, as if it were a voluntary self-sacrifice for her to love more than her share. Not only other men, but other women, look on with this canonizing compassion; for women have a lively power of imagining themselves in the place of any sister who suffers in matters of sentiment, and are eager to espouse the common cause in commiserating her. Each of them pictures herself similarly wronged or slighted by the man she likes best, and feels how cruel it would be if he were to care less for her than she for him; and for the time being, in order to realize the situation, she loads him with all the sins of omission proper to the culprit in the alien case. But possibly there is a compensation in merely loving, even where the love given is out of all proportion to the love received.
If Bartley Hubbard's sensations and impressions of the day had been at all reasoned, that night as he lay thinking it over, he could unquestionably have seen many advantages for Marcia in the affair,—perhaps more than for himself. But to do him justice he did not formulate these now, or in any wise explicitly recognize the favors he was bestowing. At twenty-six one does not naturally compute them in musing upon the girl to whom one is just betrothed; and Bartley's mind was a confusion of pleasure. He liked so well to think how fond of him Marcia was, that it did not occur to him then to question whether he were as fond of her. It is possible that as he drowsed, at last, there floated airily through the consciousness which was melting and dispersing itself before the approach of sleep, an intimation from somewhere to some one that perhaps the affair need not be considered too seriously. But in that mysterious limbo one cannot be sure of what is thought and what is dreamed; and Bartley always acquitted himself, and probably with justice, of any want of seriousness.
What he did make sure of when he woke was that he was still out of sorts, and that he had again that dull headache; and his instant longing for sympathy did more than anything else to convince him that he really loved Marcia, and had never, in his obscurest or remotest feeling, swerved in his fealty to her. In the atmosphere of her devotion yesterday, he had so wholly forgotten his sufferings that he had imagined himself well; but now he found that he was not well, and he began to believe that he was going to have what the country people call a fit of sickness. He felt that he ought to be taken care, of, that he was unfit to work; and in his vexation at not being able to go to Marcia for comfort-it really amounted to nothing less—he entered upon the day's affairs with fretful impatience.
The Free Press was published on Tuesdays, and Monday was always a busy time of preparation. The hands were apt also to feel the demoralization that follows a holiday, even when it has been a holy day. The girls who set the type of the Free Press had by no means foregone the rights and privileges of their sex in espousing their art, and they had their beaux on Sunday night like other young ladies. It resulted that on Monday morning they were nervous and impatient, alternating between fits of giggling delight in the interchange of fond reminiscences, and the crossness which is pretty sure to disfigure human behavior from want of sleep. But ordinarily Bartley got on very well with them. In spite of the assumption of equality between all classes in Equity, they stood in secret awe of his personal splendor, and the tradition of his achievements at college and in the great world; and a flattering joke or a sharp sarcasm from him went a great way with them. Besides, he had an efficient lieutenant in Henry Bird, the young printer who had picked up his trade in the office, and who acted as Bartley's foreman, so far as the establishment had an organization. Bird had industry and discipline which were contagious, and that love of his work which is said to be growing rare among artisans in the modern subdivision of trades. This boy—for he was only nineteen—worked at his craft early and late out of pleasure in it. He seemed one of those simple, subordinate natures which are happy in looking up to whatever assumes to be above them. He exulted to serve in a world where most people prefer to be served, and it is uncertain whether he liked his work better for its own sake, or Bartley's, for whom he did it. He was slight and rather delicate in health, and it came natural for Bartley to patronize him. He took him on the long walks of which he was fond, and made him in some sort his humble confidant, talking to him of himself and his plans with large and braggart vagueness. He depended upon Bird in a great many things, and Bird never failed him; for he had a basis of constancy that was immovable. “No,” said a philosopher from a neighboring logging-camp, who used to hang about the printing-office a long time after he had got his paper, “there aint a great deal of natural git up and howl about Henry; but he stays put.” In the confidences which Bartley used to make Bird, he promised that, when he left the newspaper for the law, he would see that no one else succeeded him. The young fellow did not need this promise to make him Bartley's fast friend, but it colored his affection with ambitious enthusiasm; to edit and publish a newspaper,—his dreams did not go beyond that: to devote it to Bartley's interest in the political life on which Bartley often hinted he might enter,—that would be the sweetest privilege of realized success. Bird already wrote paragraphs for the Free Press, and Bartley let him make up a column of news from the city exchanges, which was partly written and partly selected.
Bartley came to the office rather late on Monday morning, bringing with him the papers from Saturday night's mail, which had lain unopened over Sunday, and went directly into his own room, without looking into the printing-office. He felt feverish and irritable, and he resolved to fill up with selections and let his editorial paragraphing go, or get Bird to do it. He was tired of the work, and sick of Equity; Marcia's face seemed to look sadly in upon his angry discontent, and he no longer wished to go to her for sympathy. His door opened, and, without glancing from the newspaper which he held up before him, he asked, “What is it, Bird? Do you want copy?”
“Well, no, Mr. Hubbard,” answered Bird, “we have copy enough for the force we've got this morning.”
“Why, what's up?” demanded Bartley, dropping his paper.
“Lizzie Sawyer has sent word that she is sick, and we haven't heard or seen anything of Hannah Morrison.”
“Confound the girls!” said Bartley, “there's always something the matter with them.” He rubbed his hand over his forehead, as if to rub out the dull pain there. “Well,” he said, “I must go to work myself, then.” He rose, and took hold of the lapels of his coat, to pull it off; but something in Bird's look arrested him. “What is it?” he asked.
“Old Morrison was here, just before you came in, and said he wanted to see you. I think he was drunk,” said Bird, anxiously. “He said he was coming back again.”
“All right; let him come,” replied Bartley. “This is a free country,—especially in Equity. I suppose he wants Hannah's wages raised, as usual. How much are we behind on the paper, Henry?”
“We're not a great deal behind, Mr. Hubbard, if we were not so weak-handed.”
“Perhaps we can get Hannah back, during the forenoon. At any rate, we can ask her honored parent when he comes.”
Where Morrison got his liquor was a question that agitated Equity from time to time, and baffled the officer of the law empowered to see that no strong drink came into the town. Under conditions which made it impossible even in the logging-camps, and rendered the sale of spirits too precarious for the apothecary, who might be supposed to deal in them medicinally, Morrison never failed of his spree when the mysterious mechanism of his appetite enforced it. Probably it was some form of bedevilled cider that supplied the material of his debauch; but even cider was not easily to be had.
Morrison's spree was a movable feast, and recurred at irregular intervals of two, or three, or even six weeks; but it recurred often enough to keep him poor, and his family in a social outlawry against which the kindly instincts of their neighbors struggled in vain. Mrs. Morrison was that pariah who, in a village like Equity, cuts herself off from hope by taking in washing; and it was a decided rise in the world for Hannah, a wild girl at school, to get a place in the printing-office. Her father had applied for it humbly enough at the tremulous and penitent close of one of his long sprees, and was grateful to Bartley for taking the special interest in her which she reported at home.
But the independence of a drunken shoemaker is proverbial, and Morrison's meek spirit soared into lordly arrogance with his earliest cups. The first warning which the community had of his change of attitude was the conspicuous and even defiant closure of his shop, and the scornful rejection of custom, however urgent or necessitous. All Equity might go in broken shoes, for any patching or half-soling the people got from him. He went about collecting his small dues, and paying up his debts as long as the money lasted, in token of his resolution not to take any favors from any man thereafter. Then he retired to his house on one of the by streets, and by degrees drank himself past active offence. It was of course in his defiant humor that he came to visit Bartley, who had learned to expect him whenever Hannah failed to appear promptly at her work. The affair was always easily arranged. Bartley instantly assented, with whatever irony he liked, to Morrison's demands; he refused with overwhelming politeness even to permit him to give himself the trouble to support them by argument; he complimented Hannah inordinately as one of the most gifted and accomplished ladies of his acquaintance, and inquired affectionately after the health of each member of the Morrison family. When Morrison rose to go he always said, in shaking hands, “Well, sir, if there was more like you in Equity a poor man could get along. You're a gentleman, sir.” After getting some paces away from the street door, he stumbled back up the stairs to repeat, “You're a gentleman!” Hannah came during the day, and the wages remained the same: neither of the contracting parties regarded the increase so elaborately agreed upon, and Morrison, on becoming sober, gratefully ignored the whole transaction, though, by a curious juggle of his brain, he recurred to it in his next spree, and advanced in his new demand from the last rise: his daughter was now nominally in receipt of an income of forty dollars a week, but actually accepted four.
Bartley, on his part, enjoyed the business as an agreeable excitement and a welcome relief from the monotony of his official life. He never hurried Morrison's visits, but amused himself by treating him with the most flattering distinction, and baffling his arrogance by immediate concession. But this morning, when Morrison came back with a front of uncommon fierceness, he merely looked up from his newspapers, to which he had recurred, and said coolly. “Oh, Mr. Morrison! Good morning. I suppose it's that little advance that you wish to see me about. Take a chair. What is the increase you ask this time? Of course I agree to anything.”
He leaned forward, pencil in hand, to make a note of the figure Morrison should name, when the drunkard approached and struck the table in front of him with his fist, and blazed upon Bartley's face, suddenly uplifted, with his blue crazy eyes:
“No, sir! I won't take a seat, and I don't come on no such business! No, sir!” He struck the table again, and the violence of his blow upset the inkstand.
Bartley saved himself by suddenly springing away. “Hollo here!” he shouted. “What do you mean by this infernal nonsense?”
“What doyoumean,” retorted the drunkard, “by makin' up to my girl?”
“You're a fool,” cried Bartley, “and drunk!”
“I'll show you whether I'm a fool, and I'll show you whether I'm drunk,” said Morrison. He opened the door and beckoned to Bird, with an air of mysterious authority. “Young man! Come here!”
Bird was used to the indulgence with which Bartley treated Morrison's tipsy freaks, and supposed that he had been called by his consent to witness another agreement to a rise in Hannah's wages. He came quickly, to help get Morrison out of the way the sooner, and he was astonished to be met by Bartley with “I don't want you, Bird.”
“All right,” answered the boy, and he turned to go out of the door.
But Morrison had planted himself against it, and waved Bird austerely back. “Iwant you,” he said, with drunken impressiveness, “for a witness—wick—witness—while I ask Mr. Hubbard what he means by—”
“Hold your tongue!” cried Bartley. “Get out of this!” He advanced a pace or two toward Morrison who stood his ground without swerving.
“Now you—you keep quiet, Mr. Hubbard,” said Morrison, with a swift drunken change of mood, by which he passed from arrogant denunciation to a smooth, patronizing mastery of the situation. “Iwish this thing all settled amic—ic—amelcabilly.”
Bartley broke into a helpless laugh at Morrison's final failure on a word difficult to sober tongues, and the latter went on: “No 'casion for bad feeling on either side. All I want know is what you mean.”
“Well, go on!” cried Bartley, good-naturedly, and he sat down in his chair, which he tilted back, and, clasping his hands behind his head, looked up into Morrison's face. “What do I mean by what?”
Probably Morrison had not expected to be categorical, or to bring anything like a bill of particulars against Bartley, and this demand gave him pause. “What you mean,” he said, at last, “by always praising her up so?”
“What I said. She's a very good girl, and a very bright one. You don't deny that?”
“No—no matter what I deny. What—what you lend her all them books for?”
“To improve her mind. You don't object to that? I thought you once thanked me for taking an interest in her.”
“Don't you mind what I object to, and what I thank you for,” said Morrison, with dignity. “I know what I'm about.”
“I begin to doubt. But get on. I'm in a great hurry this morning,” said Bartley.
Morrison seemed to be making a mental examination of his stock of charges, while the strain of keeping his upright position began to tell upon him, and he swayed to and fro against the door. “What's that word you sent her by my boy, Sat'day night?”
“That she was a smart girl, and would be sure to get on if she was good—or words to that effect. I trust there was no offence in that, Mr. Morrison?”
Morrison surrendered, himself to another season of cogitation, in which he probably found his vagueness growing upon him. He ended by fumbling in all his pockets, and bringing up from the last a crumpled scrap of paper. “What you—what you say that?”
Bartley took the extended scrap with an easy air. “Miss Morrison's handwriting, I think.” He held it up before him and read aloud, “'I love my love with an H because he is Handsome.' This appears to be a confidence of Miss Morrison to her Muse. Whom do you think she refers to, Mr. Morrison?”
“What's—what's the first letter your name?” demanded Morrison, with an effort to collect his dispersing severity.
“B,” promptly replied Bartley. “Perhaps this concerns you, Henry. Your name begins with an H.” He passed the paper up over his head to Bird, who took it silently. “You see,” he continued, addressing Bird, but looking at Morrison as he spoke, “Mr. Morrison wishes to convict me of an attempt upon Miss Hannah's affections. Have you anything else to urge, Mr. Morrison?”
Morrison slid at last from his difficult position into a convenient chair, and struggled to keep himself from doubling forward. “I want know what you mean,” he said, with dogged iteration.
“I'll show you what I mean,” said Bartley with an ugly quiet, while his mustache began to twitch. He sprang to his feet and seized Morrison by the collar, pulling him up out of the chair till he held him clear of the floor, and opened the door with his other hand. “Don't show your face here again,—you or your girl either!” Still holding the man by the collar, he pushed him before him through the office, and gave him a final thust out of the outer door.
Bartley returned to his room in a white heat: “Miserable tipsy rascal!” he panted; “I wonder who has set him on to this thing.”
Bird stood pale and silent, still, nolding the crumpled scrap of paper in his hand.
“I shouldn't be surprised if that impudent little witch herself had put him up to it. She's capable of it,” said Bartley, fumbling aimlessly about on his table, in his wrath, without looking at Bird.
“It's a lie!” said Bird.
Bartley started as if the other had struck him, and as he glared at Bird the anger went out of his face for pure amazement. “Are you out of your mind, Henry?” he asked calmly. “Perhaps you're drunk too, this morning. The Devil seems to have got into pretty much everybody.”
“It's a lie!” repeated the boy, while the tears sprang to his eyes. “She's as good a girl as Marcia Gaylord is, any day!”
“Better go away, Henry,” said Bartley, with a deadly sort of gentleness.
“I'm going away,” answered the boy, his face twisted with weeping. “I've done my last day's work foryou.” He pulled down his shirt-sleeves, and buttoned them at the wrists, while the tears ran out over his face,—helpless tears, the sign of his womanish tenderness, his womanish weakness.
Bartley continued to glare at him. “Why, I do believe you're in love with her yourself, you little fool!”
“Oh, I'vebeena fool!” cried Bird. “A fool to think as much of you as I always have,—a fool to believe that you were a gentleman, and wouldn't take a mean advantage. I was a fool to suppose you wanted to do her any good, when you came praising and flattering her, and turning her head!”
“Well, then,” said Bartley with harsh insolence, “don't be a fool any longer. If you're in love with her, you haven't any quarrel with me, my boy. She flies at higher game than humble newspaper editors. The head of Willett's lumbering gang is your man; and so you may go and tell that old sot, her father. Why, Henry! You don't mean to say you care anything for that girl?”
“And do you mean to say you haven't done everything you could to turn her head since she's been in this office? She used to like me well enough at school.” All men are blind and jealous children alike, when it comes to question of a woman between them, and this poor boy's passion was turning him into a tiger. “Don't come tomewith your lies, any more!” Here his rage culminated, and with a blind cry of “Ay!” he struck the paper which he had kept in his hand into Bartley's face.
The demons, whatever they were, of anger, remorse, pride, shame, were at work in Bartley's heart too, and he returned the blow as instantly as if Bird's touch had set the mechanism of his arm in motion. In contempt of the other's weakness he struck with the flat of his hand; but the blow was enough. Bird fell headlong, and the concussion of his head upon the floor did the rest. He lay senseless.