As he seemed searching his mind for suitable apology, she said hastily:
“And I also know what father is, Phineas. I can understand. It is nothing that you have done. But it all seems to be beginning over again, and I hoped it was ended.”
“I guess it’s like the fire in old Ward’s peat bog,” he replied, a wrinkle of humour about his eyes. “It has been burning for twenty years underground and breaks out every little while. I can sympathise with Ward’s peat bog,” he added. “Every now and then, when I think it’s cold and dead and stamped out—my own particular smoulder, you know—there’s a breath of remembrance, when I see you, and I’m all afire again inside. Hard case, isn’t it?”
He didn’t allow his tone to be too serious.
“It isn’t well to speak of such things, Phineas. And not in that way! Somehow, it hasn’t come right for you and me. We mustn’t blame each other. It hasn’t seemed to be our fault.” She cast a glance at the waggons toiling up the street. He gazed at the old man, who had paused half way across the lawn and was querulously shouting “Daughter!”
The Squire leaned a bit further over the fence.
“I guess it has been ten years, Sylvena,” he said, “since I’ve let you see my fire break through the crust. I didn’t intend to let it show again, for I know your heart is tender. I don’t blame you for feeling that a daughter owes much to a widowed father. I’d be the last to break up a family. I haven’t any right to blame you. Don’t worry about me, ever. But I can’t seem to forget, and while I keep on loving you I am having an awfully good time all by myself doing so.”
With frank impulsiveness the woman came close to the fence and patted his big hand that clutched the iron paling. But this frankness in her action, her demeanour, and in the free and honest gaze she gave him, did not console him.
“Still you’re ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ Sylvena,” he said, half whimsically, half bitterly.
The old man had returned part way down the broad lawn, and was yelping “Daughter!” in his thin voice with increasing impatience.
She smiled at the Squire as though the jest of his last words were one well understood between them.
“No, only an old maid, Phineas,” she replied, softly. “Sometimes I think that old maids are like poets—born, not made.”
“But you’ve let ’em makeyouone,” he retorted. “It isn’t often I speak of it, Sylvena. You know that. It has been enough for me to walk the same streets with you and have a smile and a word of friendliness—-it’s enough most of the time. But my heart has been stirred to-day, and all the old feelings are on top. You have let that stingy old man——” he shook his fist at the Judge, who returned this salute with great spirit, “rob you of the best that a woman ought to have—and that’s a home and a good husband. Oh, I am not speaking of myself!” he cried, his colour coming and a sort of boyish embarrassment overwhelming him. “I don’t know how to say such things very well, but I didn’t mean myself. I never could wake ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ But if the prince himself had come along your father would have driven him away so that he could continue to monopolise your loyalty and devotion. The only reason he wants you to marry King Bradish is because he knows that Bradish will sit outside like a pup and wait until he opens the door.”
The Squire was thoroughly angry. The spectacle of the old man hobbling down the lawn and calling at them as though they were offending children exasperated him.
“Forgive me, Sylvena,” he choked, breaking in upon her pained and somewhat indignant protest. “But, being a Look, I am pretty much human. You can’t stop me from loving you. God knows I can’t stop myself. I’d like to be able to put out my hand and say to you ‘Sister!’ and look at you as you look at me, but I can’t do it!”
“From the time I was fifteen years old, Phineas,” she said wistfully, “I was mother to my mother!” A picture of the frail paralytic in her wheel chair rose before him. “I took her place in our home when she died—yes, before she died. It is a sacred promise that a girl makes to a mother, Phineas, when that mother, helpless as an infant, trusts her, believes her and goes smiling down into the grave, securely depending on that promise.”
The Judge was close upon them.
“I didn’t hardly expect you to marry me, Sylvena,” said the Squire, gazing gloomily at the old man.
“I’ve never dared to think much about marrying any one,” she said, her eyes straying to the caravan in its halo of dust. “Somehow, it hasn’t seemed to come right.”
“Some day there’ll be a man come along and you’ll know what it means to be willing to give up every other thing in this world and not be able to think about letting any one else step between you, and as it will have to be a mighty good man to make you feel that way, I’ll step up then and give you the best word I have, Sylvena, and perhaps I can begin to feel like a brother toward you. I’m generous enough to pray God that you may feel that way sometime.”
“No wonder you’re trying to beg off your brother, Phineas Look,” shrilled the Judge, interposing himself between them. He had caught a word of the Squire’s speech as he came up. “But you can’t do it! The law is going to take him. I’ll see that it does.” He whirled on his daughter. “Why do you stand here talking with this man when you know what he and his tribe are and how they have always treated us?”
She had taken his arm and was trying to lead him away, aware of the futility of argument or even reply.
“You can’t come around this family, Phin Look,” stormed the Judge, “by wheedling a girl who hasn’t had self-respect enough to spit on——”
“Judge Willard!” The voice of the Squire was so tense, so pregnant, that the old man stopped and looked at him. The lawyer was clutching a paling in each hand. He had projected his face over the fence. He was grayish white, and his eyes glowed under their knotted brows. “Don’t you discuss the honest and faithful friendship there is between your daughter and myself. Do you understand me?” The old man looked at him, “plipping” his lips as though searching for a reply.
“You have hogged the best out of her life. You have stood between her and some man’s honest affection. I want you to know that I hate every ounce of your stingy old skin and bones. I——” but he checked himself and turned to the daughter with an appealing smile breaking through the white rigidity of his countenance. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” he murmured, with a wag of his head for each exclamation. “What a savage old whelp it is that’s barking over your fence, Sylvena. Forgive me again.”
He turned hastily and went up the street, following the caravan. Old Eli, who had been patiently waiting on the sidewalk’s edge, fell in at his master’s heels.
And before him was Hiram guiding the grotesque elephant between the great silver poplars before Squire Phin’s lonely home.
“Narrer to the heel and wide to the toe,
And that’s the way the Look boys go.
Good boy Phin, he don’t raise time,
But pepper-sass’s hot and hell’s in Hime.”
—Old Palermo “Plaguin’ Song.‘’
When Marriner Amazeen plodded down street early next morning, he found Uncle Lysimachus Buck perched in solitary and surly state on the platform of Brickett’s store. A thick-foliaged maple tree shielded the platform as long as the sun was low in the east, and the platform was a desirable post of observation, since it commanded the Cove and the fishing fleet, as well as the village square.
“You’ve been el’phunteerin’, hey, along with the rest of the fools in the place?” sneered Uncle Buck as Amazeen grunted down beside him on the platform.
“Well, I called in to see how Hime had got settled, if that’s what your slur means,” retorted Amazeen with some resentment.
Silence fell upon them for a time.
“Where’s he put old Cabbage-leaf-ear?” asked Uncle Lysimachus at last.
“None of your dum bus’ness. Go see!”
The silence endured longer.
“I didn’t mean nothin’ to rasp your feelin’s, ‘Mad’!” his old friend apologised at last. “All is, I pus’nally don’t want to go peekin’ so like sin and Sancho, same’s the people in this place us’ly do when anything comes to town that ain’t cut and dried. I’d really like to know, though, how things is gittin’ squared ’round up to the Squire’s.”
Amazeen remained sullenly silent, but his desire to gossip conquered his spleen at last.
“Wals’r, Lys, it’s wuth your goin’ up,” he broke out with a chuckle. “That el’phunt’s loomin’ up in the middle of the barn floor with her hind leg hitched to a sill beam; them chariot carts is in the yard, the hosses fillin’ the stalls and the tie-up, folks standin’ ’round askin’ questions, and every durn young one in town rampagin’ ’round there! I should think it would drive the Squire out of his mind—him that has allus lived old bach and nothin’ to bother. It has set that old mare of his into spasms. He had to hitch her off in the woodshed, and there she stands with her head and tail up and snortin’ and whickerin’ ev’ry time she thinks of how that el’phunt looked when they was introduced. El’phunt’s name, by the way, is Imogene! Don’t that beat you? Imogene! So Hime said this mornin’. Told us she was a real pet, and he brought her along ’cause she would take on so if he tried to shake her. He’s had her clos’ on fifteen years, he says. Sold her when he bust up his show, but she swatted ’round her with her trunk, Hime says, and stove down bars and bellered Hail Columby and pulled up stakes and got away and follered him. Hime says Imogene is the only one in the world that ever has given a continental cuss for him and stuck to him, and he says that him and her will allus stick to one another after this. Says he’s li’ble to start out circussin’ ag’in.”
“I s’pose the whole neighbourhood’s standin’ ‘round, listenin’ to them yarns, heh?” grumbled Uncle Buck.
“Well, it’s all interestin’ to hear,” declared Ama-zeen sturdily. “And he ain’t nobody’s fool, Hime ain’t.”
“It looks to me,” Uncle Lys growled on, “as though Squire Phin had got more’n one el’phunt on his hands. Here’s Hime a-traipsin’ back home with that gor-rammed turn-out, and before he’s been here no time he sasses the whole town of Palermo, throws Judge Willard over his own fence and tears ’round gen’rally. Here’s the old row between the fam’lies busted out ag’in, and prob’ly more to happen when Klebe Willard gits home and hears of it.”
“Don’t you reckon that Klebe has got fully as many of Hime Look’s marks on him now as he wants to carry?” inquired Amazeen, drily.
“Klebe Willard, cap’n of the ‘Lycurgus Webb,’ turned forty-five, and muscled up from knockin’ down P. I. sailors, ain’t exactly the same feller he was when Hime Look scolloped him off twenty-five years ago,” Amazeen retorted. “I tell you, Lys, you’re going to find out that old ‘Hard-Times’ wasn’t snuffin’ at no pansy bed when he stood there yesterday with his nose up. He was smellin’ trouble.”
Brickett had lounged out of the store and stood munching a sliver of cheese that he had scraped from the broad knife after serving a customer.
“That old fool is gittin’ to be a town nuisance,” he observed. “When I came down this mornin’ he was standin’ across from Judge Willard’s house like a setter dog opposite a fox hole, croakin’ ‘Hard times a-comin’ to P’lermo.’ I don’t reckon that hard times is goin’ to start from Coll Willard’s place. Leastways, if I was as well fixed as the old Judge is I shouldn’t be reckonin’ to see hard times roostin’ on my primises just yit awhile.”
“You ain’t alius lived in P’lermo same’s me and Lys has, Brickett,” said Amazeen. “I don’t know what kind of things is goin’ to happen or what kind of a hard-times bird has come to nest on Coll Willard’s place, but it don’t take no seventh sense to smell trouble in this town now. Hime Look will make it without meanin’ to. He ain’t nat’rally a bad man, Hime ain’t. It’s his cussed tongue and the freaks he takes. Ev’ry one ’round him keeps gittin’ all stirred up. Long ago’s he went to the district school he had all the girls in fidgits about the snakes and frogs he lugged in his pants pockets—wa’n’t happy without a menagerie.
“Run away with circuses three times and old man Look had to chase him up and bring him home. Started off once with a shelter-tent and a angle worm in a mustard bottle and followed the fairs ’round in counties above here. Wa’n’t scarcely eighteen then, but he had more cheek than a Guinea nigger. Folks would listen to him shoutin’ up that ‘infant anaconda’—-that’s what he called the angle-worm—and would pay ten cents and go in and then would come out mad as they could stick. Most of the time he was able to keep hollerin’ so loud that no one could hear them complainin’. He’d say: ‘The gentleman who has jest come out of the tent states that under this canvas is the grandest sight that the civilised world has got to offer. He advises his friends to pass in, one and all, and behold the only infant anaconda in captivity.’ It certainly did take cheek to run that show, but he had it.”
Amazeen went fishing in his pockets for a match.
“Well, he couldn’t always holler ’em down, could he?” inquired Brickett, skeptically. “I should have thought that some one would ’a’ showed him up.”
The old man chuckled.
“Oh, once in a while a man would git heard and then Hime would bend down and ask:
“‘What’s the matter with you?’
“‘Why, he ain’t longer’n your finger,’ the man would yap back.
“‘Oh, he ain’t big enough? That’s it!’ Hime would say. ‘Well, go right back in and wait till he grows. ‘There won’t be any extry charge.’
“And then the rest of the crowd that always likes to see a man took in would laugh and Hime would go on cheerful as a cricket. But if he’d had less cheek he’d have got rid’ on a rail out of ev’ry fair ground.” He closed down the little “pepper-pot” cover over his pipe bowl.
“Then there was Hime’s dancin’ turkey,” he went on, apparently enjoying his recollections hugely. “For two or three years after that he was ’round with a fiddle and turkey and a sheet of tin. He’d put the turkey on the tin with nettin’ around and set behind and fiddle ‘Speed the Plough,’ and keep moving a lamp back and forth under that tin with his toe, and the old gobbler would have to tip-toe Nancy mighty lively to hunt for the cool places. Looked like he was jiggin’. I’m knowin’ to it that he cleaned up sev’ral thousand dollars on that ‘dancin’ turkey,’ as he called it.
“All the time his father couldn’t do nothin’ with him! Kind of a good-meanin’ chap, Hime allus was, though. Lib’ral with his money. Come easy, went easy. Drove a nice team. Girls all liked him. No girl caught him, though, till little Myry Austin got into long dresses. Hime was nigh onto thirty then, and had gone into a general dickerin’ bus’ness about the same as King Bradish does in town now; sold produce on commission, you know, and handled farmin’ tools, and so forth. He got to be real likely them days, and he reelly did think an awful sight of that Austin girl. It straightened him all out, havin’ her take a likin’ to him, and ’twas all understood in P’lermo as bein’ settled between ’em. And then what did young Klebe Willard do but come back from college with a cap on the back of his head ’bout as big as a cooky and his hair puffed out in front and puttin’ on more airs than a pigeon on a ridgepole. And havin’ nothin’ else to do he cut out Hime, and Hime didn’t know it for a long time, ’cause Klebe done his courtin’ on the sly on account of the old man. And when Hime did find it out—last one almost in the village, as us’ly happens in them cases, and got the mitten—well, you talk about goin’ to Tophet at an angle of forty-five with the track greased! Nothin’ but cards and hoorah-ste’boy, and tryin’ to make believe he didn’t care. I swanny, ’twas pitiful when you knowed what was underneath.”
Amazeen sighed and bored his cane into the soil, his elbows on his knees.
“There was excuses for him, most of us knowed that!” volunteered Uncle Buck.
“And as though he hadn’t done enough in breakin’ up the engagement—which wa’n’t no trouble, seein’ that Hime was so much older and she only kind o’ silly and teetered up by havin’ a dude like Judge Willard’s boy show her attention—Klebe had to go and sass Hime one ev’nin’ right here in front of this store—-that was when old Bruce owned it. Hime was pretty well tea-ed up—drinkin’ some, you understand, along with the rest—and he drove up here, leaned back and looked a long time at Klebe, who was standin’ on the platform smokin’ a cigarette. ‘I bought her ev’rything I could think of,’ says Hime, ‘but she had to go dicker for a poodle-dog and trade herself off, even swap!’
“Now with Hime so wrought up and all that, Klebe ought to have passed along, but he thought he had a tongue-walloper’s license, bein’ Coll Willard’s boy, and started in and called Hime ev’rything he could lay tongue to and then pitched into the Look fam’ly, root and branch in general; called old Look an ignorant clod-hopper, and said that sendin’ Phin to college was about like tryin’ to gold-plate an Early-Rose potater. And then he barked right out there in public—bein’ dizzy-headed by that time, I reckon—that all Myry Austin had cared about Hime, anyway, was to watch him perform ’round her, same as boys spit on a stick and throw it into a mill-pond for Towser to fetch back. And when Hime still set there takin’ it, Klebe was startin’ in on things that was worse still, when Hime came over his waggon wheel like a pick’rel after a skip-bait and—well, when ’twas over Klebe Willard had marks on his face that will always be there. Hime picked him up—everyone was too scared to mess in—and lugged him on his back to Judge Willard’s and throwed him over the fence about where he boosted the old man to-day, and hollered: ‘Here’s something to feed to your cat!’ Then he came back and got into his team before old Constable Denslow had got so he could speak.
“‘I shall have to arrest you, Hime,’ he says, ‘as I reckon you’ve killed him!’
“‘Arrest hell!’ says Hime. ‘I tried to kill him!’ And he slashed old Denslow across the face with his whip and went out of the village, hootin’ and gallopin’ his horse, with eighteen hundred or two thousand dollars owin’ to people ’round here. And since that night Hime Look ain’t been seen in this village till yesterday, and from what was dropped by word o’ mouth ’tween him and Phin, it’s pretty plain he ain’t been heard from by his fam’ly, either.”
He checked his garrulous narration in order to relight his pipe.
“It’s been a hard blow for Squire Phin, it all has,” observed Uncle Buck. “Just finishing college when it happened, and havin’ the record of bein’ the smartest critter there! He had the chance to go into a big city law-office, but there was poor old Seth knocked flat’s a flounder, his name on notes to wholesalers who’d sold to Hime, and feelin’ holden for all the other debts.
“Phin done what few boys would do. He come home, put his shoulder to the wheel and taught school and studied law between-whiles—and, well, we all know how he’s worked it out.”
“There was more than the money side of it, too, that he had to face,” broke in Amazeen.
“Seems as if I’ve heard hints that he was pretty fierce took in a certain quarter,” observed Brickett, with a sly look.
“Lord, I guess there was hints and more, too,” snapped Amazeen. “Why, he lugged Sylveny Willard’s dinner pail to and from school when they was so young that neither noticed there was any diff’rence between Seth Look and Coll Willard. Kind of one of those cases where two young ones nat’rally took to each other. I was postmaster for a spell and they wrote reg’lar when he was away to college, till all to once old Coll knowed about it and realised that Sylveny had got out of the ABC age. He up and howled blue murder and right on top came the Hime part. Gad, no, he wouldn’t consider Phin Look for a son-in-law—wa’n’t pedigree enough to him.”
Amazeen’s tone was scornful.
“That’s why he f’it off Klebe marryin’ Myry Austin year after year till it looked as though they never would git married—and from all I hear about the way they git along now, I reckon ’twould have been better all around if the old Judge had f’it harder. Klebe had to break loose and git a vessel for himself before he dared to buck the old man and marry her. I don’t believe he really ever wanted her, anyway, but she’s one o’ them women that’s like a sheet of fly paper—git it on your fingers and try to pull it off and it keeps stickin’ in a new place. She’s too pretty to have much head. Ain’t ever had anything to steady her down, and that keeps Klebe guessin’ and mad a good part of the time when he’s home.”
“If I’d have been Phin Look I’d have run away with Sylvena Willard years ago,” grunted Uncle Lysimachus. “I’ll bet she’d have gone. A dummed old hog like Coll Willard ain’t got no right to keep two people like them apart. And more’n that, he’s torchin’ her all the time to marry King. There ain’t a woman in this village that women-folks in trouble run to as they do to her, and we all know what Squire Phin is to P’lermo! There ain’t hardly a family in this town that he ain’t settled a fuss for—not in courts and by runnin’ up bills of expense, but by kind words and common-sense and good advice and by gittin’ right inside a critter’s heart. A man ain’t goin’ to get rich by that way of practisin’ law, but, by jerro, he’s earnin’ the kind of currency that they say makes a millionnaire in eternity. He’s the husband Sylvena Willard ought to have, and, by gad, if I was her I’d have him!”
“Did you ever stop to think, Lys,” drawled Ama-zeen, “that people who have things pretty much their own way, without carin’ what other people want, who tromp over commands, disobey parents, bust into fam’lies and all that, are pretty apt to be scaly critters? Bein’ as they are, Sylveny Willard and Phin Look deserve to have each other; but bein’ as they are, it’s almighty likely they never will. Cuts both ways, you see! A woman that forgets all her father has done for her and leaves him alone in his old age and goes away to a man that he is dead ag’inst, has got the disposition to treat a husband as bad as she has a father. May not do it, understand—but the disposition is there. Marryin’ and givin’ in marriage is all right, but fam’ly loyalty is something, too. You want to remember that Coll Willard probably don’t seem to her the same as he does to us. A man that busts into a family when he knows he ain’t wanted may be gritty and in love, and all that, but he’s puttin’ himself and his pleasure and in-t’rests first, and lettin’ others trail. Phin Look allus has practised what he preaches to his clients. But it has sartinly happened bad for him—Hime’s cuttin’ up and all the rest, and it ain’t lookin’ much better just now.”
“I had an idea they’d git married sometime,” said Brickett. “You’ll find that Squire Phin has had some partic’lar mighty good reason for stayin’ in this little place. He don’t belong here and he never has. A drummer told me that outside of here he’s called one of the best-read men in the State. Judges all say that, the drummer told me. He don’t have to stay here, not by a long shot. Yes, I thought they’d git married some day when old Coll got through, but I guess this Hime matter comin’ up agin will bust things forever. Klebe will take it up.”
“I’ll tell you what I think will happen now,” broke in a tall young man who had sauntered up and had been listening.
No one asked any questions. Amazeen bored his cane deeper with indignant twistings, as he reflected on the situation.
“I reckon she’ll give in to the Judge at last and marry King Bradish.” The lounger spoke with tone of conviction.
Buck and Amazeen slowly turned their heads and stared at each other with a singular look of mutual intelligence. Amazeen’s lips were set in a straight line above his bristly brush of short chin beard. There was a flicker of malice in Uncle Buck’s gray eyes, glittering under their tufted brows.
When they had established a thorough understanding by means of a prolonged stare, they simultaneously struggled to their feet and started around the store. At the foot of the outside stairway they paused and looked at each other again.
“Ain’t nobody else up there with him, is there?” asked Amazeen.
“No one ain’t gone up sence he opened shop,” replied Buck. “He got down early.”’
“I don’t blame him,” snorted Amazeen. “What with el’phunt and hosses and hoorah, and yard full and Hime hollerin’ ’round as though he was front of his show tent, and that ding parrot of his squawkin’, ‘Crack ’em down, gents; the old army game!’ I reckon the Squire couldn’t git away any too early. Now———-” he paused, and the two men looked at each other a long time, wrinkling their brows.
“If we try to plunk the news about Bradish and ‘Rissy Mayo to him at the fust-off, he’ll shet us up by yappin’ out that he won’t listen to slander. He handles ev’rything that’s spicy news just that way,” observed Buck, dubiously.
The young man who dropped the remark about Bradish lounged around the corner and stood eyeing the stairway, incertitude written large on his vapid countenance.
Buck, with the air of a conspirator, cautiously reached out his cane and rapped Amazeen’s foot. When the latter raised his abstracted gaze from the ground, Buck winked prodigiously and jerked his head sideways. Amazeen turned and eyed the young man with a shrewd twinkle of understanding.
“Son!” he called softly. The young man came along to them.
“You ain’t ever had that talk o’ yourn with the Squire, have ye?”
A mournful wag of the head.
“Wouldn’t you like to have me’n Lys, here, to sort o’ pave the way?”
The head waggled again in token of reviving interest.
“Well, you go stand acrost the road and when you see me come to the winder and toss out my cud o’ terbacker, you boost along up. Me’n Lys is takin’ a friendly int’rest in the case for you. Now go ’long over there and watch out.” He pushed the young man away hastily as he began to stammer thanks.
“I can’t talk with the dum fool,” he growled through the corner of his mouth, as he led the way up the stairs. “Fur’s I’m concerned I wisht he was married to a half dozen jest like the one he’s hitched up with. But as long’s we’ve got to git this thing to the Squire ’round Robin Hood’s barn, Mayo’s fool makes a good road-breaker, as you might say. Now I’ll start in on the Squire as though I was ready mad because he has married Wat to that girl, and that will bring him up all standin’ to argue that the marriage is a rousin’ success.”
“One that King Bradish is tryin’ to mess into and bust up, hey?” suggested Buck with a knowing leer.
Amazeen returned the look with just as much significance, thrust his elbow into Buck’s ribs and started up the stairs.
“You’re right,” asserted Buck. “The Squire’ll fight other folkses’ battles before he’ll take up his own—always did, always will, prob’ly. Now, I reckon if we manage this thing right, King Bradish will get the wickin’ put to him in good shape.”
He stopped outside the door of the office and concluded in a husky whisper:
“Even if the Squire don’t get her, Lys, let’s fix it so that King Bradish never will. Sylveny Willard’s too good a girl to be wasted that way, and if the Judge gits devil-set enough he’s li’ble to drive her right into it. Now we’ll ste’boy the Squire onto King in spite of himself.”
“That critter has rid’ around town with his nose up ‘bout’s long as I can stand it,” said Amazeen.
“He’s a stuck-up, blame-fired skunk, that’s what he is,” snapped Buck, the memory of certain sneers about “Palermo’s mossbacks” burning hotly with him.
The conspirators composed their faces and went in.
“Old Widder Bugg was a-weanin’ her ca’f,
Used ha’f for herself and the ca’f had ha’f,
But he bellered all day and he blatted all night,
And he hollered for his rations so tough and tight,
That the widder she fed him one last, square meal,
And the next he knowed he was peddled for veal.
Oh, nice little ca’ves that is bein’ weaned,
Shouldn’t keep blattin’ when the cow’s been dreened.”
—Effort by “Rhymester” Tuttle.
Of the four strap-bottomed “company chairs” in Squire Look’s office, “three had spavins and the other the blind staggers,” as old Uncle Lysimachus Buck expressed it. But by dint of balancing on the sound legs or bracing against the wall at the right angle, or by extreme care in easing one’s self into a safe position, the loafers who dropped in to smoke managed to worry along. When the wood box cover was shut down that made a seat for two. As for clients, when the chairs were occupied clients were glad to roost on a corner of the big table and rap their heels with great ease of manner and comfort of person.
The Squire’s visitors sat down and as promptly lighted their pipes.
“As I was tellin’ ye, Squire, the other day,” began Marriner Amazeen, after pausing to quack briskly at his pipe stem to kindle the waning lire, “I don’t see what in sanup ye was thinkin’ of to torch Watson Mayo up to marry that hity-tity-flighty little fool for. The minister wouldn’t marry ’em and you done it, and so of course the Mayos lay the blame to you.” He made great show of resentment. Buck apparently had much trouble in refraining from grinning.
The ’Squire, who had been feeding the stove, dusted his hands smartly and pudged slowly back to his armchair without replying. He picked up his pipe, surveyed a match, end to end, preparatory to scratching it, a quizzical pucker about his mouth.
“You remember the time Benson Wallace had all his new grading washed away by the cloudburst, ’Mad’?”
Amazeen nodded grimly. He did not relish Squire Look’s illustrations.
“Well, Bens’ came bootin’ down to the office here and wanted me to sue Deacon Bassett, who had been praying for rain to fill his mill-pond. Laid the whole damage of the cloudburst to the deacon’s power of supplication. I don’t have anything to do with these love cloudbursts around here.”
“But you encouraged the cussed fools—torch ’em on,” persisted Amazeen.
“No, it’s a chap named Hymen that carries the torch, ’Mad’. In Wat’s case I wasn’t even actuated by a mercenary motive, for he owned up that he didn’t have the fee, and he hasn’t paid me yet, and he probably never will.”
“And them’s the kind of double-hitches you’re throwing the harness over!” sneered Amazeen.
“She’s handsomer than the chromo picture on a calendar—you’ve got to say that about the snippet,” commented Lysimachus Buck, desiring to provoke the Squire to retort.
“You’d ought to ’a’ plunked advice right to him not to do it, Squire,” sputtered Amazeen. “It has raised the devil with him—and he wasn’t none too bright before. Who knows anything about an industrial school girl like her? She don’t know nothin’ about herself. I tell you, it’s been a hard pill for the Mayos to swaller. Their only boy clearin’ out like he done, leavin’ a good, comf’table home and now only a swipe in Jote Bradley’s livery stable!”
The lawyer leaned back in his chair, and, hooking his leg over the arm, softly scratched the back of the appreciative old dog with dangling boot toe.
“Eli, here, has often remarked to me,” he said, squinting up at the cracked ceiling, the quizzical pucker still at his mouth corners, “that I let love as a special pleading overrule exceptions right along.
“I do really suppose I have done a master sight of malicious mischief in the world by marrying these young critters that are fighting the old folks and don’t dare to flee to the parsons, and haven’t a single, reasonable, sensible,businessexcuse for getting married, except that they’ve fallen in love themselves instead of waiting and letting the farms or the fishing schooners be introduced to each other by the old folks and fall in love. There’s nothing prettier in this world, ’Mad,’ than a hundred and twenty acre farm sighing with its corn tassels and a neighbouring farm rippling back an answer with its oat heads, and both of ’em getting so much in love with one another that it is only necessary for the young folks to get together and ratify the match and count the wedding presents.”
Old Amazeen snorted disgustedly. “There ain’t no more practicality to you, Squire, than there is to a June bug tryin’ to butt the moon. I tell ye, proputty has got to be considered first!”
The Squire still gazed meditatively at the ceiling through the tobacco smoke.
“’Mad’,” he said, in that half-jesting tone that many Palermo literalists characterised as ‘too free and easy for a lawyer,’ “you’ve loafed here a good deal and I’ve heard you comment on most of the Palermo vital statistics—births and deaths and marriages. Now here’s the difference between you and Eli, here. You say, ‘Huh! ’nother brat got along down to So-and-so’s, and only last week she was rapping out Hungryman’s ratty-too on the bottom of the flour-barrel with her rolling-pin, trying to dust down enough for another batch of biscuit!’ But Eli comes in, wags his tail and says to me: ‘Just came past So-and-so’s and their dog Gyp said to me that he’d slyed in a few minutes before and kissed the new baby on the cheek with the tip of his tongue. Said the new baby tickled right out into the funniest little snicker!’ Gyp said: ‘Old man, we’re all a little short just now, ’count of extra expenses and excitement and all that, you know, or I’d ask you to have dinner with me in honor of the occasion, but we’re going to pitch in again in dead earnest, and I’m going to run the dog churn over to the custom dairy, and, say! for one snicker a day from that baby I’ll trot my legs off.’”
“’Mad’, as you say it: ‘A couple more fools married before they had a shot in their locker.’ And Eli says: ‘I happened to drop in behind that young Davis couple in the narrow path, and though I wasn’t trying to listen to secrets, I did hear him say: “Little wife, you aren’t sorry you married a poor man, are you?”’”
“All that people want money for,” said she, “is to buy just such happiness as we possess now. And their money doesn’t buy it, after all. And we don’t have to say ‘mine’ and ‘your’ about our love. It’s all—ours—and that’s a blessed word.” And then she stood on tiptoe and pulled his head down—and if I hadn’t run up over the bank then I’d have deserved to have a tin can tied to my tail.’
“’Mad’, you say: ‘Well, old Brown has got done! I hear he wasn’t wuth much property—hain’t leavin’ much behind.’ And Eli comes in with head and tail down: ‘It’s the husband of that good, old Missus Brown that’s dead—the lady that has set out so many plates of grub for me. The plate wasn’t on the back porch this morning, but I sat there a little while and I heard some one inside talking low and he said: “There was never a man in this town who left so many friends when he died. And he left a memory that’s worth leaving—never a mean act nor a sneaking trick nor a gouge in a trade! Property? Oh, I don’t know. You never thought of that when you thought of him. I only know that he used wisely the good things he found on earth in his reach as he went along, without seeing how much he could keep away from his neighbours.”’”
Old man Amazeen rapped out his pipe ashes and looked at the Squire sullenly.
“Because I’ve tug-a-lugged all my life and got a little money out at interest, I s’pose you’re gittin’ in a dig at me, too,” he growled.
“No, we were talking about young Mayo marrying Damaris Scott,” returned Phineas, cheerily, “and you were saying, or intimating, that when two such poor love-sick young critters come to me and want to own the privilege of walking down life, hand in hand and heart to heart, I ought first to inventory their property and their prospects.”
The waver in his voice, the depth of his significance was lost on the old man.
“He gave up a good home, and where did they live the first month after they were married?” Amazeen struck his hand on his patched knee. “Where did they live, I say? In one of Bradley’s box stalls that Wat Mayo tacked burlap ’round to keep out the draughts. And they ain’t much better off now down in that Sykes’ rent, living on bannock bread and fighting wharf rats.There’sone of your—“, old Ama-zeen wrinkled his nose and brought the word out of his nostrils with a sardonic twist—“lovematches, Phin Look, and there’s worse than that on the docket.”
Amazeen stumped across the room to the front window. “Huh! That’s queer! He’s coming across the street now,” he said, with a chuckle and a wink directed at Uncle Lysimachus.
Squire Phin understood why the two old men turned their backs on him, hunching their shoulders and shaking with suppressed mirth as the uncertain footsteps of Mayo blundered up the outside stairs.
He was a tall and scrawny young man with black hair parted in the middle and spatted down on his head, presenting twin surfaces as shiny as the wings of a beetle. A thin moustache drooped over a weak mouth, and his eyes had that bland, vacant arch above them that irritates one’s common-sense. Stupid, smug, self-satisfied, and spoiled—the only child of the hard-working village carpenter, he had always worn better clothes than any other boy in Palermo, had never been allowed to work, and had posed as a village beau. He was just the one to attract a girl fresh from the half-penal restraint of the State industrial school and “bound out” as a drudge to a Palermo family.
From the time when Phineas Look began first impatiently to notice the youth loafing along the street, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, the sight made him angry—not with the boy, but with the parents that were ruining him. Once he had bluntly pitched into Ezra Mayo, and from the indignant retorts of that fond parent discovered that he vaguely prized Watson’s stupid idleness as something aristocratic.
The fact that they now referred to this marriage as they would to an especially sudden and fatal attack of the bubonic plague, and refused to admit that they still had a son, appealed to the offended lawyer by its humour rather than otherwise.
“You’ve been trying to swim in a puddle of molasses, you poor devil,” he muttered as young Mayo came shuffling across the room. The faded glories of his worn clothing were eloquent of what had happened in his fortunes. His coat was ripped in the arm seam, the cuffs were frayed, but he wore his big puff tie of baby blue, and the pungent effluvia of the stable was toned down by cheap perfume that surrounded him like impalpable fog.
“That smell’s thick enough to cut,” murmured old Amazeen to Uncle Buck, fingers squeezing his nostrils. The woe-begone visage of the client stirred spasms of silent mirth in the old men.
“Well, Wat, how’s the bride?” inquired Squire Phin, with heartiness. “And there wasn’t any hurry about your paying me that two dollars, if that’s what you’re come in for.”
“I ain’t come to pay you no two dollars,” returned the youth, gloomily. “First place, I ain’t got it; second place, it ain’t as I expected it was goin’ to be.”
A subdued “tchock” sounded in the nose of Amazeen.
“Let’s see. You’re speaking now of your marriage and not of your job, as I understand it,” suggested the Squire, relighting his pipe; “though—ump-foo—ump-foo—I should say you’d better save such talk for the job.”
“Well, I’m sort of speakin’ of the two together,” stammered the young man.
“I reckon you’d better begin to dissociate your wife from the livery stable, Watson,” drily advised the Squire, “even though you did start housekeeping there. Now, you’ll remember that you came to me bringing the prettiest girl I ever saw, and you told me that it wouldn’t be worth while for you to try to live if you didn’t have her. You don’t mean to come here now, do you, and tell me that you don’t love her?”
“’Tain’t that,” he blurted; “oh, ’tain’t that, Squire. It’s because I love her so much and—and—well, somehow it’s all going wrong and I’m afraid she don’t love me. It has kind of taken the gimp out o’ me. I didn’t think dad and ma would stand out so long—andshedidn’t, either, and I ain’t got no trade so I can hold down some good job, and she ain’t satisfied with me. No, she ain’t, Squire. If dad and ma would only take me home—if you would see ’em and fix it and——”
“Look here, Watson.” Look threw himself forward and drove his fists on the table with an emphasis that started the dust. “That’s why I married you off, you fool, to get you out of leading-strings, to make a man of you, instead of a puppy, loafing around our streets and chasing home to your mother’s doughnut jar three times a day. Even old Eli, here, knows how to carry home a bone forhimself, but you hadn’t even done that foryourselfup to the time you were married. And I gave you something you wanted, something to work for, something that every man needs to make a true man of himself, except when he’s a tough old bach like me. Now what are you whining about?”
Phineas Look’s reading of his own “heart-docket” the day before had not inclined him over-much to amiability toward this particular variety of ingrate. His tone was peremptory and he scowled.
“I can’t earn no kind of a livin’,” Mayo stammered.
“And you probably never will so long as you stay a chambermaid in a livery stable. Great God, is that the limit of your ambition or your enterprise? A man with a wife he loves, with two strong hands and a will to get-there-Eli, to come sniveling like this! Hunt your work! Buckle to it! That’s what will make something better of you, boy, than Mayo’s housedog.”
The taunt was wasted, for the youth persisted in his stubborn lament. “She says now she wouldn’t have married me if she didn’t think we’d be taken care of better.”
“What kind of cussed notions did you put in her head?” the lawyer stormed. “If you lied to her, Watson, it’s up to you to square yourself now by making good. Do so well by her that she’ll love you and respect you for yourself. Don’t make me sorry that I cut your dog-leash before your parents plumb ruined you.”
Young Mayo cast a furtive look at the two old men, and leaning over the table murmured, his lips trembling:
“I tell you, Squire, she scares me. She says it has come to her in a vision that she has a mother—a lady mother, somewhere, all in silks and satins, and she’s seen her in a vision with her diamond thing on her head. And most ev’ry night she wakes and sits up in bed and reaches up her arms and says her lady mother just asked her to come, Squire Phin, and she’s a-goin’. Yes, s’r, she’s a-goin’ some time and I’m scared and I ain’t got no ambition and I can’t buy her no good clothes, and I sold my watch and scarfpin to give her money. My Gawd, Squire, she’s a-goin’ and I can’t live without her, nohow.”
Perspiration streamed down his quivering face and his lips “guffled” tremulously. All the smugness and self-satisfaction were gone now, and for the first time the lawyer saw the Mayo boy in all his wretched, discouraging inefficiency. With a pang of self-reproach he reflected that some natures cannot stand stiff doses—and his remedy for making over a man had certainly been a heroic one. As he pondered, he fell into his characteristic attitude, hands clutched into the long locks of his gray hair, his elbows on the table. He gazed into the pathos of that quivering face and studied it as he would the page of an open book. The little office was very still.
“Blorh-hum!” coughed Amazeen, and he proceeded, addressing no one in particular: “When I was a boy, goin’ to school, there was a family named Bragg that lived clust to us, and they had a boy named Ximenus—that was it, Ximenus Bragg. Them Braggs they was poorer—poorer’n Pooduc, but the old man had to have his three dogs, and fin’ly Ximenus was took with a craze for music and nothin’ would do but what he’d got to have a snare drum. And he teased and he coaxed. Old Bragg hadn’t the gumption to plunk his foot right down and say ‘No,’ but he’d whine and argue with the boy and say that with winter a-comin’ on he’d ought to have long-legged boots instead of a drum. Finally Old Bragg told Ximenus that if he would go without the boots and not whine, he could have the drum, and the drum he did get, by gorry. I s’pose that for a couple of days there never was a more tickleder boy. He ratty-tooed and ratty-tummed and long-rolled and biffed and banged and et his meals off’n the head of the thing and kept at it till his ma was so near drove crazy that she chased him out doors with the rollingpin and threatened to bust in the head of that drum if he ever put stick to it ag’in in the house.
“There it was, late fall and the snow beginning to fly, and I’ll never forget the sight Ximenus made standin’ out there on the cold door stone on one foot and holding the other foot to the calf of his leg to warm it, and then shifting feet to get the other warm, and drumming away all the time, trying to keep his courage up and make himself believe that he loved music and the drum and was glad he had it instead of them new long-legged boots.”
“Beats all about some critters, don’t it?” commented Uncle Buck, after listening to this tale with much interest.
“It does that,” returned Amazeen.
The Squire had not taken his eyes from the Mayo boy’s face.
“Bub,” he said softly, “they meant well—your folks—but—damn ’em for fools.
“Are you and the little one hungry?” he asked in a half whisper after a time, careful that the old men did not overhear.
“We ain’t suff’rin’ none, Squire, but we don’t have meat vittles nor nothin’ the same’s I had at——” but as the hard lines crinkled ominously around the lawyer’s gray eyes he stopped confusedly.
Shielding himself from the scrutiny of Buck and Amazeen behind the youth who still leaned over the table, Squire Phin straightened his leg and cautiously ran his hand into his trousers pocket. After a period of fumbling he slid his hand along the table, slipped a bill into the palm by which the young man was propping himself, squeezed the fingers down over it, and said with a tenderness almost parental:
“Go buy a good, meat dinner to-day, son, and have plenty of meat hash for supper, and perhaps the little one will sleep so soundly that the lady mother can’t disturb her. Take good heart. As Eli, here, says: ‘The harder you have to dig after a woodchuck, the better your appetite is when you get him.’ We’ll see what can be done. Now straighten up. Throw back your shoulders. Cock your knee every time you step, just like your best livery horse—the best ‘letter,’ you know—the one all the folks ask for. Hold up your chin and show ’em it’s natural and not a check-rein habit. Remember all the time that you’re young, life’s ahead of you, and the prettiest girl in Palermo is your wife. That’s the way to face the world. Tail over the dasher. Now out and at it!”
And seizing the youth by the arm, he marched him to the door, thwacking his broad palm between his shoulders at every step.
When Squire Phin turned and came back to his table he knotted his eyebrows and glared at the two old men.
“Now wipe those Chessy cat grins off your faces,” he snapped. “I see through your hectoring scheme. But you watch me. I’ll sooner or later put that marriage along with the others I’ve pigeon-holed under the label ‘Successes.’”
Amazeen turned to Buck. “The Squire wants to have all his marriage certificates hold up like his title deeds, Lys—legal, binding, and good for all time. But you mustn’t get touchy with us, Phin. It isn’t very often that you marry a fool tumble-bug to a butterfly. Howsomever, you’ve done it this trip, and it ain’t goin’ to be a success—and it ain’t your fault. There’s something worse than what’s showed yet goin’ to drop in that quarter or I’m no prophet. You’d better not be mixed too close in it.”
“Go along with your tattling gossip,” cried the lawyer. “If you and Uncle Lys haven’t anything better to do, go out and take a sun bath. I want to study.”
“You know more law already than you need. You know it better than you do some kinds of human nature, and I’m going to post you a little on the last-named,” pursued Amazeen, cheerfully disregarding the rebuff. “There’s more’n lady mothers and visions that’s makin’ Rissy Mayo discontented.”
“Huh-huh!” grunted Look, without apparent interest, taking down a volume of reports and spatting the dust from it.
“And I ain’t givin’ you any guess-so,” shouted Amazeen, nettled by the lawyer’s contemptuous snort. He stood up and cracked his cane on the floor. “I ain’t ghostin’ ’round, ’specially, nor tryin’ to pry into my neighbours’ business, but when I’m knowin’ to a thing that’s poked right under my nose, why, I know it. Wat Mayo has to set up ev’ry ev’nin’, don’t he, to wait for let teams to come in? Well, he wa’n’t out strollin’ in the Cod Lead Nubble pines all spring and summer, he and Rissy, she a-swingin’ her hat by the ribbons, all so fine and gay—and that was nigh ev’ry fair night. He was settin’ in the stable office shinin’ up hames’ brass-work and nickel trimmin’s, wa’n’t he? He ain’t meetin’ her on the South Cove road with a buff-lined Goddard, and wearin’ a white hat with a black band, and takin’ her aboard. No, he ain’t got any such hat, and there’s only one buff-lined Goddard in these parts and——”
“You say you’re knowing to all that?” demanded the Squire. His gaze was direct and glowering and his fingers gripped the volume so tightly that they were white and bloodless.
“Not only I’m knowin’ to it, but so’s the South Cove seiners that have their dry racks out that way.” Amazeen was defiant. The lawyer glared at him so threateningly that he became thoroughly indignant. “And if you want the straight facts,” he barked, “and have got to have names right out in meetin’ to prove it ain’t just gossip, then it’s King Bradish who is sparkin’ round the lady mother’s lovely daughter that you’ve plastered off onto a poor boy that’s broke his people’s hearts by gettin’ married to her. I’ve been wond’rin’ how the high-toned Sylveny Willard would like to find that out.”
Squire Phin laid the book on the table and put his hands behind him to hide their trembling.
“You listen a moment, Amazeen,” he said, spitting the words at the old man; “there are limits to what a person can tell and tattle in a community, when that telling and tattling implicates others’ good names. You know me and you know how much you can depend on what I tell you. If I hear another word on this matter as having been passed around the village by you or Buck, here, I’ll give my services to King Bradish, sue you for slander, attach every dollar’s worth you own, and, by the gods, I’ll win my case. Now if you want your tongue to empty your pocket, go ahead and talk.”
The old men stared at him a while and then, mumbling angrily, but plainly intimidated, went clumping down the stairs. The Squire stood in the middle of the office, his hands spatting each other behind him. At last the consciousness that some one was bawling his name outside broke upon his profound meditation.
“Squire Phin! Squire! Won’t you see here a second?” shouted Amazeen.
Look went along to the front window and threw it up. Only the old men were in sight in the street, standing shoulder to shoulder, their faces upturned, their beards snapping in the breeze. At this safe strategic distance they had one more shot to fire, and their countenances showed it. Amazeen held his hand beside his mouth and huskily whispered:
“Squire, you know—that party—the party we was talkin’ about just now?” Sullen nod. “You needn’t sue me on his account. I won’t say nothin’. But—Squire!” Another curt nod.
“I know that said party has owed you a settlement for quite a while, if what folks say is true. Now, why don’t you put your bill in with Wat’s and collect both with a”—the old man shouted the last word—“hoss-whip?” For Squire Phin had banged down the window.