A nice little man came up the lane,
And it was summer weather;
Said he, “It is jolly to meet again,
Like this, we two together.
And if there be no other thing
That you can think to say,
Then it’s ‘How do you do? ’ and ‘How do you do?’
And ‘How do you do, to-day? ’ ”
It was “Figger-four” Avery who secured from Hiram Look the most information about himself for general circulation. When, after the first few days of wonderment, the attendance at the Squire’s premises dropped off, it was “Figger-four” who remained loyal to the new attraction. Hiram tolerated his constant presence because the little man’s wide-eyed, wide-eared, wide-mouthed receptiveness of his tales flattered the eminent impresario of Imogene and her appanage.
Avery was so small and inoffensive that the showman never resented any questions that he asked. All others Hiram shooed off with profanity when they hinted concerning his affairs and intentions.
“Blast him,” growled Hiram to his brother, “I feel like a sap tree with a spile let into it when he’s around. I just drip and drip away to him and he sets and laps it down and I can’t seem to shut off. But he’s an obligin’ little fool.”
Avery’s soubriquet came from the appearance of his legs. A fever-sore years before had shriveled the left leg, and the knee was set permanently at an angle. As he bobbed along, alternately rising and sinking, he kept presenting with his legs the shape of a grotesque 4.
“Everywhere I go,” said Hiram, “Figger-four is right at my elbow, still askin’ questions. And I get interested in answerin’ and I forget and try to keep step with him, and the first thing I know I’m hoppin’ along worse than a darned jack-rabbit. But he’ll do errands like a fly.”
Therefore he did not rebuff the little man. In consequence Avery was able to report that Hiram had travelled all over the country; that he had brought his chariots to Palermo because he was going to start out with another circus after he got rested up and had squared things with his brother. Furthermore, the people who had bought his other show property weren’t willing to pay a fair price for the waggons, and Hiram didn’t propose to be “Jewed.” No one had ever got the better of Hiram, so Hiram told Avery, and Avery told the people of Palermo. He had—at this point Figger-four always took a long breath—rising forty thousand dollars in the bank, beside what he carried in the fat pocketbook. He was ready to lend money on first mortgages, and Avery was able to state that already several persons whom Judge Willard had been squeezing for bonuses on renewal of their notes had refunded their loans with Hiram. As Avery bobbed around telling this, he served as an excellent advertising medium, and other patrons of Judge Willard, who had been the town’s sole financial man for years, came to the new capitalist for loans. Avery admitted that probably the Judge would still enjoy a monopoly of handling the money of the widows and orphans and old folks who had placed their funds with him for investment, because Hiram was not yet morally rehabilitated in the town’s opinion.
“But there ain’t a better man to borrow money from,” concluded his champion. “He don’t take no bonus and he lets you have it for six per cent, and set your own time.”
Moreover, Hiram started the hum of industry in Palermo by hiring Ezra Mayo and several helpers to build a shelter for the circus waggons. And he was also vaguely hinting to the admiring Avery that next season he might start something in the way of business in Palermo that would make people open their eyes.
“You’re all deader’n a side-show mermaid here in Palermo,” he said one afternoon as he and Avery were sitting by the roadside under one of the big Look poplars. “There’s a lot of things that need to be peppered up. My brother Phin could have done it if he wasn’t too easy-goin’. Now, how long has old Coll Willard been town treasurer?”
There was a queer glint in the good eye that Hiram turned on Avery.
“Goin’ on thirty years.”
“Does he give bonds?”
“Hain’t ever been asked to,” replied Figger-four, with the readiness of one whose business is to know other people’s affairs. “This town wouldn’t ask a Willard to do such a thing as that. He’s safer’n the Bank of England, the Judge is.”
“Is, eh?” Hiram’s voice was hard. “I’ve seen a town note that was signed with only his name as treasurer. Does the town allow him to borrow money that way?”
“I believe Cap’n Ward did bring it up in town meetin’ once and say that the selectmen ought to sign notes along with the treasurer. But there wa’n’t anything done, as I remember. Cap’n was kind of a kicker. He died the summer after that town meetin’,” added Avery, with an air as though the death were a special visitation to punish temerity in attacking a Willard.
“Well, I’m feelin’ pretty healthy, myself,” said Hiram, “and you watch me go into the next town meetin’.”
“Lyme Bearce says he’ll bet you’re a disturbin’ element, no matter where you light,” stated Avery, with the fearless naïveté of a village news-bureau that proposes to do its full duty.
“Lyme Bearce and the whole of you be jiggered,” stormed Hiram. “I’ve been ’round the world some, and got up against human nature, and I tell you the only way to meet a man is with one hand hold of your wad and the other doubled up behind your back. Old Willard ain’t goin’ to run this town to suit himself. You watch me!”
“Then you ain’t goin’ off right away with your circus?” meekly asked Avery.
“I shan’t be goin’ till things get dull ’round here,” crisply returned the showman. “That’ll be after there’s a performance in one ring, me with the whip, old Coll Willard ridin’ bareback, and ev’ry time I snap he’ll turn a flip-flop.”
Figger-four blinked at him uncertainly.
“Let’s see, you ain’t ever seen Klebe since you—you——”
“Since I licked him! Say it; I ain’t ashamed of it,” blustered Hiram.
“Well, he’s thickened up solid’s a knot, and they say there’s more knockin’ down o’ men on board the ‘Lycurgus Webb’ than on any other schooner that sails out of Rockland. Terrible hard man Klebe has growed to be!”
Avery glanced at the showman slyly to note how he received this information.
“I have squared all accounts with Klebe Willard,” said Hiram, “but if I owe him anything more he can come and collect it. As for his father, that’s another matter. He took my old father by the throat after I went away and he had the twist noose of a mortgage around him for a good hold. He bought in accounts against us, as ev’ryone in P’lermo knows, so that he could collect the bills in a way to add ev’ry cent of costs that skin-skunk lawyers could tack on. And my old father and my brother was caught foul and paid double—yes, treble—for ev’ry dollar I owed. I ain’t nothin’ except plain muck, Avery—just a cheap renegade that hasn’t woke up to be half decent till it is too late. Payin’ it back to Phin don’t fix it. I shall always hate myself—but never mind that!” He swallowed hard and shook his head violently to and fro. Sudden passion blazed out of this moment of weakness. “There’s one thing I can do—I can spend forty thousand dollars puttin’ Coll Willard where he put my old father, and, by the gods, I’ll do it! That’s my business and no one’s else, and they can’t oh-please-don’t me!—no one, Avery, no one!”
“Oh, I reckon the Judge is too well fixed foryou,” observed Avery, wagging his head. “The Willards was always wuth money—plenty of it.”
Hiram did not reply. But he snorted contemptuously and his eye had a strange look of craft and secret intelligence. “S’pose your brother will be your lawyer,” suggested Avery.
“Look-a-here, Figger-four,” cried the showman, “I’ve been drippin’ away to you as usual without meanin’ to say half that I have. My brother Phin has been abused by old Willard, right and left, but he has been too easy to fight back the way he ought to. I’m squarin’ things for our family in gen’ral, but it has got to be done without Phin’s knowin’ it. Do you see? I want to use you some, first and last, and you’ll get your pay, but if you say one single word to Phin about what I’m doin’, I’ll twist that other leg of yours till the joint comes behind like a cow’s hind gambrel. Me and you, and mum! You understand!”
Avery apprehensively promised and escaped, evidently fearful lest more secrets were to be entrusted to him. He felt that he wasn’t capable of safely holding any more just then. But the consciousness that Hiram Look was meditating the overthrow of such a magnate as Judge Willard propped his eyes open a bit more widely as he hopped about the street, and people began to wonder why Figger-four so often caught himself up in his discourse and looked scared and hurried away. They didn’t realise how anxiously the poor sieve was struggling to hold his secrets. The constant and sulphurous threats of Hiram started the cold sweat whenever they conferred together. Day by day Avery brought new bits of information that the showman sent him to dig out of people, and day by day Hiram fitted the information, piece to piece, only himself knowing to what it all tended.
He sat most of the time in the porch of the old house, smoking long cigars, the parrot occasionally croaking his familiar cry as he waddled about his cage, that was suspended from the porch roof.
“My office,” Hiram called the porch.
People who wanted to borrow money, old acquaintances, folks who loafed along that way to hear his stories of wanderings, came and sat on the turf of the yard or on the steps. The showman shunned Brickett’s store and the other gathering places of the village. Once, Hard-Times Wharff came up and started to have a weather-vane spell on the Look porch, but Hiram drove him away with violent contumely.
“He’s crazier’n a barn rat in a thrashing machine,” the showman observed to his faithful Avery. “Why, I hear he even said I was bringing trouble into this place, the old liar. I’ve only come to straighten out trouble, that’s all. Smoothin’ and glossin’ things over and lettin’ people kick you around and never objectin’ may be some folks’ idea of livin’, but it ain’t mine. And I don’t allow anyone to say I’m makin’ trouble when I’m doin’ a duty. You tell that to ’em in the village, Avery, and you tell old Whatyecallum Wharff, there, that I’ll feed him to Imogene if he snoops ’round here again.”
But the next day Avery came bobbing hurriedly into the yard with the breathless announcement:
“’Quar’us smelt it comin’! ’Twas a warnin’ to you, Hime!”
“Smelt what? That load of superphosphate that Cap’n Nymphus Bodfish just brought in his packet? I can smell it, too.”
“Klebe Willard came in that packet,” gasped Avery. “His schooner is loadin’ at Portland, and he’s up for his lay-off.”
“Well, what if he did come?” inquired Hiram, rocking on the hind legs of his chair and boring Avery with his piercing eye.
“Why, all is, he’s talked with the Judge, and now he’s frothin’ ’round Brickett’s store, and he’s comin’ up here. I stayed long enough to find that out.”
“Let him come,” observed Hiram, with a calmness that troubled Avery.
The messenger snapped up the full length of his good leg and shook his cane at the imperturbable man on the porch. “But there’s liable to be trouble,” he cried. “Klebe’s pretty middlin’ how-come-ye-so, same as he usually is when he’s ashore, and there’s enough folks in this place to want to see trouble and they’ll poke him ahead. Why don’t you have him put under bonds?”
Hiram got up and stepped down into the road. A man had already started out of Brickett’s store and was stumping up the middle of the dusty highway. A dozen men were leisurely following along the gravelled sidewalks. When the distant pedestrian perceived Hiram, he shouted hoarsely, shook both fists above his head and came on with brisk pace.
“Avery,” said Hiram, “you gallop down with your best high-Betty-Martin tiptoe and tell that gent that’s in the middle of the road that there’s nothing’ doin’ in the circus way here this afternoon.”
Avery stood hesitating.
“Hop along,” roared the showman, giving the man a push. “You’ve been whinin’ that you didn’t want trouble here. Now get into the game and stop it. You can inform Klebe Willard—for I reckon that’s him tackin’ up this way—that when he steps his foot onto the Look place he’s steppin’ onto a proposition that has the burnin’ deck laid away in the ice-box. Tell him I said so.”
Hiram left the road and went into the big barn.
The other came on more rapidly now, with a shout that was something like a jeer. He violently bumped the entreating Avery from his path and strode into the Look yard, the retinue following at a distance.
The new arrival set his sturdy legs wide apart, threw his cloth cap on the ground, and bellowed:
“Come out here in the fair and open, where there’s sea-room, you old woodchuck! Come out and see the mark I’ve lugged for twenty-five years.”
He slapped his hand against his cheek where a scar showed its wrinkled whiteness across his flushed, brown face.
“Come out!” he bawled.
“Crack ’em down, gents,” squawked the parrot, and he seized a bar of the cage in his beak and rattled away vigorously.
“Come out!” Willard kept shouting, stamping about on the turf. “If you ain’t turned coward as well as skin-game thief, come out!” The parrot interspersed in these invitations his raucous cries.
“Between you and Absalom a man can’t do his chores in much peace,” calmly said Hiram, appearing in the tie-up door. He stepped into the yard, set the tip of a long-handled pitchfork in the ground, and leaned his shoulder against this support.
“You see that, do you?” yelled Willard, striding forward a few steps and putting a thick forefinger end on the scar. “That’s been there twenty-five years.”
“Let’s see. You’re Cap’n Klebe Willard, ain’t you?” inquired Hiram, affably. And a wordless shout answering him, he said:
“Yes, I know you and I know the mark, because I put it there myself for good reasons.” He looked around at the little group of spectators with an air of secure triumph.
“And you threw my poor old father over his own fence, you coward, when I wasn’t there to defend him. Now, Hime Look, you’ve got to meet a man and not a boy.”
He rolled his sleeves up from his hairy wrists.
“You’ve got to fight a man and fight him in order to pay a bill you’ve owed here in Palermo for a long time.”
Look still leaned on the pitchfork. “Put down your fork!” bawled the frenzied skipper, “I’m not one of your tame animals,” and without other preface he rushed at Hiram.
The showman had been watching him with his sound eye glowing redly, the glass one glaring impassively. At the skipper’s rush, with the facility an old circus man displays with a pitchfork, he shortened the handle in his grasp, speared one tine through the generous cartilage of Willard’s ear, and before that furious adversary fairly realised what had happened, he swung him on his heel, forced him back by the pain of the pierced ear, and then driving the tines into the side of the barn, set both fists on the end of the handle and had the frantic man a safe prisoner at the end of the fork. Willard writhed a few times, groaning as his ear tugged against the steel. Then he stood up, perforce as stiff as a soldier, and roared at Hiram all the billingsgate of a long coast “language-artist.” The grim captor simply glared at him until he had exhausted himself.
“A hyeny came at me in a cage once,” said the showman, reminiscently, in the first pause, “and I caught him just like this, and I held him till the fight was all out of him. Now, Klebe, you’ve come up here drunk as a fiddler’s hoorah and wantin’ to fight. You can’t fight with me to make a town spectacle. That’s what your father tried to do—make a town spectacle of me. I won’t stand for it. The Willard family can have all the trouble with me it’s lookin’ for, so far’s I’m personally concerned, but not in knock-downs. Those don’t settle things. You can see that for yourself. We fi’t twenty-five years ago, and here you are just as hot for it next time I see you.”
The skipper burst into a fresh rage, and Hiram calmly waited.
“The idea is, Klebe,” he went on in a maddeningly patronising way, “you’ve always done about as you wanted to and made others stand ’round. Now, I’ve come back to Palermo to do a little runnin’ of things for myself. I’ll give you your chance at me when the right and proper time comes, and fair warning ahead. And when you say that you’ll walk off these premises, then I’ll pull out the fork. If you don’t promise here before these people to keep away from me and shut up about fights, you may as well make arrangements to have your meals brought.”
At that moment Squire Phin came hastily into the yard, in advance of the puffing, hopping, terrified Figger-four, who had brought him.
“Hiram,” he called, as he came within hearing, “release Captain Willard.”
“Not until he promises to behave himself.”
For answer the Squire, his face flaming with indignation, stepped behind his brother, and, seizing him by the shoulders, yanked him backwards. The fork came away and Willard stood free, clutching his bleeding ear. As he rushed again at Hiram, the Squire stepped between. He said slowly, quietly, yet with something in his face and his mien that was soul-compelling:
“Captain Willard, you go home!”
After a long stare at him, a stare that at last grew wavering, Willard turned and went out of the yard.
The Squire stood and looked at his brother while the spectators stole sheepishly away. His hands were clasped behind his back; sorrow, anger, and reproach were upon his face.
At last the showman stooped and dragged the fork tine to and fro on the grass to restore its brightness.
“I don’t want to poison Imogene,” he growled.
The Squire was still silent.
“Well, say it,” snapped Hiram. “It’s on your mind. Let’s have it. I’m gettin’ used to bein’ called names.”
But his brother only shook his head slowly, his eyes lowered to the ground. He turned and walked back toward his office.
Hiram gazed after him as long as he was in sight, and then he went into the barn. The big doors at the rear were open, and the elephant, with eyes directed on the soothing landscape, was comfortably weaving to and fro. She crooked her trunk at him as he came near and curved it around his shoulders when he stood beside her.
“Old girl,” he said, mournfully, “I reckon the cards was stacked when they dealt me my hand in this game o’ life. I’m a storm centre that would put a barometer out of business, but”—he took hold of her ragged ear and shouted into it, as though the affirmation did his resolution good,—“it’s me for the Willard family, just the same, and Phin along with me at the finish. You neverdidgive a continental for me, old girl, till I had licked you to a standstill, and I know families that’s like you.”
For the dearest affection the heart can hold
Is the honest love of the nine-year-old.
It isn’t checked by the five-barred gate
Of worldly prudence or real-estate,
And that is the reason why, till the end,
A childhood lover is loyal friend.
The little crowd that followed Klebe Willard out of the Look door-yard moved slowly, for the irate skipper formed the nucleus of the group and stopped every few steps to mop at his wounded ear with a big handkerchief, while he grunted threats and promises of vengeance.
“I hope you’ll give it to him hot and heavy, Cap’n. He needs it. To be sure, I’ve done days’ work for him and got my pay, but I was never cussed so much before in my life as I was by him in that one week, and I don’t allow no man to talk that way to me.” This war-counsellor was Ezra Mayo, the carpenter, a sallow, weasened little man who had prudently run out of the door-yard at the showman’s first hostile movement. “And there’s others in the Look family that better be made to mind their own bus’ness,” he added with bitterness.
He looked around apprehensively, and he now saw Squire Phin following slowly, as though to avoid overtaking them.
A carriage was standing in front of Brickett’s store, and the man who occupied it leaned back with crossed legs and lazily kicked his foot over the wheel. A white hat, a black moustache and the light lining of the Goddard top emphasised the colour of his florid face. He looked prosperous, well-fed and entirely self-satisfied, and hailed the sputtering captain with great familiarity.
As the Squire turned to ascend the outside stairway the man in the carriage flapped a greeting at him with careless hand, garbed in a tan glove. There was in the salute the same half-mocking condescension that marked the intercourse of King Bradish with most of the townsmen. But long before that, Squire Phin felt there was something more subtle than mere condescension in Bradish’s attitude toward him’. There Was a sneer under all, and there had been a sneer ever since the time when Palermo knew that Judge Willard wanted King Bradish for his son-in-law.
As the lawyer toiled up his stairs he heard Bradish inquire sardonically:
“Well, Klebe, which licked?”
The Squire closed his door on the flood of profane threats that Willard began to pour out, clutching the tire of Bradish’s wheel with one hand and pounding emphasis with the other.
The lawyer’s hands were trembling a bit as he sat down in his arm-chair and drew his tin tobacco-box toward him. He heard the voice of Bradish outside, raised above the captain’s angry diapason:
“Do it? Why, of course I should do it; and you’d be backed up in it by all of us.”
Squire Phin leaned on his table, and, narrowing his eyes in earnest thought, stared up at a row of creosote stains on the cracked plastering of his wall. Those stains for many years had occupied a peculiar place in his thoughts. When he half shut his eyes and gazed on the wall without studying detail, the stains took on the semblance of a row of men. He used at first to imagine them a jury, and he rehearsed his cases before them. It was profitable exercise. Every judge who came to hold court in that county had grown to respect the ability of the earnest attorney whose law was so flawless and whose cases were so thoroughly prepared.
And after the Squire began to study the conditions of the country and its great social questions, he found recreation in applying to them the broad principles of law and seeking for solution. His own modest orbit of practice afforded him no mental stimulus such as he got from this imaginary practice.
One day when there were no loafers in his office, he half-shamefacedly cut the picture of the Chief Justice of the United States out of an illustrated weekly and tacked it on the wall in the centre of the creosote stains, and after that he argued “big cases.”
And in order to argue them he stinted himself in his modest personal wants in order to buy reports and digests and commentaries and all kinds of fat books in slippery buff calf; and he read those books until his eyes ached and his head spun, and he trained his big guns of logic and appeal on those creosote stains—and then sometimes wondered whimsically if this were not a sign of incipient aberration. He worried a bit occasionally until a certain grave judge whom he met at nisi prius term confessed to him one day as they were strolling after supper that he, from childhood, had entertained a gnawing hankering to be a locomotive engineer, and even then at sixty-five liked to walk by himself along country paths, chuffing softly between his teeth and keeping as sharp a lookout as though he were in the cab of a limited express.
After that—the Judge being generally considered the most matter-of-fact old hard-head on the State bench—Squire Phin reflected that probably all men, if one but knew it, nurse little notions of their own.
Therefore he kept on hammering the great trusts before that Creosote Supreme Bench, cherished the diversion as his chief recreation—lived in a dream world of amazing activity and usefulness. And in the meantime he humbly and contentedly drew deeds, conveyances and wills, appraised estates, presided sagely over “leave-it-out” questions of dispute, and spent most of his time keeping would-be litigants in Palermo out of the law.
The voices under his window kept on their monotonous rumble as he meditated. There was the occasional spit of an oath from Willard, following the irritating drawl of Bradish, who seemed to relish the skipper’s rage.
“Your honours,” murmured Squire Phin, “I want to thank God in your presence that I never yet ste-boyed a bulldog into a fight, rubbed a tomcat’s ears, nor scuffed a rooster’s feathers and set him over into a neighbour’s barnyard.”
He tossed his pipe into the tin box and went along and threw up the front window as though he had arrived at his resolution.
“Bradish!” he called, and when the man poked his head around the side of the Goddard and peered at the window, the Squire beckoned and went back to his chair.
“I was intending to come up right away, Squire,” said the visitor, with an irritating air of condescension, standing with one foot on a chair and slapping his glove against his leg. His garments seemed peculiarly fresh and smart in the dingy office, in contrast with the lawyer’s careless attire. “But I got pretty much interested in hearing Klebe give personal recollections of ‘When I was a circus animal for five minutes!’ It strikes me that your brother——”
“I didn’t call you up here to talk about my brother,” broke in the lawyer, brusquely.
“Sure enough,” replied Bradish, airily, “I’d be ashamed of him if I were you. So, then, to business! Have you collected from Buffum and Crummett and those others?”
“No,” said the lawyer, “and it isn’t about them I want to talk. I——”
“But I propose to talk about ’em,” snapped Brad-ish, interrupting in turn. “Here I’ve put a lot of bills in your hands to collect—collect!I want all that’s due me and I’ve got to have it. I’m in a hurry and I told you so. This is the fourth time I’ve ordered you to put ’em to the wall, and you haven’t done it.”
“Look here, Bradish,” said Squire Phin, standing up and planting his broad hands on the table to prop himself, “I’ve collected your bills from all except a half dozen men, and that half dozen intend to pay. But I’m not the kind of a lawyer that will take a poor man by the heels and pound his head on the ground to shake money out of his pockets. Those men have had sickness and death and troubles in their families, and they simply can’t pay. And you can’t buy law in my office with which to persecute honest men, Bradish.”
“Give me the bills, then,” commanded the other, stretching out his hand and clacking his middle finger smartly into the palm. “You aren’t the only lawyer in this county.”
Squire Phin looked at him steadily for a time, then pulled down a letter file and began to search it. When he had found the papers he held them and gazed at his client, knotting his eyebrows.
“I didn’t call you up here to talk about your bills,” he said, “but now that we are on the subject I’m going to ask you something, Bradish. Why is it that, after I’ve collected and put in your hands almost ten thousand dollars in the last few weeks—from men to whom you had promised longer time—you are still driving me to take the very heart’s blood out of these poor devils? Can’t you wait a few weeks?”
Bradish brought his foot to the floor.
“I suppose it’s a regular thing for a lawyer to ram his nose into a man’s business and twist it clear to the bottom, hey?”
“I don’t know as I ever asked another client such a question,” rejoined the Squire, coldly, “because I don’t usually have a client who wants me to go to a debtor with an auger and a blood-pump when the poor chap is down and helpless.”
“Then I’ll tell you, Look,” said Bradish, leaning forward with mock appearance of confiding the truth; “it’s none of your infernal business. Give me those papers. I know of a man that can collect them.”
“And I know a man that will,” returned the Squire, “and collect them without making women and children go hungry while their men folks are in jail.” He sat down at the table, pulled a long wallet from his pocket and began counting money from a thick packet of banknotes. “Receipt those bills,” he said curtly.
Bradish hesitated a moment, his anger prompting him to refuse the money from this source. But evidently his anxiety to secure his cash overmastered the grudge. He scrawled his name across the papers and took the banknotes.
“Circus money, eh?” he sneered, unable to resist the impulse to make the fling. “I heard that Hiram has been squaring himself with you.” He began counting the money.
“Now there’s no more business between us, Brad-ish,” said the lawyer as his client buttoned his coat.
“I hope not,” retorted Bradish.
“Only this,” pursued the Squire; “I may guess what you’re collecting your money for and shortening financial sail in town, and I may not. No matter! But I want to tell you, King Bradish, that from this time out you are going to leave Damaris Mayo to her husband.” Again he propped himself on the table and leaned forward.
The charge came so unexpectedly that the man’s florid face grew pale and then as suddenly flushed crimson, as he stammered oaths, seeking emphasis for his denial. The Squire came around the table toward him and raised his hand.
“Not a word—not a word more, Bradish,” he said, his composure perfect. “I married that boy and girl, and you can’t ruin that little home if I can prevent it—no, sir, you can’t!”
Bradish strode to the door, but he drove his fists down at his sides with a gesture of impotent ire, whirled and came back close to the lawyer.
“Why don’t you own up what your grudge is against me?” he gritted. “Why ain’t you man enough to fight fair and lay down when you’re licked? If Syl-vena Willard had wanted you she would have married you, and because she is going to marry me when—-when”—his eyes shifted uneasily under the Squire’s stern gaze—“when she gets ready to, is no reason why you should ghost me ’round town and make up stories to retail to her. I suppose you’ll be reporting I’m planning to run away.”
“You stop right where you are, Bradish!” cried the lawyer. “Sylvena Willard is too good a woman to have her name bandied here between us, or dragged through a village scandal by your fault. Your affairs and hers are between yourselves. You needn’t discuss them. But you shall not break up young Mayo’s family, nor insult Sylvena Willard by your actions, and I say this as a friend of both. Now, if you know where your head is level you will get out of my office.”
The creases deepened about the Squire’s mouth. One fist was clenched at his side. The other hand pointed to the door.
Bradish paused irresolutely, closing and unclosing his hands. But at that moment the door opened and a woman came in. Bradish crowded past her and went thumping down the stairs.
Mrs. Micajah Dunham, bolt upright in the middle of the seat of a rattly beach waggon and disdaining the support of the leather-covered back, even when the ledges of the Cove road danced her most vigorously, had with a directness typical of Mrs. Micajah Dunham driven straight to the gnawed hitching post in front of Brickett’s store. Mrs. Dunham always appeared to be a very rigid sort of person, but on this occasion there was extra rigidity about her, from the set of her jaw to the stiffness of her knee action, as she stepped down from the waggon. Looking neither right nor left, she ran the halter rope through the gnawed hitching post and walked up the outside stairs exactly in the middle, hands at her sides and neglecting the rain-bleached rail as she had disdained the seat-back. A bonnet trimmed with dust-spotted imitations of grapes framed her narrow face squarely, and a shawl appeared to pinch her shoulders together.
She sat down in the “blind-stagger” chair well to the edge, on account of the dust, at which her housewife’s eye glared in disfavour.
“Squire,” she said, with a directness of attack that took no account of his averted face, “I’ve come to consult you legally, and I’ve brought the dockyments.” She jerked herself up, crossed the room, and laid on his open book a sheet of rudely scalloped pink paper, on which were pasted hearts cut out of red and blue tissue.
“That’s almost the first to which I really was knowin’ the straight facts,” she went on. “But I’ve had a glimmer of an idea for some time. Oh, I tell you it ain’t come all to once, this thing ain’t!” The lawyer turned slowly, picked up the paper, holding it gingerly by the corner.
“Sit down, Esther,” he said quietly, “and we’ll see what we can make out of it.”
There were some lines of writing on the paper, and he read them aloud in dry, legal monotone, the woman greeting the sentiments with scornful sniffs:
“For those that love the world is bright;
And when it’s bright it is a sign
That some one’s eyes do shed the light;
Oh, darling, be my Valentine!”
He paused and cocked his eyebrows at her inquiringly.
“I caught Mr. Dunham writin’ that tormented sculch out of a book at the sekert’ry in the best room one day the first of this month,” she said. “And I took it away from him. And I know that he jest went to work and made another, ’cause he said he was goin’ to. He’s been dead set and possessed by the Old Harry for months, Squire, till I’m plumb out with him. I can’t, won’t and shan’t stand it no longer. Here’s items, if you need ’em.”
She unfolded a long roll composed of many sheets of notepaper pasted together, and he read in the same calm voice her pencilled entries:
“July 15.—He helped her and her scholars to pick white weeds to trim up the schoolhouse.
“July 19.—Took our ladder and clime trees for leaves, ditto.
“July 22.—Took broken candy to door and give it to her.
“August 2.—Hitched and took her to her boarding place when it rained.
“August 5.—More broken candy.
“August 7.—Hitched before school and went after her.
“August 10.—Dressed up and visited school.”
The lawyer ran his eye over the other entries, noting a general similarity in all. Then he read aloud:
“August 10.—Suspect he is making a valentine.
“August 12.—Caught him at it and took the valentine.”
“And this is it, eh?” he inquired, tapping the gaudily decorated sheet on the table. “But this is hardly the season for valentines.”
“And this ain’t the season for a man that’s goin’ on fifty-two to fall in love with an eighteen-year-old girl, either,” she retorted. “But he’s done it. And ’sides all I’ve put down, it has been a continual peddlin’ out to her of candy and apples and fol-de-rols. You understand that by twistin’ a little I can see that schoolhouse door right from my but’ry winder, and there it is in that paper, chalked up to date.”
For the first time since she had entered the room his eyes softened a bit. He shook the paper at her gently.
“I understand, do I,” he inquired, his mild tones contrasting soothingly with her high-pitched anger, “that this record of devotion to a certain school-house door means that ’Caje is——”
“It means,” she shrilled, “that that miserable, old, soft-headed fool of a husband of mine has gone to work and fell in love with that young teeter-bird of a schoolmarm in our deestrick, and has acted out till I’m distracted. I can’t do nothin’ with him, Squire. He jest grunts and growls and clears out of the house when I go at him. Now it’s come to the end of the jig. Understand? It’s the wind-up.
“There’s the dockyments. I want to warn you right at the outset that you ain’t goin’ to come none of your gum-games on me, the way they tell of you actin’ with some of them that come to you for law. My mind is as set as old Pisgy itself.” She brought her work-stained hand down on the chair rail with a vehemence that made it creak.
“I’m not going to have any fight with you, Esther,” he replied, smiling into her hostile eyes. “But you do surprise me about ’Caje. I thought he was as steady-going as a stone boat.”
She nipped her lips spitefully.
“Always a hardworking man, ’Caje has been,” the lawyer went on; “has stuck to his work a little speck too close, maybe.”
“Look here, Squire Phineas Look,” she broke in, “this ain’t gittin’ on about thatdi-vose. You needn’t try to beat about the bush.”
“Let’s see!” he mused. “Poor, crazy Ben Haskell’s girl, ’Liza, is teaching in the Dunham district, I believe. And Ben in the asylum these five years! Is she as pretty as her mother was before her?”
“High-headed snippet,” sniffed Mrs. Dunham. “But I’ll show her!”
The Squire set his arms on the table, his elbows squared, and a quizzical smile in the wrinkles about his eyes.
“’Caje Dunham is a good neighbour, is honest and pays his bills, Esther,” he said, “but do you think for one moment that pretty ’Liza Haskell wants that old, callous-fisted, round-shouldered husband of yours hanging around her?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed, and she glared at him with malice in her gaze.
“A school agent in a district has to putter around the school house more or less,” he went on. “If he has been too neighbourly I’ll talk with him about it. But you’re not going to drag an innocent girl through any scandal, Esther, just to satisfy some grudge that you’ve hatched up in your own mind.”
“So she has run to you with her budget, has she?” demanded the woman, her expression still more malevolent.
“No, I haven’t seen ’Lize Haskell for months,” said the Squire with candour.
“Oh,sheain’t the one I mean,” Mrs. Dunham snapped. “I mean the pompous Queen o’ Sheby that was sittin’ in that school house yistiddy when I called there to give the little fool her come-uppance right before her scholars.”
She nipped her lips and looked at him so spitefully and meaningly that a flush crept up from under his collar.
He knew that the motherless girl had become a protégé of Sylvena Willard’s at the time that Ben Haskell had been taken to the madhouse.
“No wonder you’re ’shamed,” the woman went on angrily. “You all of you are in the plot ag’inst me. I give her her earful, all right, Willard so high and mighty, or no Willard. That teacher and her, the both of ’em, got it straight fromme.”
“Do you mean to say that you went to the school house and abused that girl before Sylvena Willard?” demanded the Squire, standing up and glowering down on her.
But her spirit was equal to his, for her anger was bitterer.
“If any woman gits in my way when I’m doin’ my bounden duty by myself,” she retorted, “she gits what’s comin’ to her. Says I to that snifflin’ school-marm, ‘There’s no man what’s draggin’ at a woman’s gown-tail unless he gits encouragement.’ And I says to Miss Queen Sheby of the Willards, ‘You can take that to yourself, you that’s tryin’ to shet me up. King Bradish and Squire Phin Look wouldn’t both be——”
“Esther Dunham,” he shouted, “not another word. Not one word!”
It was the awful anger of a patient man thoroughly aroused that fronted her.
“I have a right to speak my own mind, and I pretty gen’rally do it,” she muttered, but she did not venture to say any more.
He slowly sank back into his armchair, still glaring at her.
“Oh, the devilish weapon that a woman feels privileged to use,” he cried. After a time he went on sternly:
“Esther, I knew you at school, and I’ve watched you more or less since. You were kind of a cute little girl, with your way of spitting out just what you thought about folks and things. But we’d laugh at kittens when we’d cuff an old cat’s ears for doing the same thing. You’ve nagged and browbeaten your husband all your life together, and you know it!”
“Gimme them dockyments,” she rasped, popping up with a snap like a carpenter’s rule. The lawyer put his broad hand on them.
“’Caje Dunham was the kind of man that you could have driven with a cotton thread of love and teamed him anywhere. But you’ve used goad sticks, and hot pitch and a twist bit, and it isn’t any wonder you’ve made him balky.”
“So you’re stickin’ up for that missable critter right before my face and eyes,” she cried. “I might ’a’ knowed better than to come here and expect a dried-up old bach to admit anything about the rights of a woman. You give me them papers, Squire Phin Look! I know where I can buy law, even if it isn’t for sale in this shop.”
He calmly held the papers away from her clutching fingers.
“How much have you and ’Caje put away between you?” he inquired.
And when she did not reply, puckering her eyes and resenting his intrusive question, he suggested, more gently, “In case of alimony, you know!”
“If that’s what you’re askin’ for, I don’t know as there’s any hurt in tellin’ you we’ve got risin’ ’leven thousand, put where it’s earnin’ int’rest and twenty-five hundred out on first mo’gidges.”
“And not a chick nor a child to leave it to,” he murmured, looking at her with sudden sympathy in his eyes. “It’s too bad, Esther, that your little ’Cilia was called away to her treasures in Heaven before she could enjoy some of the treasures you heaped up on earth for her—you two, poor, tug-a-lugging old critters, you!” She sat down suddenly, and her work-stained, knotted hands trembled as she folded them on her lap.
“Saving and skinching and piling up,” he went on. “What good has it ever done you, Esther? Why didn’t you and ’Caje knock off and have a little fun together in the world before you got hardened this way? And for poor ’Cilia it was always ‘Sometime!’ till she got to be sixteen years old, and then she went on the first journey of her life—to the grave! And the only good dress she ever wore was the one you laid her out in! Do you know what animals grub and grub with their noses rooting soil?” He shouted the question at her.
She came back at him with equal fire. “When I want a sermon I’ll go to the parson! ’Tain’t any disgrace to be prudent and forehanded, is it, even if we ain’t got no one to enjoy it after we’re gone?”
Her voice broke suddenly. The tears flooded into her cold eyes.
“Oh, Squire,” she quavered, “’twould have been different with ’Caje and me if only ’Cilla’d been left to us. Hain’t neither of us knowed what to do with ourselves since we laid her away in the graveyard.”
He walked around the table and patted the shoulder bowed under the faded shawl.
“And as little as you’ve got left in the world now, Esther, here you are wanting to get rid of the biggest hunk of it. Can’t you realise that you don’t understand this thing yet? Your husband don’t know what the trouble is with him. Now let me tear up this list of ’Caje’s temporary aberrations. I’ll have a talk with him, and we’ll see—we’ll see!”
But with an angry red in her cheeks that seemed to scorch the tears there she jerked her shoulder away from his patting hand.
“Squire Phin, you’ve known me from a little snippet, and you know I ain’t flyin’ off to no tangents without good reason. It ain’t no one night’s growth, this ain’t. I’m going to have a bill from that man, I say! The neighbours ain’t goin’ to have a chance to sayI’vebacked down. If you don’t want to take the case, then out with it, bus’nesslike, and I’ll go farther. But thatdi-vose I’m goin’ to have!”
There was no gainsaying her angry obstinacy.
“Well, Esther,” he said with a sigh, “leave the papers and I’ll have notice of the libel served.”
“When? There can’t be no more fubbin’. The neighbours are all stirred up, and I’ve made my talk!”
“To-morrow.”
“So do! And I’ll plan according,” she snapped, and with lips set tight she left the room.
The Squire slowly filled his pipe, his eyes fixed in unblinking stare on a far corner.
“Neighbours!” he snorted. “Poor little gaffer of a girl, and the whole of ’em pecking at her!”
He aimlessly searched for a match in his pockets, his eyes still on the corner.
“Oh, Sylvie,” he murmured, “they are just ready to bury their beaks in you if you step between—oh-h-h!”
In sudden impotent choler he snapped the stem of the unlighted pipe, threw the pieces into the corner and went out, shutting his office door behind him with a vehemence that made the building shiver.