“How's that?” John was asked by the small young man.
“I'm layin' low 'bout that,” replied John, mysteriously.
“Now, John,” said the postmaster, “you wouldn't lay low if there was a good chance to make some money, and not give us poor devils a chance?”
The postmaster spoke consciously. He expected what came, the buzz of remonstrance at his classing himself in his new office with poor devils.
“You'd better talk about poor devils,” growled the milkman, Tappan. “You'd better talk. Huh! here you be, don't hev to git to work till eight o'clock, an' quittin' at eight nights, and fifteen hundred a year. You'd better talk, Mr. Ray. If you was a man gittin' up at three of a winter's mornin', and settin' out with a milk-route at four, an' makin' 'bout half a penny a quart, an' cussed at that 'cause it ain't all cream—if you was as dead tired as I be this minute you might talk.”
“Well, I'm willing to allow that I am not as hard pushed as you are,” said the postmaster, with magnanimous humility.
“You'd better. Poor devils, huh! I guess I know what poor devils be, and the hell they're in. Bet your life I do. Huh!”
“I'm a poor devil 'nough myself, when it comes to that,” said Amidon, “but I reckon you kin speak for yourself when it comes to talkin' about bein' in hell, Tappan. Fur's I'm concerned, I'm findin' this a purty comfertable sort of place.”
Amidon was a tall man, and he stretched his length luxuriously as he spoke. Tappan eyed him malignantly. He was not a pleasant-tempered man, and now he was both weary and impatient of waiting for his turn with the barber.
“I should think any man might be comfortable, ef he had a wife takin' boarders to support him, but mebbe if she was to be asked to tell the truth, she'd tell a different story,” he said. Tappan spoke in a tone of facetious rage, and the others laughed, all except the barber. He had a curious respect for his landlady's husband.
“Ef a lady has the undisposition to let her husband subside on her bounty, it is between them twain. Who God has joined together, let no man set asunder,” said he, bombastically, and even the surly milkman, and Rosenstein under his manipulating razor, when a laugh was dangerous, laughed. John Flynn, when he waxed didactic, and made use of large words and phrases, was the comic column of Banbridge.
Amidon, thus defended, chuckled also, albeit rather foolishly, and slouched to the door. “Guess I'll drop up and git the Sunday paper. I'll be in later on, John,” he mumbled. He had the grace to be somewhat ashamed both by the attack and by the defence, and was for edging out, but stopped on the threshold of the door, arrested by something which the small man said.
“Talkin' about poor devils, there's one man in Banbridge ain't no poor devil. S'pose you know we've got a J. P. Morgan right amongst us?”
“Who?” asked the postmaster; and Amidon, directly now the conversation was thoroughly shifted from himself, returned to his former place.
“I know who he means,” said he, importantly. “Oh, it's the man what's rented the Ranger place. They say he's a millionaire.”
The milkman straightened himself interestedly. “I rather guess he is,” said he. “They take two quarts of cream every morning, and three quarts of milk.”
“Lord!” said the barber, gaping over his patron's head. “Lord!”
Although very short and slight, the barber had a large face, simple, amiable with a smirk of conceit as to the lower part; his forehead was very large and round, as was his head, and his blue eyes were very placid, even beautiful. The barber never laughed.
“Two quarts of cream!” said the small man. “Whew!”
“He must be rich if he takes all that cream,” said the postmaster. “A half a pint a day about breaks me, but my wife must have it for her coffee.”
Rosenstein had so far got his freedom of speech, for the barber had never ceased operation to speak, though rather guardedly. “He must be rich,” he said. “Any man in Banbridge that buys as much as he does from a store in the place, an' wants his bills regular every Saturday night, has got somethin'.”
“Has he paid 'em?” asked the postmaster.
“All except the last one, an' that he didn't pay because I couldn't cash a check for five hundred and give him the balance. ‘Lord, sir,’ says I, ‘ef you want a check of that value cashed, you'll have to go to John Wanamaker. That's as much as I take in Banbridge in a whole year.’ ‘Well, mebbe you'll do better this year,’ says he, laughing, and goes out. He's a fine-spoken man, an' it was a lucky day for Banbridge when he come here.”
“He don't buy many postage-stamps,” said the postmaster, thoughtfully, “but he asked me if I should be able to let him have as much as ten dollars' worth at a time, ef he wanted 'em, an' I said I should, an' I've just ordered in more. An' he has a big mail.”
The barber had been opening his mouth and catching his breath preparatory to speaking and saying more than any of them. Now he spoke: “That man's wuth a mighty lot of money now,” said he, “but what he's wuth now ain't nothin' to what he's goin' to be wuth some day.”
“What do you mean, John?” asked Amidon, patronizingly.
“Well, now, I'll tell you what I mean. That man, it's Cap. Carroll what's just arraigned to Banbridge that you're all talkin' about, ain't it?”
“Yes. Go ahead.”
“Well, now, Cap. Carroll is agoin' to be one of them great clapatalists, ef he ain't now,” he said.
“How?”
“Well, he got holt of some stock that's goin' to bust the market and turn Wall Street into a mill-stream in less than a year, ef it keeps on as it has went so fur.”
“What is it?” asked the small man.
The milkman sighed wearily. “Oh, slow up yer jaw, and gimme a chance sometime,” he growled. “I want to git home an' git my breakfast. I'm hungry.”
Flynn began hurriedly finishing off Rosenstein, talking with no less eagerness as he did so. “Well, it's Bonaflora mining-stock, ef you want to know,” he said, importantly.
“Where is it?” asked the postmaster, with a peculiar smile.
“Out West somewhere. It ain't but fifty cents a share, an' it's goin' up like a skyrocket, an' there's others. There's a new railroad out there, an' other mines, an' a new invention for makin' fuel out of coal-dust, an' some other things.”
“Is Captain Carroll the president of them?” asked the small man, with an impressed air. He was very young, and eager-looking, and very shabby. He grubbed on a tiny ancestral farm, for a living for himself and wife and four children, young as he was. He had never had enough to eat, at least of proper food. He did not come to the “Tonsorial Parlor” to be shaved, for he hacked away at his innocent cheeks at home with his deceased father's old razor, but he loved a little gossip. In fact, John Flynn's barber-shop was his one dissipation. Sometimes he looked longingly at a beer-saloon, but he had no money, unless he starved Minna and the children, and for that he was too good and too timid. His Minna was a stout German girl, twice his size, and she ruled him with a rod of iron. She did not approve of the barber-shop, and so the pleasure had something of the zest of a forbidden one.
Every Sunday he was at his wit's end, which was easily reached, to invent a suitable excuse for his absence. To-day it had been to see if Mrs. Amidon did not want to buy some apples. Some of their last winter's store had been miraculously preserved, and Minna saw the way to a few pennies thereby. He could quite openly say that he had been to the barber-shop to-day, having seen Amidon there, therefore he was quite easy in his mind, and leaned back in his chair with perfect content. One of the children at home cried all the time. A yawning mouth of wrath at existence was about all he ever saw of that particular baby, and Minna almost always scolded, and this was a haven of peace to little Willy Eddy.
Here he felt like a man among men; at home he felt like nothing at all among women. The children were all girls. Sometimes he wondered if a boy-baby might not have been a refuge. He was not very clean; his hands were still stained with picking over potatoes the day before; his shoulders in their rusty coat had a distinct hunch; but he was radiantly happy talking of the rich Captain Carroll. He seemed to taste the honey of the other man's riches and importance in his own mouth. Willy Eddy did not know the meaning of envy. He had such a fund of sympathetic imagination that he possessed the fair possessions of others like a child with fairy tales.
“Is he president of all of them?” asked little Willy Eddy, with gusto, and looked as if he himself held them all in his meagre potato-stained hands.
“No,” replied the barber, with importance—“no, he's more than a president. A president is nothin' except a figger-head. I don't care what he's president of, whether it is of this great country or of railroads or what not. They could git along without the president, but they can't without this gentleman. He's the promoter.”
“Oh!” said the small man.
The milkman sighed wrathfully again. “Oh, hang it all!” he said. “I've seed promoters. It's mostly their own pockets they promote.”
“Well, I don't know,” said the postmaster, as one with authority. “I don't know. Captain Carroll was in the office the other day, and we had a little talk, and it struck me that some of the ventures he is interested in were quite promising. And it is different with a man of his wealth. When a poor man takes up anything of the kind, you can suspect, but this is different. He said to me that he had no occasion, so far as the money was concerned, to turn his finger over for any of them or to open his mouth concerning them. He said he would not be afraid to stake every dollar he had in the world on them if it was necessary.”
Flynn had daintily anointed Rosenstein's shaven face with witch-hazel and was now dusting it with powder. Tappan was slouching towards the chair.
“Have you bought some of the stock?” the barber asked, abruptly, of the postmaster, who smiled mysteriously and hedged.
“Well, maybe I have, and maybe again I haven't,” said he. “Have you, John?”
“Not yet,” replied the barber. “I am deflecting upon the matter. It requires considerable loggitation when a man has penuriously saved a circumscribed sum from the sweat of his brow.”
“That's so. Don't be rash, John,” said Amidon.
It was not especially funny, but since Amidon intended it to be, they all obligingly laughed, except Tappan, who set himself with a grunt in the chair and had the white sheet of which Rosenstein had been denuded tied around his neck.
Rosenstein, who was a lean man, with a much-lined face, cast a glance at himself in the looking-glass, and heaved an odd sigh as he turned away to get his hat.
“You don't seem to be much stuck on your looks, old man,” remarked Amidon.
Rosenstein cast a perfectly good-humored but rather melancholy look at Amidon. “No; I never was,” he replied, soberly. “Can't remember when I wouldn't have preferred to meet some other fellow in the looking-glass. It's such an awful thing, the intimacy with himself that's forced on a man when he comes into this world.”
“That's so,” assented Amidon, rather stupidly, but he was not to be abashed with the other man's metaphysics. Rosenstein did credit to his German ancestry at times, and was then in deep waters for his village acquaintances.
“Who would you ruther meet in the lookin'-glass than yerself?” pursued Amidon.
“Not you,” replied Rosenstein, with unexpected repartee, and was going out amid a chorus of glee at Amidon's discomfiture when another man darkened the doorway, and the storekeeper fell back as Captain Carroll entered amid a sullen silence.
The postmaster rose, and in a second the small man and Amidon followed his example. Carroll greeted them all with a cordiality which had in it a certain implication of admiring confidence. Not a man there but felt at once that this new-comer had a most flattering recognition of himself in particular, to the exclusion of all the others. It was odd how he contrived to produce this impression, but produce it he did. It was Arthur Carroll's great charm, the great secret of a remarkable influence over his fellow-men. He appealed with consummate skill to the selfish side of every one with whom he came in contact, he exalted him in his own eyes far above the masses with whom he was surrounded, by who could tell what subtle alchemy. Each man preened unconsciously his panoply of spiritual pride under this other man's gentle, courteous eyes. Even Rosenstein straightened himself. And besides, this was the respectful admiration which the man himself excited, by reason of his fine appearance and address, his good looks, his irreproachable clothes, and his reputed wealth.
Arthur Carroll made an entrance into the “Tonsorial Parlor.” Moreover, the other men could see out in front of the establishment, the coach, the coachman in livery—the first livery on record as actually resident in Banbridge; liveries had passed through, but never before tarried—the fretting steeds with their glittering equipment. Around the coach had already gathered several small boys, huddled together, and transfixed with awe too deep for impudence.
Carroll, having greeted the men, said good-morning urbanely to the barber, who had ceased lathering Tappan and was looking at him indeterminately. It seemed dreadful to him that this great man should have to wait for the milkman. The barber was a conservative to the core, and would speak of the laboring-classes and tradesmen as if he himself were on the other side of the highway from birth. Tappan himself, who, as said before, was naturally surly, was also a dissenter on principle, and had an enlarged sense of injury, had qualms at keeping waiting a man who patronized him to the extent of two quarts of cream and three quarts of milk daily. It was like quarrelling with his bread-and-butter, as he put it, when alluding to the affair later on.
“I ain't goin' through the world seein' no men as is better 'n I be,” he said, “but there's jest this much about it, I ain't a fool, an' I know enough to open the door when a man wants to walk through to pay me some money. Ef Carroll hadn't been takin' that much cream and milk, I'd set there in that barber's-chair ef I'd had a year's beard to shave, an' I'd kept him waitin', and enjoyed it, but, as it was, I did what I did.”
What Tappan did was to wave back Flynn's lathering-hand, and to say, rather splutteringly, that he would wait, “ef Captain Carroll was in a hurry.”
But Captain Carroll was in no hurry, it seemed, and, moreover, gave the impression that if he had been about to catch a railroad train to keep an important business engagement, he would not have dreamed of thrusting himself in before the milkman with his milk all delivered. He, moreover, gave the impression that he considered the milkman a polished gentleman for his handsome offer, and all this without saying so much. Captain Carroll seated himself, and completed the impression by tendering everybody cigars. Then the “Tonsorial Parlor” and its patrons waiting for a Sunday-morning shave became a truly genteel function. Willy Eddy, who was dreamily imaginative, and read the Sunday papers when his Minna gave him a chance and did not chide him for the waste of money, remembered things he had read about the swagger New York clubs. He smoked away and made-believe he was a clubman, and enjoyed himself artlessly. The sun got farther around and the south window was a sheet of burning radiance. It became rather too warm, and on Carroll making a motion to move his chair into the shade, every other man moved into the sunshine, and sat sweltering and smoking in a fatuous vainglory. The canary bird hopped faster and faster. The gold-fishes swam with a larger school of bright reflections. A bumblebee flew in the open window and buzzed dangerously near the hero's head. Willy Eddy rose and, ostentatiously, at his own risk, drove the intruder away, and was gratefully thanked. Truly hero-worship, while it is often foolish and fool-making, is not the worst sentiment of mankind. When the great man made a move to order his coachman to take the wonderful rig away, and drive, because the horses were restive and needed exercise, and he himself—the delicate humor of the thing—also needed exercise and would walk home, Amidon sped in his service as he had never sped in the service of the long-suffering wife, at that moment struggling painfully with the Sunday dinner, and bringing wood from the shed to replenish the fire.
Carroll did not need to lead up to his mining and other interests. The subject was broached at once by the others. The postmaster opened it. He spoke with less humility than the others, as being more on a footing of equality.
“Well, captain, heard lately from the Boniflora?” he asked, knowingly. And Carroll replied that he had received a letter from the manager the night before which gave most encouraging information concerning the prospects.
“Anything of the United Fuel?” continued the postmaster.
“Large block just sold, at an advance of six and three-eighths,” replied Carroll, blowing the smoke from his mouth. Carroll inspired confidence by the very quietness and lack of enthusiasm with which he spoke of his enterprises. All his listeners thought privately that he was in no way anxious to sell his stock, after all. Perhaps, moreover, he did not intend to sell any but large blocks. Little Willy Eddy ventured to ask for information on the latter point.
“Mebbe you don't keer nothin' about sellin' of it unless it is in big lumps?” he queried, timidly. He was thinking of a matter of $250 which his father had saved from pension-money, and was still in the savings-bank. Carroll replied (but with the greatest indifference) that they often sold stock in very small blocks, and the confidence of them waxed apace. Amidon thought of a little money which his wife had saved from her boarders, and the barber immediately resolved to invest every cent he had in the United Fuel. Such was Captain Carroll's graciousness and urbanity that he idled away an hour in the barber-shop, and the other men melted away, although reluctantly, from an atmosphere of such effulgence. The milkman's hollow stomach drove him home for his breakfast. Little Willy Eddy thought uneasily of his Minna, and took his departure. The postmaster had a Sunday mail to sort. And Amidon went out to get a drink of beer; Carroll's cigar had dried his throat. Carroll was shaven last, and Flynn did his best by him, even unto a new jar of cold cream, double the quantity of witch-hazel, and a waste of powder. Then after he had carefully adjusted his hat, and was at last about to go, Flynn stopped him.
“Beg your pardon, sir,” said he, “but—”
“But what?” said Carroll, rather kindly.
The barber's lip was actually quivering. The magnitude and importance of what he was about to propose almost affected his weakly emotional nature to tears.
He finally made out to say, while tears were actually rolling down his cheeks under Carroll's puzzled regard, that he had $1000 which he had saved, and he would like to invest every penny of it in United Fuel. And before Carroll knew what he was at, he had actually produced $1000 in a bulky roll of much-befingered notes, from some hiding-place, and was waving them before Carroll's eyes.
“Here,” said he, “here is the money. You may as well take it now. You can get the securities in New York to-morrow, and bring them out on the train. Here is the money. Take it.”
Arthur Carroll did not move to take the money. He stood looking at the excited man with a curious expression. In fact, his face seemed to reflect the emotion of the barber's. His voice was a trifle husky.
“Is that all you have saved?” he asked.
“Every dollar,” replied the barber, continuing to wave and thrust the bills, but he raised an edge of his apron to his eyes, overflowing with the stupendousness of it. “Every dollar. I might have saved more, but I've been laid up winters considerable with grippe, and folks don't like to be shaved by a grippy barber. Dunno's I blame 'em. I've had to hire, and hirin' comes high. I've had considerable to do for a widder with four children, too—she's my brother's widder—an', take it all together, I 'ain't been able to save another dollar. But that don't make no odds, as long as I'm going to double it in that stock of yourn. Take it.”
Carroll backed away almost sternly. “I don't want your money,” he said.
The barber stood aghast. Captain Carroll had actually a look of offence.
“I hope as I hain't done nothin' that ain't reg'lar,” he stammered.
Captain Carroll stepped close to him. He laid one white long-fingered hand on the barber's white jacket-sleeve. He whispered with slyest confidence, although no one was within hearing:
“You keep that money a little while longer,” he whispered. “I wouldn't say it to every man, but I will to you. There's going to be a lawsuit, and the stock may drop a point or two. It won't drop much, and it will recover more than it loses, but then is the time to buy, especially when you want a big block, and—I'll let you know.”
“Thank you, thank you,” said the barber, restoring the bills to a greasy old pocket-book. He was faint with gratitude. “All right,” he said, and he nodded and winked with intensest comprehension. “All right. You let me know.”
“Yes, I'll let you know when it is best to invest,” repeated Carroll. He turned on the threshold. “See here,” he said, “if I were you, I'd put that money in a bank. I wouldn't keep it here.”
“Oh, nobody knows it's here, except you, and you are safe, I ruther guess.”
The barber laughed like a child. Carroll went out and passed up the street. He heard from the Episcopal church the sound of singing. Finally he left it behind. He was passing along a short extent where there were no houses. On one side there was a waste tract of land, and on the other a stretch of private grounds. The private grounds were bordered by a budding hedge, the waste lot bristled with strong young weeds. Carroll, as he swung along with his stately carriage of the head and shoulders, took out his pocket-book. It was an important-looking affair, the size of bank-notes. He opened it. There was not a vestige of money within. He laughed a little softly to himself, and replaced it. He lived on a street which diverged at right angles from the main street. Just as he was about turning the corner, a runabout in which were seated two men passed him. It stopped, and the men turned and looked back at him. Then before Carroll turned the corner, one hailed him:
“Hullo!” he said.
“Hullo!” returned Carroll, and stood waiting while the man swung his trap round with cautious hisses—he drove a high-stepping mare.
“Are you a man by the name of Carroll?” said he, holding the fretting mare tightly, and seesawing the lines, as she tried to dart first one way, then the other.
Carroll nodded.
“Well, look a-here,” said the man, “I heerd you wanted to buy some hosses.”
“You heard rightly,” said Carroll.
“Wall, I've got a pair that can't be beat. Kentucky bred, four-year-old, sound as a whip. Not an out.”
“Are you a trader?”
“Yep. Hed them hosses in last week. New-Yorker jest sent for 'em, then he died sudden, and his heirs threw 'em on the market at a sacrifice.”
Carroll looked at the men, and they looked at him. The two men in the runabout resembled each other, and were evidently brothers. Carroll's eyes on the men were sharp, so were theirs on him. Carroll's eyes were looking for knavery, and the men's were looking for suspicion of knavery.
“How much?” asked Carroll, finally.
The men looked at each other. One made a motion with his lips; the other nodded.
“Fifteen hundred,” said the first speaker, “and damned cheap.”
“Well, you can bring them around, and I'll look at them,” said Carroll. “Any night after seven.”
Carroll walked on, turning up the road which led to his own house, and the men whirled about again and then drove on, the mare breaking into a gallop.
In Banbridge no one in trade was considered in polite society, with one exception. The exception was Randolph Anderson. Anderson had studied for the law. He had set up his office over the post-office, hung out his innocent and appealing little sign, and sat in his new office-chair beside his new desk, surrounded by the majesty of the lettered law, arranged in shelves in alphabetical order, for several years, during which his affairs were constantly on a descending scale. Then at last came a year when scarcely one client had darkened his doors except Tappan, who wanted to sue a delinquent customer and attach some of his personal property. After ascertaining that the personal property had been cannily transferred to the debtor's wife, he had told Anderson, upon the presentation of a modest bill, that he was a fraud and he could have done better himself. Beside this backward stroke of business, Anderson had that year a will to draw up, for which he was never paid, and had married a couple who had reimbursed him in farm produce. At the expiration of that year the lawyer, having to all intents and purposes been given up by the law, gave it up in his turn. Every cent of the money which he had inherited from his father had been expended. Nothing remained except his mother's small property, which barely sufficed to support her. Anderson then borrowed money from his uncle, who was well-to-do, giving him his note for three years, rented a store on Main Street, purchased a stock of groceries, and went into trade. His course made quite a sensation. He was the first Anderson in the memory of Banbridge, where the name was an old one, to be outside the genteel pale of a profession. His father had been a physician, his grandfather a clergyman.
“If my son had studied medicine instead of law, he could have at least subsisted upon the proceeds of his profession,” his mother said, with the gentle and dignified dissent which was her attitude with regard to her son's startling move. “People are simply obliged by the laws of the flesh to go through measles and whooping-coughs and mumps, and they have to be born and die, and when they get in the way of microbes they have to be ill and they have to call in a physician, and some few of them pay him, so he can manage at least to live. Of course law is different. If people haven't any money they can forego quarrels, unless they are forced upon them. Quarrels are luxuries. It really began to seem to me that all the opportunity for a lawyer in Banbridge was in the simple line of suing some one for debt, and there is always that way, which does seem to me rather dishonest, of putting the property out of one's hands.”
There was undoubtedly much truth in what Mrs. Sylvia Anderson said. She was a shrewd old woman, with such a softly feminine manner that she misled people into thinking the contrary. Banbridge folk rather pitied Randolph Anderson for having such a sweetly helpless and incapable mother, albeit very pretty and very much of a lady.
Mrs. Anderson was a large woman, but delicately articulated, with small hands, and such tiny feet that she toppled a little when she walked. Her complexion was like a child's, and she fluffed her thick white locks over her ears and swathed her throat high in soft laces, concealing all the aged lines in face and figure with innocent feminine arts.
Randolph adored his mother. He had never cared for any other woman. He had sat at his mother's little feet all his life, although he had at times his own masculine way, as in the matter of the deserting of his profession for trade. He had remained firm, although his mother had said much against it.
“Frankly, I do not approve of it, dear,” she said. “I agree, but I do not approve. I do not like it, that you should desert the trodden path of your forebears. It is not so much that I am proud, but I am conservative. I believe there is a certain harmony between the man and the road his race have travelled. I believe he is a very sorry figure on another, especially if it be on a lower level.”
“I don't think it is a question of level,” said Randolph. “A road is simply a question of progress.”
“Well, perhaps,” said his mother, “but in that case the state of things is the same. A grocer would cut a sorry figure on your road, even if it ran parallel towards the same goal, and a lawyer would cut a sorry figure on a grocer's. Frankly, dear, I really doubt if you will make a good grocer.”
Randolph laughed. “At least I hope I can earn our bread-and-butter,” he said. Then he went on seriously. “It is just here,” he said—“you and I are not sordid. Neither of us cares about money for itself, but here we are on this earth, with that existence which has its money price, and obligations imposed upon us. We cannot shirk it. We must live, and in order to live we must have a certain amount of money. Now all we have in this world for material goods is this old house and your little pittance. We have not a cent besides. If we were to try living on that, it would not last out your lifetime. If it would, I should not combat your prejudices, but we could lie on our oars and eat up the old place, and later on I would hustle for myself. But it will not. Now, I have demonstrated that I cannot earn anything by my profession. I have tried it faithfully and well. Last year I did not earn enough to pay my office rent. I never shall in Banbridge, and there is no sense whatever in my striking out in a new place with no prestige and no money. You and I simply want enough to live on, enough money to buy the wherewithal to keep the flame of life comfortably burning, and I can think of no other way than this grocery business. People must eat. You are certainly sure of earning something, if you offer people something they want. In my profession there is nothing that they do want.”
“But your education,” said his mother. She thought of the rows of law-books of whose contents she fondly believed her son a master.
“Oh, that is mine still,” said Randolph, “but other people don't want it. There is no use, mother, in evading the question. We live in an age of market values. We must consider them. Butter and cheese have a sure market value, and the knowledge of the law in my head has not. Nobody wants it enough to pay anything for it, to give us a moneyed equivalent wherewith we may buy the things we need. Therefore, if nobody wants that, we must offer them something else. When it comes to the rights of our fellow-men to spend their own money as they choose, that is inalienable. It is about the most firmly established right in the country. No; people cannot be coerced into buying my little store of knowledge, therefore I will try them with my little store of butter and cheese and eggs and molasses.”
Randolph Anderson laughed. Aside from regard for his mother's feelings, he had not the slightest scruple against his business venture. On the contrary, it rather amused him. He must have had a latent taste for business, for he quite enjoyed studying the markets and purchasing his stock in trade. He purchased wisely, too. He offered a choice stock of goods, or, rather, his two salesmen did. He himself did not sell much over his own counters, except in the case of a great rush of business. But it was not from the least sensation of superiority. It was merely because of a distrust of his own ability to acquit himself well in such a totally different branch of industry. Anderson was cast on unusually simple and ingenuous lines. Nobody would have believed it, but he was actually somewhat modest and shy before his own clerks, and realized sensitively his own lack of experience. So he had a way of subsiding when customers appeared, and retreating to his office in the rear of the building. He spent most of his time in this office. It was a very pleasant one, overlooking the river, on which steamboats and canal-boats travelled to the city. From Anderson's office the bank of red clay soil sloped to the water's edge. He could see the gleam of the current through the shag of young trees which found root in the unpromising soil. Now and then the tall mast of a sailing-vessel glided by, now the smoke-stack of a steamer. Often the quiet was broken by the panting breath of a tug. Often into his field of vision flapped the wet clothes from the line strung along the deck of a canal-boat. The canal ran along beside the regular current of the river, separated from it by a narrow tow-path. Farther down, the great railroad bridge crossed the stream, and at all hours he could catch the swift glisten of the train-windows as they shot past.
Anderson's office was about twelve by fourteen, and lined with shelves on two sides. On these he had books, not law-books. Those he had relegated to the library at home. He had probably in the depths of his consciousness a sensation of melancholy at the contemplation of those reminders of his balked career. No man, no matter how gracefully he may yield to it, cares to contemplate failures. He had filled these shelves with books of which he was fond, for daily reading. They were most of them old. He had little money with which to purchase new ones. He had been forced to rely upon those which his father and grandfather had accumulated. There were, however, a few recent and quite valuable books which he had acquired since his venture in trade, upon entomology, especially books upon butterflies. Since his retreat from the law he had developed suddenly, perhaps by the force of contrast, or the opposite swing of the pendulum, an overwhelming taste for those airy flowers of animated life. The two walls of the office not occupied with books were hung with framed specimens. He had also under the riverward window a little table equipped with the necessary paraphernalia for mounting them. Many a sunny day in the season he spent in the fields on this gentle hunt. There was a broad sill to the window, and upon it stood a box filled with green plants. When the season was enough advanced and the window always open, the trailing vines rooted in the box hung far down outside, and the women on the passing canal-boats looked up at them. The window-ledge was wide enough, moreover, for an old red cushion upon which slept in the sun when he was not afield for love or war or prey, a great cat striped like a tiger, with fierce green eyes, and a mighty purr of comfort, and a rounding back of affection for Anderson's legs when he talked to him.
Anderson had two comfortable old chairs in his office, and a goodly assortment of pipes, for he was a great smoker. He made tobacco a part of his grocery business, and had a strong sense of comfort in reflecting upon the unlimited supply. He had been forced, in the last days of his law-practice, to stint himself even in this creature comfort. On the whole, he was much happier when fairly established in trade than he had ever been before. He was so absorbed in his business (all the details of which he mastered), in his books, and his butterflies, that he saw very little of the people, and knew very little of what was going on in Banbridge, except through his mother. Mrs. Anderson, in spite of her years, and a certain lack of strength which had always hampered her, was quite prominent in Banbridge society. She was one of the old women whom young girls adore, even when the adoration is not increased by the existence of a marriageable son. Sometimes the old lady would regard an unmarried female-caller with a soft suspicion of ulterior motives, but she never whispered them to her son. Sylvia Anderson had a lovely, fine delicacy where the foibles of her own sex were concerned. She was so essentially feminine herself that she was never quite rid of her maiden sense of alienation even with her son. She would have been much happier with a daughter, although she was very fond of her son.
One afternoon in May, a short time after Mrs. Van Dorn and Mrs. Lee had made their circuit of calls which had included her, some other ladies were making the rounds in the calling-coach, which drew up before her door. There were three ladies, two of them unmarried. They were an elder aunt, her young unmarried niece, and a married lady who had been the girl friend of the aunt. They made a long call, and Mrs. Anderson entertained them with tea in her pink-and-gold china cups, with cream in the little family silver cream-jug, and with slices of pound-cake. It was an old custom of Mrs. Anderson's which she had copied all through her married life from Madam Anderson, Randolph's grandmother, the widow of old Dr. Anderson, the clergyman.
“I always make it a custom, my dear, to keep pound-cake on hand, and have some of the best green tea in the caddy, and then when callers come of an afternoon I can offer them some refreshment,” she had said when her son's wife first came to live with her. So Mrs. Anderson had antedated the modern fashion in Banbridge, but she did not keep a little, ornate tea-table in her parlor. The cake and tea were brought in by the one maid on a tray covered with a polka-dotted damask.
This afternoon the callers had their cake and tea, and lingered long afterwards. Now and then Mrs. Anderson glanced imperceptibly at the window, thinking her son might pass. She regarded the unmarried aunt and the young niece with asides of reflection even while she talked to them. The niece was not pretty, but her bloom of youth under the roses of her spring hat was ravishing. The aunt had never been pretty; and, moreover, her bloom had gone, but she was well dressed, and her thin figure was full of grace. She sat in her chair with delicate erectness, the folds of her gray gown was disposed over her supple length of limb with charming effect. She also had a sort of eager, almost appealing amiability. It was as if she said:
“Yes, I know I am no longer young. I am not fair to see, but indeed I mean well by you. I would do much for you. I even love you. Cannot you love me for that?” and that was softly compelling.
Mrs. Anderson reflected that a man might easily admire either of these women. Her manner, in spite of herself, cooled towards them. She did not think of the third woman, who was married, except to ply her with cake and tea and inquire for her husband and children. The woman, after she had finished her cake and tea, sat sunken in her corsets, under her loosely fitting black silk, and looked stupidly amiable. She rose with a slight sigh of relief when at last the others made a motion to go. She thought of her supper at home, and the children long out of school. It was past supper-time for Banbridge. The sun was quite low. An hour ago a little herd of cows had pelted by in a cloud of dust, with great udders swinging perilously, going home to be milked.
“That Flannigan boy always runs those cows home,” said the aunt, disapprovingly, as she passed the window.
“I have always heard it was bad for the milk,” assented Mrs. Anderson.
Now that her callers were on the move, Mrs. Anderson was exceedingly cordial. She said something further about the quality of the cream obtained from the cows, and the aunt said yes, it was very good, although so dear. The old lady kissed both the aunt and the niece when they at last went out of the door, and said she was so glad that she was at home, and begged them to come again. She stood in the door watching them get into the coach. The young girl's face in the window, with her beflowered hat, a rose crowned with roses, in the dark setting of the window, was beautiful. Even the aunt's face, older and more colorless, except for an unlovely flush of excitement, was pathetically compelling and charmed. Mrs. Anderson, filling up the doorway with her stately bulk, swept around by her soft black draperies, her fair old face rising from a foam of lace, and delicately capped with lace, on which was a knot of palest lavender, stood in a frame of luxuriant Virginia-creeper, and smiled and nodded graciously to her departing guests, while wondering if they would meet her son coming home. After that followed a reflection as to the undesirability of either of them as a possible daughter-in-law.
Just as she was turning to enter the house, after the coach had rolled out of sight, she saw her son coming down the street under the green shade of the maples which bordered it. The mother went toddling on her tiny feet down the steps to the gate to meet her son. The house stood quite close to the road; indeed, only a little bricked-path separated it from the sidewalk. All the ground was at the sides and back. The house was a square old affair with a row of half-windows in the third-story, or attic, and considerable good old panel-work and ornamentation about it. On the right side of the house was a large old flower-garden, now just beginning to assert itself anew; on the left were the stable and some out-buildings, with a grassy oval of lawn in the centre of a sweep of drive; in the rear was a kitchen-garden and a field rising to the railroad, for railroads circled all Banbridge in their vises of iron arms. A station was only a short distance farther up this same street. As Mrs. Anderson stood waiting and her son was advancing down the street a train from the city rumbled past. When Randolph had come up, and they had both entered the house, a carriage passed swiftly and both saw it from the parlor window.
“Do you know who's carriage that is?” asked Mrs. Anderson. “It is something new in Banbridge, isn't it?”
“It belongs to those new people who have moved into the Ranger place,” replied Randolph. He wore a light business-suit which suited him, and he looked like a gentleman, as much so as when he had come from a law-office instead of a grocery-store. Indeed, he had been much shabbier in the law-office and had not held his head so high. In the law-office he had constantly been confronted with the possibility of debt. Here he was free from it. He had been smoking, as usual, and there was about his garments an odor of mingled coffee and tobacco. He had been selling coffee, and grinding some. One of his two salesmen was ill, and that was why he was so late. The new carriage rolled silently on its rubber tires along the macadamized road; the high black polish and plate-glass flashed in the sunlight, the coachman in livery sat proudly erect and held his whip stylishly, the sleek horses pranced, seeming scarcely to touch the road with their dainty hoofs.
“Those are fine horses,” said Randolph.
“Yes,” assented his mother. “They must be very wealthy people, I suppose.”
“It looks so,” replied Randolph.
His mother, still staring out of the window, started. “Why,” she said, “the coachman is turning around!”
“Perhaps he has forgotten something at the station,” said Randolph.
“Why, it is stopping here!” cried Mrs. Anderson, wonderingly. The carriage indeed stopped just before the Anderson gate, and remained there perfectly still. The coachman gazed intently at the house, but made no motion to get down. At a window was seen a gentleman's face; past him the fresh face of a girl, also gazing. Randolph looked out, and the gentleman in the carriage made an imperious beckoning motion.
“Why, he is beckoning you!” said Mrs. Anderson, amazedly and indignantly.
Anderson moved towards the door.
“You are not going out when you are beckoned to in that way?” cried his mother.
Anderson laughed. “You forget, mother,” he said, “that a grocer is at the beck and call of his patrons.”
“I am ashamed of you!” she said, hotly, her fair old face flushing, “to have no more pride—”
Anderson laughed again. “I am too proud to have pride,” he said, and went out of the room. He went leisurely down the steps, and crossed the little brick walk to the gate, and then approached the carriage. The gentleman inside, with what seemed an unpremeditated movement, raised his hat. Randolph bowed. Carroll smiled in the gentle, admiring way which he had.
“Perhaps I have made a mistake,” he said, “but I was directed here. I was told that Anderson, who keeps the grocery, lives here.”
“I am Anderson,” replied Randolph, with dignity and a certain high scorn, and purposely leaving off the Mr. from his name.
Arthur Carroll no longer smiled, but his voice had a certain urbanity, although it rang imperiously. “Now, see here,” he said. “I want to know why you did not do as I left instructions at your shop?”
“To what do you refer?” inquired Anderson, quietly.
“I want to know why you did not send in your bill last Saturday night, as I ordered.” Carroll's voice was so loud that Mrs. Anderson, in the house, heard him distinctly through the open windows.
“I did not know that you had so ordered,” replied Anderson, still quietly, with a slight emphasis on the ordered. He looked slightly amused.
“Well, I did. I told your clerk to be sure to send in my bills promptly every Saturday morning. I wish to settle weekly.”
“The mistake was doubtless due to the fact that my clerk has been at home ill for the last three days,” said Anderson. “This is the first time I have heard of your order.”
“Well,” said Carroll, “send it in at once now, and don't let it happen again.”
Although the tone was harsh and the words were imperious, still they were not insolent. There was even an effect ofcamaraderieabout them. At the last he flashed a quick smile at Anderson, which Anderson returned. He was dimly conscious all the time of Charlotte's very pretty face past her father's, peeping around his gray shoulder with a large-eyed, rather puzzled expression. Carroll nodded slightly after the smile, and told the coachman to go on, and the horses sprang forward after a delicate toss of their curving forelegs.
Randolph re-entered the house, and his mother, who was waiting, faced him with soft indignation.
“I must say, my son, that I am surprised that you submit to being addressed in such a fashion as that,” she said, her blue eyes darkening at him.
Randolph laughed again. “There was no real insolence about it, after all, mother,” he replied.
“It sounded so,” said she.
“That was because you could not see his face,” said Randolph. “He looked very amiable.”
“He was angry because he did not get his bill Saturday?” said Mrs. Anderson, interrogatively.
“Yes. He must have given the order to Sam Riggs the day before he went home ill, I suppose.”
“He must be a very wealthy man,” said Mrs. Anderson. “It is rather good of him to be so anxious to pay his bill every week.”
“Yes, it is a very laudable desire,” said Randolph. “I only hope his ability may equal it.”
His mother looked at him with quick surprise. “Why, you surely don't think—” she said.
“I think nothing. The man is all right, so far as I know. He seems a gentleman, and if he is well off he is a very desirable acquisition to Banbridge.”
“Who was that with him in the coach?” asked Mrs. Anderson.
“One of his daughters, I should judge. I hear he has two.”
“Pretty?”
“Well, I hardly know. Have you had any callers?”
“Yes. I suppose you met them. They made a very long call.”
“You mean the Egglestons?”
“Yes, Miss Josie and little Agnes Eggleston and Mrs. Monroe. They stayed here over an hour. I thought you would meet them.”
“Yes, I met them just as I turned from Main Street,” replied Randolph, soberly, but he was inwardly amused. He understood his mother. But there was something which he did not tell her concerning his experience with the new-comers, the Carrolls. Shortly, she went out to give some directions about tea, and Randolph, sitting beside a window in the parlor with an evening paper, drew from his pocket a letter just received in the mail, and examined it again. It was from a city bank, and it contained a repudiated check for ten dollars, made out by Captain Arthur Carroll, and which Anderson had cashed a few days previous at the request of the pretty young girl in the carriage, who to-night had sat there looking at him and did not speak, either because she had forgotten his face as he did her the little favor, or because he was so far away from her social scale that she was innocently unaware of any necessity for it.
Randolph Anderson had a large contempt for money used otherwise than for its material ends. A dollar never meant anything to him except its equivalent in the filling of a need. Generosity and the impulse of giving were in his blood, yet it had gone hard several times with people who had tried to overreach him even to a trifling extent. But now he submitted without a word to losing ten dollars through cashing Arthur Carroll's worthless check. He himself was rather bewildered at his tame submission. One thing was certain, although it seemed paradoxical; if he had not had suspicions as to Arthur Carroll's perfect trustworthiness, he would at once have gone to him with the check.
“I dare say he overdrew his account without knowing it, as many an honest man does,” he reasoned, when trying to apologize to himself for his unbusiness-like conduct, but always he knew subconsciously that if he had been perfectly sure of that view of it he would not have hesitated to put it to the proof. For some reason, probably unconfessed rather than actually hidden from himself, he shrank from a possible discovery to Arthur Carroll's discredit. When a man of Randolph Anderson's kind replies to a question concerning the beauty of a young girl that he does not know, the assumption is warranted that he has given the matter consideration. A man usually leaps to a decision of that kind, and if he has no ulterior motive for concealment, he would as lief proclaim it to the house-tops.
Usually Randolph Anderson would no more have hesitated about giving his opinion as to a girl's looks than he would have hesitated about giving his candid opinion of the weather. For the most part a woman's face had about as much effect upon his emotional nature as the face of a day. He saw that it was rosy or gray, smiling and sunny, or frowning or rainy, then he looked unmovedly at the retreating backs of both. It was all the same thing. Anderson was a man who dealt mostly with actualities where his emotions were concerned. With some, love-dreams grow and develop with their growth and development; with some not. The latter had been true with Randolph Anderson. Then, too, he was scarcely self-centred and egotistical enough for genuine air-castles of any kind. To build an air-castle, one's own personality must be the central prop and pillar, for even anything as unsubstantial as an air-castle has its building law. One must rear around something, or the structure can never rise above the horizon of the future.
Anderson had stored his mind with the poetic facts of the world rather than projected his poetic fancies into the facts of the world. He saw things largely as they were, with no inflorescence of rainbows where there was none; but there are actual rainbows, and even auroras, so that the man who does not dream has compensations and a less chance of disillusion. Of course Anderson had thought of marriage; he could scarcely have done otherwise; but he had thought of it as an abstract condition pertaining to himself only in a general way as it pertains to all mankind. He had never seen himself plainly enough in his fancy as a lover and husband to have a pang of regret or longing. He had been really contented as he was. He had a powerful mind, and the exercising of that held in restraint the purely physical which might have precipitated matters. Some men advance, the soul pushing the body with more or less effort; some with the soul first, trailing the body; some in unison, and these are they who make the best progress as to the real advancement. Anderson moved, on the whole, in the last way. He was a very healthy man, mind and body, and with rather unusual advantages in point of looks. This last he realized in one way but not in another. He knew it on general principles; he recognized the fact as he recognized the fact of his hands and feet; but what he actually saw in the looking-glass was not so much the physical fact of himself as the spiritual problem with its two known quantities of need and circumstance, and its great unknown third which took hold of eternity. Anderson, although not in a sense religious, had a religious trend of thought. He went every Sunday with his mother to the Presbyterian church where his grandfather had preached to an earlier generation.
On the Sunday after his encounter with Arthur Carroll with reference to the bill, he went to church as usual with his mother.
Mrs. Anderson was a picture of a Sunday, in a rich lavender silk and a magnificent though old-fashioned lace shawl which floated from her shoulder in a fairy net-work of black roses. She would never wear plain black like most women of her age. She was one of the blue-eyed women who looks well in lavender. Her blue eyes, now looking at her son from under the rich purples and lavenders of the velvet pansies on her bonnet, got an indeterminate color like myrtle blossoms. A deeper pink also showed on her cheeks because of the color of her gown.
“Mother, you are just such a mixture of color as that lilac-bush,” said her son, irrelevantly, looking from her to a great lilac-bush in the corner of the yard they were passing. It was tipped with rose on the delicate ends of its blooming racemes, which shaded to blue at the bases.
“Did you see those new people in church to-day?” said she.
“Yes, I think I did,” replied Randolph. “They sat just in front of the Egglestons, didn't they?”
“Yes,” said his mother, “they did sit there. There is quite a large family. The ladies are all very nice-looking, too, and they all look alike. If they are going to church, such a family as that, and so well off, they will be quite an acquisition to Banbridge.”
“Yes,” said Randolph. He spoke absently, and he looked absently at a great wistaria which draped with pendulous purple blooms the veranda of a house which they were just passing. It arrested his eyes as with a loud chord of color, but his mind did not grasp it at all. Afterwards he could not have said he had seen it. As is often the case, while his eyes actually saw one thing, his consciousness saw another. Great, purple, pendulous flowers filled his bodily vision, and the head and shoulders of a young girl above a church pew his mental outlook. Had he seen the Carrolls in church—had he, indeed? Had he seen anything besides them, or rather besides one of them? Had he not, the moment she came up the aisle and entered the pew, seen her with a very clutch of vision? He could not have described one article of her dress, and yet it was complete in his thought. She had worn a soft silk of a dull-red shade, with a frill of cream lace about the shoulders, and there were pink roses under the brim of her dull-red hat, and under the roses was her face, shaded softly with a great puff of her dark hair. And her dark eyes under the dark hair had in them the very light of morning dew, which sparkled back both this world and heaven itself into the eyes of the looker, all reflected in tiny crystal spheres. Suddenly the man gazing across the church had seen in this girl's face all there was of earth and the overhang of heaven; he had seen the present and the future. It is through the face of another human being that one gets the furthest reach of human vision, and that furthest reach had now come for the first time to Randolph Anderson. All at once a quiver ran through his entire consciousness from this elongated vision, and he realized sight to its uttermost. Yet it did not dawn on him that he was in love with this girl. He would have laughed at the idea. He had seen her only twice; he had spoken to her only once. He knew nothing of her except that she had given him a worthless check to cash. Love could not come to him in this wise, and it had not, in fact. He had only attained to the comprehension of love. He had gotten faith, he had seen the present world and the world to come in the light of it, but not as yet his own soul. Yet always he saw the girl's head under the pink roses under the brim of the dark-red hat. It was evidently a favorite headgear of hers. She had worn it with a white dress when she had come to the store to get the check cashed. But he had not seen her so fully then. His little doubt and bewilderment over the check had clouded his vision. Now, since he had seen her in the church-pew, his last thrifty scruple as to ignoring the matter of the check left him. He felt that he could not put his doubt of her father to the proof. Suppose that the account had not been carelessly overdrawn— Suppose— He never for one instant suspected the girl. As soon suspect a rosebud of foregoing its own sweet personality, and of being in reality something else, say a stinging nettle. The girl carried her patent royal of youth and innocence on her face. He made up his mind to say nothing about the check, to lose the ten dollars, and, since dollars were so far from plenty with him, to sacrifice some luxury for the luxury of the loss. He made up his mind that he could very well do without the book with colored plates of South American butterflies which he had thought of purchasing. Much better live without that than rub the bloom off a better than butterfly's wing. Better anything than disturb that look of innocent ignorance on that girl's little face.
It was the next day that Randolph Anderson, on his way home at noon, saw ahead of him, just as he turned the corner from Main to Elm street, where his own house was, a knot of boys engaged in what he at first thought was a fight or its preliminaries. There was a great clamor, too. In the boughs of a maple in the near-by yard were two robins wrangling; underneath were the boys. The air was full of the sweet jangle of birds and boyish trebles, for all the boys were young. Anderson, as he came up, glanced indifferently at the turbulent group and saw one boy who seemed to be the centre of contention. He was backed up against the fence, an ornate iron affair backed by a thick hedge, the green leaves of which pricked through the slender iron uprights. In front of this green, iron-grated wall, which was higher than his head, for he was a little fellow, stood a boy, who Anderson saw at a glance was the same one whom he had seen with the Carrolls in church the day before. His hair was rather long and a toss of dark curls. His face was as tenderly pretty as his sister's, whom he strongly resembled, although he was somewhat fairer of complexion. But it was full of the utmost bravado of rage and defiance, and his two small hands were clinched, until the knuckles whitened, in the faces of the little crowd who confronted him. The color had not left his face, for his cheeks burned like roses, but his pretty mouth was hard set and his black eyes blazed. The boys danced and made threatening feints at him. They called out confused taunts and demands whose purport Anderson at first did not comprehend, but the boy never swerved. When one of his tormentors came nearer, out swung the little white fist at him, and the other invariably dodged.
Anderson's curiosity grew. He went closer. Amidon and Ray, the postmaster, on his way home to his dinner, also joined him, and the little barber, smelling strongly of scented soap and witch-hazel. They stood listening interestedly.
“Most too many against one,” remarked the postmaster.
“He don't look scared,” said Amidon. “He's Southern, and he's got grit. He's backed up there like the whole Confederacy.”
A kindly look overspread the sleek, conceited face of the man. His forebears were from Alabama. His father had been a small white slave-owner who had drifted North, in a state of petty ruin after the war, and there Amidon, who had been a child at the time, had grown up and married the thrifty woman who supported him. The wrangle increased, the boys danced more energetically, the small fists of the boy at bay were on closer guard.
“Hi, there!” sung out Amidon. “Look at here; there's too many of ye. Look out ye don't git into no mischief, now.”
“Hullo, boys! what's the trouble?” shouted the postmaster, in a voice of authority. He was used to running these same boys out of his office when they became too boisterous during the distribution of the mails, making precipitate dashes from the inner sanctum of the United States government. They were accustomed to the sound of his important shout, and a few eyes rolled over shoulder at him. But they soon plunged again into their little whirlpool of excitement, for they were quick-witted and not slow to reason that they were now on the king's highway where they had as much right as the postmaster, and could not be coerced under his authority.
“What is it all about?” the postmaster called, loudly, above the hubbub, to Anderson.
Anderson shook his head. He was listening to the fusillade of taunting, threatening yells, with his forehead knitted. Then all at once he understood. Over and over, with every pitch possible to the boyish threats, the cry intermingling and crossing until all the vowels and consonants overlapped, the boys repeated: “Yerlie—yerlie—yerlie—” They clipped the reproach short; they elongated it into a sliding thrill. From one boy, larger than the others, and whose voice was changing, came at intervals the demand, in a hoarse, cracking treble, with sudden descents into gulfs of bass: “Take it ba-ck! Take it ba-ck!”
Always in response to that demand of the large boy, who was always the one who danced closest to the boy at bay, came the reply, in a voice like a bird's, “Die first—die first.”
After a most energetic dash of this large boy, Anderson stepped up and caught him by the shoulder on his retreat from the determined little fist. He knew the large boy; he was a nephew of Henry Lee, whose wife had invaded the Carroll house in the absence of the family.
“See here, Harry,” said Anderson, “what is this about, eh?”
The large boy, who, in spite of his size, was a youngster, looked at once terrifiedly and pugnaciously into his face, and beginning with a whimper of excuse to Anderson, ended with a snarl of wrath for the other boy. “He tells lies, he does. He tells lies. Ya-h!” The boy danced at the other even under Anderson's restraining hand on his shoulder. “Yerlie—yerlie! Ya-h!” he yelled, and all the others joined in. The chorus was deafening. Anderson's hand on the boy's shoulder tightened. He shook him violently. The boy's cap fell off, and his shock of fair hair waved. He rolled eyes of terrified wonder at his captor. “What, wha-at?—” he stammered. “You lemme be. You— Wha-at?”
“I'll tell you what, you big bully, you,” said Anderson, sternly. “That boy there is one to a dozen, and he's the smallest of the lot—he's half your size. Now, what in thunder are you all about, badgering that little chap so?”
A sudden silence prevailed. They all stood looking from under lowered eyebrows at the group of watching men; their small shoulders under their little school-jackets were seen to droop; scarcely a boy but shuffled his right leg, while their hands, which had been gyrating fists, unclinched and twitched at their sides. But the boy did not relax for a second his expression of leaping, bounding rage, of a savage young soul in a feeble body. Now he included Anderson and the other men. He held his head with the haughtiness of a prince. He seemed to question them with silent wrath.
“Who are you who dare to come here and interfere in my quarrel?” he seemed to say. “I was sufficient unto myself. I needed none of your protection. What if I was one to a dozen? Look atme!” His little hands did not for a second unclinch. He was really very young, probably no more than ten. He was scarcely past his babyhood, but he was fairly impressive, not the slightest maturity of mind, but of spirit. He could never take a fiercer stand against odds than now if he lived to be a hundred.
Anderson approached him, in spite of himself, with a certain respect. “What is the matter, young man?” he inquired, gravely.
The boy regarded him with silent resentment and scorn; he did not deign an answer. But the big boy replied for him promptly:
“He—he said his father kept a tame elephant when they lived in New York State, and he—he used to ride him—”
He spoke in a tone of aggrieved virtue, and regarded the other with a scowl. The men guffawed, and after a second the boys also. Then a little fellow behind the ringleader offered additional testimony.
“He said he used to get up a private circus once a week, every Saturday, and charge ten cents a head, and made ten dollars a week,” he said. Then his voice of angry accusation ended in a chuckle.
Anderson kept his face quite grave, but all the others joined in the chorus of merriment. The little fellow backed against the iron fence gave an incredulous start at the sound of the laughter, then the red roses faded out on his smooth cheeks and he went quite white. The laughter stung his very soul as no recrimination could have done. He suffered tortures of mortified pride. His fists were still clinched, but his proud lip quivered a little. He looked very young—a baby.
Anderson stepped to his aid. He raised his voice. “Now, look here, boys,” he said. But he made no headway against the hilarity, which swelled higher and higher. The crowd increased. Several more men and boys were on the outskirts. An ally pressed through the crowd to Anderson's side.
“Now, boys,” he proclaimed, and for a moment his thin squeak weighted with importance gained a hearing—“now, boys,” said the barber, “this little feller's father is an extinguished new denizen of Banbridge, and you ain't treatin' of him with proper disrespect. Now—” But then his voice was drowned in a wilder outburst than ever. The little crowd of men and boys went fairly mad with hysterical joy of mirth, as an American crowd will when once overcome by the humor of the situation in the midst of their stress of life. They now laughed at the little barber and the boy. The old familiar butt had joined forces with the new ones.
“They have formed a trust,” said Amidon, deserting his partisanship, now that it had assumed this phase of harmless jocularity.
But the boy at bay, as the laughter at his expense increased, was fairly frantic. He lost what he had hitherto retained, his self-possession. “I tell you I did!” he suddenly screamed out, in a sweet screech, like an angry bird, which commanded the ears of the crowd from its strangeness. “I tell you I did have an elephant, I did ride him, and I did have a circus every Saturday afternoon, so there!”
The “so there” was tremendous. The words vanished in the sound. The boyish expression denoting triumphant climax became individual, the language of one soul. He fired the words at them all like a charge of shot. There was a pause of a second, then the laughter and mocking were recommencing. But Anderson took advantage of the lull.
“See here, boys,” he shouted, “there's been enough of this. What is it to you whether he had a dozen elephants and rode them all at once, and had a circus every day in the week with a dozen tame bears thrown in? Clear out and go home and get your dinners. Clear out! Vamoose! Scatter!” His tone was at once angry and appealing. It implied authority and comradeship.
Anderson had given great promise as a speaker during his college course. He was a man who, if he exerted himself, could gauge the temper of a mob. The men on the outskirts began moving away easily; the boys followed their example. The little barber took the boy familiarly by the arm.
“Now, you look at here,” said he. “Don't you hev them chaps a-pesterin' of you no more, an' ef they do, you jest streak right into my parlor an' I'll take care of ye. See?”
The boy twitched his arm away and eyed the barber witheringly. “I don't want anything to do with you nor your old barber-shop,” said he.
“You had better run along, John,” said Anderson to the barber, who was staring amazedly, although the complacent smirk upon his face was undiminished.
“I guess he's a child kinder given to speakin' at tandem,” he said, as he complied with Anderson's advice.
The boy turned at once to the man. “What business had that barber telling me to go into his old barber-shop?” demanded he. “I ain't afraid of all the boys in this one-horse town.”
“Of course not,” said Anderson.
“I did have an elephant when I lived in Hillfield, and I did ride him, and I did have circuses every Saturday,” said the boy, with challenge.
Anderson said nothing.
“At least—” said the child, in a modified tone. Anderson looked at him with an air of polite waiting. The boy's roses bloomed again. “At least—” he faltered, “at least—” A maid rang a dinner-bell frantically in the doorway of the house near which they were standing. Anderson glanced at her, then back at the boy. “At least—” said the boy, with a blurt of confidence which yielded nothing, but implied the recognition of a friend and understander in the man—“at—least I used to make believe I had an elephant when I lived in Hillfield.”
“Yes?” said Anderson. He made a movement to go, and the boy still kept at his side.
“And—” he added, but still with no tone of apology or confession, “I might have had an elephant.”
“Yes,” said Anderson, “you might have.”
“And they did not know but what I might,” said the boy, angrily.
Anderson nodded judicially. “That's so, I suppose; only elephants are not very common as setter dogs for a boy to have around these parts.”
“It was a setter dog,” said the boy, with a burst of innocence and admiration. “How did you know?”
“Oh, I guessed.”
“You must be real smart,” said the boy. “My father said he thought you were, and somehow had got stranded in a grocery store. Did you?”
“Yes, I did,” replied Anderson.
Anderson was now walking quite briskly towards home and dinner, and the boy was trotting by his side, with seemingly no thought of parting. They proceeded in silence for a few steps; then the boy spoke again.
“I began with the setter dog,” said he. “His name was Archie, and he used to jump over the roof of a part of our house as high as”—he looked about and pointed conclusively at the ell of a house across the street—“as high as that,” he said, with one small pink finger indicating unwaveringly.
“That must have been quite a jump,” remarked Anderson, and his voice betrayed nothing.