THEY were on their way back from Father Minor's funeral. Going to the graveyard the horses had ambled slowly; coming home they trotted along briskly so that from under their feet the gravel grit sprang up, to blow out behind in little squills and pennons of yellow dust. The black plumes in the headstalls of the white span that drew the empty hearse nodded briskly. It was only their colour which kept those plumes from being downright cheerful. Also, en route to the cemetery, the pallbearers, both honorary and active, had marched in double file at the head of the procession. Now, returning, they rode in carriages especially provided for them.
The first carriage—that is to say, the first one following the hearse—held four passengers: firstly, the widowed sister of the dead man, from up state somewhere; secondly and thirdly, two strange priests who had come over from Hopkinsburg to conduct the services; finally and fourthly, the late Father Minor's housekeeper, a lean and elderly spinster whose devoutness made her dour; indeed, a person whom piety beset almost as a physical affliction. Seeing her any time at all, the observer went away filled with the belief that in her particular case the more certain this woman might be of blessedness hereafter, the more miserable she would feel in the meantime. Now, as her grief-drawn face and reddened eyes looked forth from the carriage window upon the familiar panorama of Buckner Street, all about her bespoke the profound conviction that this world, already lost in sin, was doubly lost since Father Minor had gone to take his reward.
In the second carriage rode four of the honorary pallbearers, and each of them was a veteran, as the dead priest had been: Circuit Judge Priest, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, Doctor Lake, and Mr. Peter J. Galloway, our leading blacksmith and horseshoer. Of these four Mr. Galloway was the only one who worshipped according to the faith the dead man had preached. But all of them were members in good standing of the Gideon K. Irons Camp.
As though to match the changed gait of the undertaker's horses, the spirits of these old men were uplifted into a sort of tempered cheerfulness. So often it is that way after the mourners come away from the grave. All that kindly hands might do for him who was departed out of this life had been done. The spade had shaped up and smoothed down the clods which covered him; the flowers had been piled upon the sexton's mounded handiwork until the raw brown earth was almost hidden. Probably already the hot morning sun was wilting the blossoms. By to-morrow morning the petals would be falling—a drifting testimony to the mortality of all living things.
On the way out these four had said mighty little to one another, but in their present mood they spoke freely of their departed comrade—his sayings, his looks, little ways that he had, stories of his early life before he took holy orders, when he rode hard and fought hard, and very possibly swore hard, as a trooper in Morgan's cavalry.
“It was a fine grand big turnout they gave him this day,” said Mr. Galloway with a tincture of melancholy pride in his voice. “Almost as many Protestants as Catholics there.”
“Herman Felsburg sent the biggest floral design there was,” said Doctor Lake. “I saw his name on the card.”
“That's the way Father Tom would have liked it to be, I reckin,” said Judge Priest from his corner of the carriage. “After all, boys, the best test of a man ain't so much the amount of cash he's left in the bank, but how many'll turn out to pay him their respects when they put him away.”
“Still, at that,” said the sergeant, “I taken notice of several absentees—from the Camp, I mean. I didn't see Jake Smedley nowheres around at the church, or at the graveyard neither.”
“Jake's got right porely,” explained Judge Priest. “He's been lookin' kind of ga'nted anyhow, lately. I'm feared Jake is beginnin' to break.”
“Oh, I reckin tain't ez bad ez all that,” said the sergeant. “You'll see Jake comin' round all right ez soon ez the weather turns off cool ag'in. Us old boys may be gittin' along in years, but we're a purty husky crew yit. It's a powerful hard job to kill one of us off. I'm sixty-seven myself, but most of the time I feel ez peart and skittish ez a colt.” He spoke for the moment vaingloriously; then his tone altered: “I'm luckier, though, than some—in the matter of general health. Take Abner Tilghman now, for instance. Sence he had that second stroke Abner jest kin make out to crawl about. He wasn't there to-day with us neither.”
“Boys,” said Doctor Lake, “I hope it's no reflection on my professional abilities, but it seems to me I've been losing a lot of my patients here recently. I'm afraid Ab Tilghman is going to be the next one to make a gap in the ranks. Just between us, he's in mighty bad shape. Did it ever occur to any of you to count up and see how many members of the Camp we've buried this past year, starting in last January with old Professor Reese and winding up to-day with Father Minor?”
None of them answered him in words. Only Judge Priest gave a little stubborn shake of his head, as though to ward away an unpleasant thought. Tact inspired Sergeant Bagby to direct the conversation into a different channel.
“I reckin Mrs. Herman Felsburg won't know whut to do now with that extry fish she always fries of a Friday,” said the sergeant.
“That's right too, Jimmy,” said Mr. Galloway. “Well, God bless her anyway for a fine lady!”
Had you, reader, enjoyed the advantage of living in our town and of knowing its customs, you would have understood at once what this last reference meant. You see, the Felsburgs, in their fine home, lived diagonally across the street from the little priest house behind the Catholic church. Mrs. Felsburg was distinguished for being a rigid adherent to the ritualistic laws of her people. Away from home her husband and her sons might choose whatever fare suited their several palates, but beneath her roof and at the table where she presided they found none of the forbidden foods.
On Fridays she cooked with her own hands the fish for the coldShabbathsupper and, having cooked them, she set them aside to cool. But always the finest, crispest fish of all, while still hot, was spread upon one of Mrs. Felsburg's best company plates and covered over with one of Mrs. Felsburg's fine white napkins, and then a servant would run across the street with it, from Mrs. Felsburg's side gate to the front door of the priest house, and hand it in to the dour-faced housekeeper with Mrs. Felsburg's compliments. And so that night, at his main meal of the day, Father Minor would dine on prime river perch or fresh lake crappie, fried in olive oil by an orthodox Jewess. Year in and year out this thing had happened once a week regularly. Probably it would not happen again. Father Minor's successor, whoever he might be, might not understand. Mr. Galloway nodded abstractedly, and for a little bit nothing was said.
The carriage bearing them twisted out of the procession, leaving a gap in it, and stopped in front of Doctor Lake's red-brick residence. The old doctor climbed down stiffly and, leaning heavily on his cane, went up the walk to his house. Next Mr. Galloway was dropped at his shabby little house, snug in its ambuscade behind a bushwhacker's paradise of lilac bushes; and pretty soon after that it was Sergeant Bagby's turn to get out. As the carriage slowed up for the third stop Judge Priest laid a demurring hand upon his companion's arm.
“Come on out to my place, this evenin', Jimmy,” he said, “and have a bite of supper with me. There won't be nobody there but jest you and me, and after supper we kin set a spell and talk over old times.”
The sergeant shook his whity-grey head in regretful dissent.
“I wish't I could, Judge,” he said, “but it can't be done—not to-night.”
“Better come on!” The judge's tone was pleading. “I sort of figger that there old nigger cook of mine has killed a young chicken. And she kin mix up a batch of waffle batter in less'n no time a-tall.”
“Not to-night, Billy; some night soon I'll come, shore. But to-night my wife is figurin' on company, and ef I don't show up there'll be hell to pay and no pitch hot.”
“Listen, Jimmy; listen to me.” The judge spoke fast, for the sergeant was out of the carriage by now. “I've got a quart of special licker that Lieutenant Governor Bosworth sent me frum Lexington. Thirty-two years old, Jimmy—handmade and run through a gum log. Copper nor iron ain't never teched it. And when you pour a dram of it out into a glass it beads up same ez ef it had soapsuds down in the bottom of it—it does fur a fact. There ain't been but two drinks drunk out of that quart.”
“Judge, please quit teasin' me!” Like unto a peppercorn, ground between the millstones of duty and desire, the sergeant backed reluctantly away from between the carriage wheels.
“You know yourse'f how wimmin folks are. It's the new Campbellite preacher that's comin' to-night, and there won't be a drop to drink on the table exceptin' maybe lemonade or ice tea. But I've jest natchelly got to be on hand and, whut's more, I've got to be on my best behaviour too. Dem that new preacher! Why couldn't he a-picked out some other night than this one?”
“Jimmy, listen——”
But the sergeant had turned and was fleeing to sanctuary, beyond reach of the tempter's tongue.
So for the last eighth-mile of the ride, until the black driver halted his team at the Priest place out on Clay Street, the judge rode alone. Laboriously he crawled out from beneath the overhang of the carriage top, handed up two bits as a parting gift to the darky on the seat, and waddled across the sidewalk.
The latch on the gate was broken. It had been broken for weeks. The old man slammed the gate to with a passionate jerk. The infirm latch clicked weakly, then slipped out of the iron nick and the gate sagged open—an invitation to anybody's wandering livestock to come right on in and feast upon the shrubs, which from lack of pruning had become thick, irregular little jungles. Clumps of rank grass, like green scalp locks, were sprouting in the walk, and when the master had mounted the creaking steps he saw where two porch planks had warped apart, leaving a gap between them. In and out of the space ran big black ants. The house needed painting, too, he noticed; in places where the rain water had dribbled out of a rust-hole in the tin gutter overhead, the grain of the clapboarding showed through its white coating. Mentally the judge promised himself that he would take a couple of days off sometime soon and call in workmen and have the whole shebang tidied and fixed up. Once a place began to run down it seemed to break out with neglect all over, as with a rash.
Halfway through his supper that evening the judge, who had been strangely silent in the early part of the meal, addressed his house boy, Jeff Poindexter, in the accents of a marked disapproval.
“Look here, Jeff,” he demanded, “have I got to tell you ag'in about mendin' the ketch on that front gate?”
“Yas, suh—I means no, suh,” Jeff corrected himself quickly. “Ise aimin' to do it fust thing in de mawnin', suh,” added Jeff glibly, repeating a false pledge for perhaps the dozenth time within a month. “I got so many things to do round yere, Jedge, dat sometimes hit seems lak I can't think whut nary one of 'em is.”
“Huh!” snorted his employer crossly. Then he went on warningly: “Some of these days there's goin' to be a sudden change in this house ef things ain't attended to better—whole place goin' to rack and ruin like it is.”
Wriggling uneasily Jeff found a pretext for withdrawing himself, the situation having become embarrassing. It wasn't often that the judge gave way to temper. Not that Jeff feared the covert threat of discharge. If anybody quit it wouldn't be Jeff, as Jeff well knew. Usually Jeff had an excuse ready for any accusation of shortcomings on his part; thinking them up was his regular specialty. But this particular moment did not seem a propitious one for offering excuses. Jeff noiselessly evaporated out of sight and hearing.
In silence the master hurried through the meal, eating it with what for him was unusual speed. He was beset with an urge to be out of the big high-ceiled dining room. Looking about it he told himself it wasn't a dining room at all—just a bare barracks, full of emptiness and mighty little else.
After supper he sat on the porch, while the long twilight gloomed into dusk and the dusk into night. He was half-minded to walk downtown in the hope of finding congenial company at Soule's drug store, the favoured loafing place of his dwindling set of cronies. But he changed his mind. Since Mr. Soule, growing infirm, had taken a younger man for a partner, the drug store was changed. Its old-time air of hospitality and comfort had somehow altered.
The judge smoked on, rocking back and forth in his chair. The bull bats, which had been dodging about in the air as long as the daylight lasted, were gone now, and their shy cousin, the whippoorwill, began calling from down in the old Enders orchard at the far end of the street. Two or three times there came to Judge Priest's ears the sound of footsteps clunking along the plank sidewalk on his side of the road, and at that he sat erect, hoping each time the gate hinges would whine a warning of callers dropping in to bear him company. But the unseen pedestrians passed on without turning in. The whippoorwill moved up close to Judge Priest's side fence. A little night wind that had something on its mind began with a mournful whispering sound to swish through the top of the big cedar alongside the porch.
The judge stood it until nearly half-past nine o'clock. Even under the most favourable circumstances a whippoorwill and a remorseful night wind, telling its troubles to an evergreen tree, do not make what one would call exhilarating company. He closed and locked the front door, turned out the single gas light which burned in the hall and went up the stairs. In its main design the house was Colonial—Southern Colonial. But his bedroom was in an ell, above a side porch overlooking the croquet ground, and this ell was adorned with plank curlicues under its gables, and a square, ugly, useless little balcony, like a misplaced wooden moustache, adhered to its most prominent elevation on the side facing the front. The judge frequently said that, as nearly as he could figure it out, the extension belonged to the Rutherford B. Hayes period of American architecture.
Except for him the house was empty. Aunt Dilsey didn't stay on the place at night and Jeff's sleeping quarters were over the stable at the back. As Judge Priest felt his way through the upper hall and made a light in his bedchamber, the house was giving off those little creaking, complaining sounds from its joints that an old tired house always gives off when it is lonely for a fuller measure of human occupancy.
His own room, revealed now in its homely contour and its still homelier furnishings, was neat enough, with Jeff's ideas of neatness, but all about it indubitably betrayed the fact that only male hands cared for it. The tall black-walnut bureau lacked a cover for its top; the mantel was littered with cigar boxes and old law reports; the dead asparagus ferns, banked in the grate, were faded to a musty yellow; and some of the fronds had fallen out across the hearth so that remotely the fireplace suggested the mouth of a big cow choking on an overly large bite of dried hay. In places the matting on the floor was frayed almost through.
Just from the careless skew of the coverlid and the set of the pillows against the white bolster, you would have known at a glance that a man had made up the bed that morning.
Barring one picture the walls were bare. This lone picture hung in a space between the two front windows, right where the occupant of the room, if so minded, might look at it the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning. Beyond any doubt a lover of the truly refined in art would have looked at it with a shudder, for it was one of those crayon portraits—a crayon portrait done in the most crayonsome and grewsome style of a self-taught artist working by the day rather than by the piece. Plainly it had been enlarged, as the trade term goes, from a photograph; the enlarger thereof had been lavish with his black leads; that, too, was self-evident. The original photographer had done his worst with the subject; the retoucher had gone him one better.
It was a likeness—you might call it a likeness—of a woman dressed in the abominable style of the late seventies—with heavy bangs down in her eyes, and a tight-fitting basque with enormous sleeves, and long pendent eardrops in her ears. The artist, whoever he was, had striven masterfully to rob the likeness of all expression. There alone his craftsmanship had failed him. For even he had not altogether taken away from the face a certain suggestion of old-fashioned wistfulness and sweetness. In all other regards, though, he had had his reckless way with it. The eyes were black and staring, the lines of the figure stiff and artificial, and the background for the head was a pastel nightmare.
For so long had Judge Priest been wifeless and childless that many of the younger generation in our town knew nothing of the tragedy in this old man's life—which was that the same diphtheria epidemic that took both his babies in one week's time had widowed him too. We knew he loved other people's children; some of us never suspected that once upon a time he had had children of his own to love. Except in his memory no images of the dead babies endured, and this crayon portrait was the sole sentimental reminder left to him of his married life. And so, to him, it was a perfect and a matchless thing. He wouldn't have traded it for all the canvases of all the old masters in all the art galleries in this round big world.
This night, before he undressed, he went over and stood in front of it and looked at it for a while. There was dust in the grooves of the heavy tarnished gilt frame. From the top bureau drawer he took a big silk handkerchief and carefully he wiped the dust away. Then, before he put the handkerchief back in its place, he straightened the thing upon the nail which held it, and gave the glass front an awkward little caress with his pudgy old hand.
“It's been a long, long time, honey, since you went away and left me,” he said slowly, in the voice of one addressing a hearer very near at hand; “but I still miss you and the babies powerfully. And sometimes it's sorter lonesome here without you.”
A little later, when the light had been turned out, a noise like a long, deep sigh sounded out in the darkness. That, though, might have been the wheeze of the afflicted bedsprings as the old judge let his weight down in the bed.
An hour passed and there was another small sound there—a muffled nibbling sound. Behind the wainscoting, between bedroom and bathroom, a young, adventuresome rat gnawed at a box of matches which he had found on the floor in the hall and had dragged to his nest in the wall. From within the box a strangely tantalising aroma escaped; the rat, being deluded thereby into the belief that phosphorus might be an edible dainty, was minded to sample the contents. Presently his teeth met through the cover of the box. There was a sharp flaring pop, followed by a swift succession of other pops, and the rat gave a jump and departed elsewhere in great haste, with a hot bad smell in his snout and his adolescent whiskers quite entirely singed away.
The Confederates, in ragged uniforms of butternut jeans, were squatted in a clump of pawpaw bushes on the edge of a stretch of ploughed ground. From the woods on the far side of the field Yankee skirmishers were shooting toward them. A shell from the batteries must have fallen nearby and set fire to the dried leaves and the fallen brush, for the smoke kept blowing in a fellow's face, choking him and making him cough. Captain Tip Meldrum, the commander of Company B, was just behind the men, giving the order to fire back. High Private Billy Priest aimed his musket at the thickets where the Yankees were hidden and pulled the trigger, but the cap on the nipple of his piece was defective or something, and the charge wouldn't explode. “Fire! Fire! Fire!” yelled Captain Tip Meldrum over and over again, and then he yanked out his own horse-pistol and emptied it into the hostile timber. But Private Priest's gun still balked. He flung it down—and found himself sitting up in bed, gasping.
The dream hadn't been altogether a dream at that. For there was indeed smoke in the judge's eyes and his nostrils—plenty of it. A revolver was cracking out its shots somewhere near at hand; somebody outside his window was shrieking “Fire!” at the top of a good strong voice. In the distance other voices were taking up the cry.
In an earlier day, when a fire started in town, the man who discovered it drew his pistol if he were on the highway, or snatched it up if he chanced to be at home, and pointing its barrel at the sky emptied it into the air as fast as the cylinder would turn. The man next door followed suit and so on until volleys were rattling all over the neighbourhood. Thus were the townspeople aroused and, along with the townspeople, the members of the volunteer fire department. Now we had a paid department and a regular electric-alarm system, predicated on boxes and gongs and wires and things; but in outlying districts the pistol-shooting fashion of spreading the word still prevailed to a considerable extent, and more especially did it prevail at nighttime. So it didn't take the late dreamer longer than the shake of a sheep's tail to separate what was fancy from what was reality.
As Judge Priest, yet half asleep but waking up mighty fast, shoved his stout legs into his trousers and tucked the tails of his nightshirt down inside the waistband, he decided it must be his barn and not his house that was afire. The smoke which filled the room seemed to be eddying in through the side window, from across the end of the ell structure. He thought of his old white mare, Mittie May, fast in her stall under the hay loft, and of Jeff, who was one of the soundest sleepers in the world, in his room right alongside the mow. There was need for him to move, and move fast. He must awaken Jeff first, and then get Mittie May out of danger. Barefooted, he felt his way across the room and along the hall and down the stairs, mending his gait as he went. And then, as he jerked the front door open and stumbled out upon the porch, he came into violent collision with Ed Tilghman, Junior, who lived across the street, and who had just bounded up the porch steps with the idea of hammering on the front-door panels. Tilghman was a young man and the judge an old one; it was inevitable the judge should suffer the more painful consequences of the sudden impact of their two bodies together. He went down sideways with a great hard thump, his forehead striking against a sharp corner of the door jamb. He was senseless, and a little stream of blood was beginning to trickle down his face as Tilghman dragged him down off the porch into the yard and stretched him on his back in the grass, and then ran to fetch water.
In that same minute the big bell in the tower of fire headquarters, half a mile away, began sounding in measured beats, and a small hungry-looking tongue of flame licked up across the sill and flickered for a moment through the smoke which was pouring forth out of the bathroom window and rolling across the flat top of the extension. The smoke gushed out still thicker, smothering down the red pennon, but in a second or two it showed again, and this time it brought with it two more like it. The bathroom window became a frame for a cloudy pink glare, and the purring note of the fire became a brisk and healthy crackle as it ate through the seasoned clapboards of the outer wall.
All of a sudden, so it seemed, the yard and the street were full of people. Promptly there began to happen most of the things that do happen at a fire. As for instance: Mr. Milus Miles, who arrived among the very first and who had a commandingly loud voice, mounted a rustic bench alongside the croquet ground and called for volunteers to form a bucket brigade. That his recruits would have no buckets to pass after they had enrolled themselves for service was with Mr. Miles a minor consideration. It was the spirit of the thing, the forethought, the responsibility, the aptitude for leadership in a work of succour—all these inspired him.
Mr. Ulysses Rice, who lived in the next street, climbed the side fence—under the circumstances it somehow to him seemed a more resolute thing to scale the fence than to enter by the gate in the regular way—and ran across the yard, inspired with a neighbourly and commendable desire to save something right away. He put his toe in a croquet wicket and fell headlong. This was to be expected of Mr. Rice. He had a perfect genius for getting into accidents. All Nature was ever in a conspiracy with all the inanimate objects in the world to do him bodily hurt. If he went skiff riding and fell overboard, as he customarily did, it was not because he had rocked the boat. The boat rocked itself. He was the only man in town who had ever succeeded in gashing his throat with a safety razor.
He now disentangled his foot from the wicket and scrambled up and, still actuated by the best motives imaginable, he dashed toward the back of the Priest homestead, being minded to seek entrance by a rear door. But a wire clothesline, swinging at exactly the right height to catch him just under the nose, did catch him just under the nose and almost sawed the tip of that useful organ off Mr. Rice's agonised face. Coincidentally, citizens of various ages and assorted sizes ran into the house and dragged out the furnishings of the lower floor, bestowing their salvage right where other citizens might fall over it. Through all the joints between the shingles the roof of the ell leaked smoke, until it resembled a sloped bed of slaking lime. This fire was rapidly getting to be a regular fire.
With a great clattering the department came tearing up the street. Dropping down from their perches on the running boards of the wagons, certain of its members began unreeling the hose, then ran back with it to couple it to the nearest fire hydrant, nearly two blocks away down Clay Street. Others brought a ladder and reared it against the side of the house, with its uppermost rounds projecting above the low eaves. While many hands steadied the ladder in place, Captain Bud Gorman of Station No. 1—there was also a Station No. 2, but Bud skippered Station No. 1—mounted it and, with an axe, started chopping a hole in the roof at a point where there seemed as yet to be no immediate peril. Under his strokes the shingles flew in showers. It was evident that if the flames should spread to this immediate area Captain Bud Gorman would have a rough but practicable flue ready for their egress into the open air, against the moment when they had burst through the ceiling and the rafters below.
More people and yet more kept coming. The rubber piping, which perversely had kinked and twisted as it came off the spinning drum of hose reel No. 1, was fairly straight now, and from his station just inside the gate the fire chief bellowed the command down the line to turn 'er on! They turned her on, but somewhere in the coupled sections of hose a stricture had developed. All that happened was that from the brass snout of the nozzle a languid gush of yellow water arose in a fan shape to an elevation of perhaps fifteen feet, thence descending in a cascade, not upon the particular spot at which the nozzle was aimed, but full upon the ill-starred Mr. Rice as he tugged to uproot a wooden support of the little grape arbor which flanked the house on the endangered side. Somewhat disfigured by the clothesline but still resolute to lend a helping hand somewhere, Mr. Rice had but a moment before become possessed of an ambition to remove the grape vines, trellis and all, to a place of safety. His reward for this kindly attempt was a sudden soaking.
As though the hiss of the water had aroused him, Judge Priest sat up in the grass, where he had been lying during these tumultuous and crowded five minutes. He was still half dazed. As his eyesight cleared, he saw that the bathroom was as good as gone and that his bedroom was about to go. Some one helped him to his unsteady feet and kept him upright. He shook himself free from the supporting grasp of the person who held him, and advanced toward the porch steps, wavering a little on his legs as he went.
Then, before anybody sensed what he meant to do, before anybody could make a move to stop him, he had mounted the steps and was at the front door.
Out of the door, bumping into him, backed a coughing, gasping squad, their noses smarting and their eyes streaming from the acrid reek, towing after them the big horsehair sofa which was the principal piece of furniture in the judge's sitting room. The sofa had lost two of its casters in transit, and it took all their strength to drag it over the lintel.
“It's no use, Judge Priest,” panted one of these workers, recognising him; “we've got pretty nearly everything out that was downstairs and you couldn't get upstairs now if you tried.”
Then seeing that the owner meant to disregard the warning, this man threw out an arm forcibly to detain the other. But for all his age and size, the judge was wieldy enough when he chose to be. With an agile twist of his body he dodged past, and as the man, astounded and horrified, glared across the threshold he saw Judge Priest running down the murky hall and, with head bent and his mouth and nose buried in the crook of one elbow, starting up the stairs into the thickest and blackest of the smoke. To this man's credit, be it said, he made a valiant effort to overtake the old man. The pursuer darted in behind him, but at the foot of the steps fell back, daunted and unable to breathe. He staggered out again into the open, gagging with the smoke that was in his throat and down in his lungs.
“He's gone in there!” he shouted, pointing behind him. “He's gone right in there! He's gone upstairs!”
“Who is it? Who's gone in there?” twenty voices demanded together.
“The judge—just a second ago! I tried to stop him—he got by me! He ain't got a chance!” Even as he spoke the words, a draught of fire came roaring through the crater in the roof which Captain Bud Gorman's axe had dug for its free passage. An outcry—half gasp, half groan—went up from those who knew what had happened. They ran round in rings wasting precious time.
Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, half dressed, trotted across the lawn. He had just arrived. He grabbed young Ed Tilghman by the arm.
“How'd she start, boy?” demanded the sergeant. “Where's the judge? Did they git everything out?”
“Everything out—hell!” answered Tilghman, sobbing in his distress. “The old judge is in there. He got a lick on the head and it must have made him crazy. He just ran back in there and went upstairs. He'll never make it—and nobody can get him out. He'll smother to death sure!”
Down on his knees dropped Sergeant Bagby and shut his eyes, and for the first, last and only time in his life he prayed aloud in public.
“Oh, Lord,” he prayed, “fur God's sake git Billy Priest out of there! Oh, Lord, that's all I'll ever ask You—fur God's sake git Billy Priest out of there! Ez a favour to me, Lord, please, Suh, git Billy Priest out of there!” From many throats at once a yell arose—a yell so shrill and loud that it overtopped all lesser sounds; a yell so loud that the sergeant ceased from his praying to look. Through the smoke, and over the sloping peak of the roof from the rear, came a slim, dark shape on its all-fours. Treading the pitch of the gable as swiftly and surefootedly as a cat, it scuttled forward to the front edge of the housetop, swung downward at arms' length from the eaves, and dropped on a narrow ledge of tin-covered surface where the small ornamental balcony, which was like a misplaced wooden moustache, projected from the face of the building at the level of the second floor, then instantly dived headfirst in at that window of the judge's bedchamber which was farthest from the corner next the bathroom.
For a silent minute—a minute which seemed a year—those below stared upward, with starting eyes and lumps in their throats. Then, all together, they swallowed their several throat lumps and united in an exultant joyous yell, which made that other yell they had uttered a little before seem by comparison puny and cheap. Through the smoke which bulged from the balcony window and out upon the balcony itself popped the agile black figure. Bracing itself, it hauled across the window ledge a bulky inert form. It wrestled its helpless burden over and eased it down the flat, tiny railed-in perch just as a fire ladder, manned by many eager hands, came straightening up from below, with Captain Bud Gorman of Station No. 1 climbing it, two rounds at a jump, before it had ceased to waver in the air.
Volunteers swarmed up the ladder behind Bud Gorman, forming a living chain from the earth to the balcony. First they passed down the judge, breathing and whole but unconscious, with his nightshirt torn off his back and his bare right arm still clenched round a picture of some sort in a heavy gilt frame. His grip on it did not relax until they had carried him well back from the burning house, and for the second time that night had stretched him out upon the grass.
The judge being safe, the men on the ladder made room for Jeff Poindexter to descend under his own motive power, all of them cheering mightily. Just as Jeff reached solid ground the stoppage in the hose unstopped itself of its own accord and from the brazen gullet of the nozzle there sprang up, like a silver sword, a straight, hard stream of water which lanced into the heart of the fire, turning its exultant song from a crackle to a croon and then to a resentful hiss.
In that same instant Sergeant Bagby found himself, for the first time since he escaped from the kindly tyranny of a black mammy—nearly sixty years before—in close and ardent embrace with a member of the African race.
“Jeff,” clarioned the sergeant, hugging the blistered rescuer yet closer to him and beating him on the back with hearty thumps—“Jeff, God bless your black hide, how did you come to think of it?”
“Well, suh, Mr. Bagby,” wheezed Jeff, “hit wuz lak dis: I didn't wake up w'en she fust started. I got so much on my mind to do daytimes 'at I sleeps mighty sound w'en I does sleep. Presen'ly, tho', I did wake up, an' I got my pants on, an' I come runnin' acrost de lot frum de stable, an' I got heah jes' in time to hear 'em all yellin' out dat de jedge is done went back into de house. I sees there ain't no chanc't of goin' in after him de way he's done went, but jes' about that time I remembers dat air little po'ch up yonder on de front of de house w'ich it seem lak ever'body else had done furgot all 'bout hit bein' there a-tall. So I runs round to de back right quick, an' I dim' up de lattice-work by de kitchen, an' I comes out along over de roof, an' I drap down on de little po'ch, an' after that, I reckin, you seen de rest of it fur you'self, suh—all but whut happen after I gits inside dat window.”
“What did happen?” From the ring of men who hedged in the sergeant and Jeff five or six asked the same question at once. Before an all-white audience Jeff visibly expanded himself.
“W'y, nothin' a-tall happen,” he said, “'ceptin' that I found de ole boss-man right where I figgered I'd find him—in his own room at de foot of his baid. He'd done fell down dere on de flo', right after he grabbed dat air picture offen de wall. Yas, suh, that's perzack-ly where I finds him!”
“But, Jeff, how could you breathe up there?” Still in the sergeant's cordial grasp, Jeff made direct answer:
“Gen'l'mens, I didn't! Fur de time bein' I jes' natchelly abandoned breathin'!”
Again that night Judge Priest had a dream—only this time the dream lacked continuity and sequence and was but a jumble of things—and he emerged from it with his thoughts all in confusion. In his first drowsy moment of consciousness he had a sensation of having taken a long journey along a dark rough road. For a little he lay wondering where he was, piecing together his impressions and trying to bridge the intervening gaps.
Then the light got better and he made out the anxious face of Doctor Lake looking down at him and, just over Doctor Lake's shoulder, the face of Sergeant Bagby. He opened his mouth then and spoke.
“Well, there's one thing certain shore,” said the judge: “this ain't heaven! Because ef 'twas, there wouldn't be a chance of you and Jimmy Bagby bein' here with me.”
Whereupon, for no apparent reason on earth that Judge Priest could fathom, Doctor Lake, with a huskily affectionate intonation, called him by many profane and improper names; and Sergeant Bagby, wiping his eyes with one hand, made his other hand up into a fist and shook it in Judge Priest's face, meanwhile emotionally denouncing him as several qualified varieties of an old idiot.
Under this treatment the fogginess quit Judge Priest's brain, and he became aware of the presence of a considerable number of persons about him, including the two Edward Tilghmans—Senior and Junior—and the two Tilghman girls; and Jeff Poindexter, wearing about half as many garments as Jeff customarily wore, and with a slightly blistered appearance as to his face and shoulders; and Mr. Ulysses Rice, with a badly skinned nose and badly drenched shoulders; and divers others of his acquaintances. Indeed, he was quite surrounded by neighbours and friends. Also by degrees it became apparent to him that he was stretched upon a strange bed in a strange room—at least he did not recall ever having been in this room before—and that he had a bandage across the baldest part of his head, and that he felt tired all over his body.
“Well, I got out, didn't I?” he inquired after a minute or two.
“Got out—thunder!” vociferated the sergeant with what the judge regarded as a most unnecessary violence of voice and manner. “Ef this here black boy of yourn hadn't a-risked his own life, climbin' down over the roof and goin' in through a front window and draggin' you out of that fire—the same ez ef you was a sack of shorts—you'd a-been a goner, shore. Ain't you 'shamed of yourself, scarin' everybody half to death that-a-way?”
“Oh, it was Jeff, was it?” said the old judge, disregarding Sergeant Bagby's indignant interrogation. He looked steadfastly at his grinning servitor and, when he spoke again, there was a different intonation in his voice.
“Much obliged to you, Jeff.” That was all he said. It was the way he said it.
“You is more'n welcome, thanky, suh,” answered Jeff; “it warn't scursely no trouble a-tall, suh—'cep'in' dem ole shingles on dat roof suttin'y wuz warm to de te'ch.”
“Did—did Jeff succeed in savin' anything else besides me?” The judge put the question as though half fearing what the answer might be.
“Ef you mean this—why, here 'tis, safe and sound,” said Sergeant Bagby, and he moved aside so that Judge Priest might see, leaning against the footboard of the bed, a certain crayon portrait. “The glass ain't cracked even and the frame ain't dented. You three come out of there practically together—Jeff a-hang-in' onto you and you a-hangin' onto your picture. So if that's whut you went chargin' back in there fur, I hope you're satisfied!”
“I'm satisfied,” said the judge softly. Then after a bit he cleared his throat and ventured another query:
“That old house of mine—I s'pose she's all burnt up by now?”
“Don't you ever believe it,” said the sergeant. “That there house of yourn 'pears to be purty nigh ez contrary and set in its ways ez whut you are. It won't burn up, no matter how good a chance you give it. Jest about the time Jeff here drug you out on that little balcony outside your window, the water works begun to work, and after that they had her under control in less'n no time. She must be about out by now.”
“Your bathroom's a total loss and the extension on that side is pretty badly scorched up, but the rest of the place, excusing damage by the water and the smoke, is hardly damaged,” added the younger Tilghman. “You'll be able to move back in, inside of a month, judge.”
“And in the meantime you're going to stay right here, Judge Priest, and make my house your home,” announced Mr. Tilghman, Senior. “It's mighty plain, but such as it is you're welcome to it, judge. We'll do our level best to make you comfortable. Only I'm afraid you'll miss the things you've been used to having round you.”
“Oh, I reckin not,” said Judge Priest. His glance travelled slowly from the crayon portrait at the foot of the bed to Jeff Poindexter's chocolate-coloured face and back again to the portrait. “I've got mighty near everything I need to make me happy.”
“What I meant was that maybe you'd be kind of lonesome away from your own house,” Mr. Tilghman said.
“No, I don't believe so,” answered the old man, smiling a little. “You see, I taken the cure for lonesomeness to-night. You mout call it the smoke cure.”
THE family tree of the Van Nicht family was not the sort of family tree you think I mean, although they had one of that variety too. This was a real tree. It was an elm—the biggest elm and the broadest and the most majestic elm in the entire state, and in the times of its leafage cast the densest shade of any elm to be found anywhere, probably. For more than one hundred years the Van Nicht family had lived in its shadow. That was the principal trouble with them—they did live in the shadow. I'll come to that later.
Every consequential visitor to Schuylerville was taken to see the Van Nicht elm. It was a necessary detail of his tour about town. Either before or after he had viewed the new ten-story skyscraper of the Seaboard National Bank, and the site for the projected Civic Centre, and the monument to Schuyler County's defenders of the Union—1861-'65—with a dropsical bronze figure of a booted and whiskered infantryman on top of the tall column, and the Henrietta Wing Memorial Library, and the rest of it, they took him and they showed him the Van Nicht elm. So doing, it was incumbent upon them to escort him through a street which was beginning to wear that vacillating, uncertain look any street wears while trying to make up its mind whether to keep on being a quiet residential byway in an old-fashioned town or to turn itself into an important thoroughfare of a thriving industrial centre. You know the kind of street I aim to picture—with here an impudent young garage showing its shining morning face of red brick in a side yard where there used to be an orchard, and there a new apartment building which has shouldered its way into a line of ancient dwellings and is driving its cast-iron cornices, like rude elbows, into the clapboarded short ribs of its neighbours upon either side.
At the far, upper end of that street, upon the poll of a gentle eminence, uplifted the Van Nicht elm. It was for sundry months of the year a splendid vast umbrella, green in the spring and summer and yellow in the fall; and in the winter presented itself against the sky line as a great skeleton shape, without a blemish upon it, except for a scar in the bark close down to the earth to show where once there might have been a fissure in its mighty bole. No grass, or at least mighty little grass, grew within the circle of its brandishing limbs. It was as though the roots of the tree sucked up all the nourishment that the soil might hold, leaving none for the humble grass to thrive upon.
It was in the winter that the house, which stood almost directly under the tree, was most clearly revealed as a square, ugly domicile of grey stone, a story and a half in height, lidded over by a hip roof of weathered shingles; with a deeply recessed front door, like a pursed and proper mouth, and, above it, a row of queer little longitudinal windows, half hidden below the overhang of the gables and suggesting so many slitted eyes peering out from beneath a lowering brow. You saw, too, the mould that had formed in streaky splotches upon the stonework of the walls and the green rime of age and dampness that had overspread the curled shingles and the peeling paint, turning to minute scales upon the woodwork of the window casings and the door frames. Also you saw one great crooked bough which stretched across the roof like a menacing black arm, forever threatening to descend and crush its rafters in. This was in winter; in summertime the leaves almost completely hid the house, so that one who halted outside the decrepit fence, with its snaggled and broken panels, must needs stoop low to perceive its outlines at all.
The carriage or the automobile bearing the prominent guest and the chairman of the local reception committee would halt at the end of the street.
“That,” the chairman would say, pointing up grade, “is the Van Nicht elm. Possibly you've heard about it? Round here we call it the Van Nicht family tree. It is said to be the largest elm in this part of the country. In fact, I doubt whether there are any larger than this one, even up in New England. And that's the famous old Van Nicht homestead there, just back of it.
“Its got a history. When Colonel Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht came here right after the Revolutionary War—he was a colonel in the Revolution, you know—he built the house, placing it just behind the tree. The tree must've grown considerably since then, but the house yonder hasn't changed but mighty little all these years. It's the oldest building in Schuyler County. As a matter of fact, the town, with this house for a starter, sort of grew up down here on the flat lands below. The old colonel raised a family here and died here. So did his son and his grandson. They were rich people once—the richest people in the county at one time.
“Why all the land from here clear down to Ossibaw Street—that's six blocks south—used to be included in the Van Nicht estate. It was a farm then, of course, and by all accounts a fine one. But each generation sold off some of the original grant, until all that's left now is that house, with the tree and about an acre of ground more or less. And I guess it's pretty well covered with mortgages.”
This, in substance, was what the guide would tell the distinguished stranger. This, in substance, was what was told to young Olcott on the day after he arrived in Schuylerville to take over the editorial management of the Schuylerville News-Ledger. Mayor T. J. McGlynn was showing him the principal points of interest—so the mayor had put it, when he called that morning with his own car at the Hotel Brain-ard, where Olcott was stopping, and invited the young man to go for a tour of inspection of the city, as a sort of introductory and preparatory course in local education prior to his assuming his new duties.
While the worthy mayor was uttering his descriptive remarks Olcott bent his head and squinted past the thick shield of limbs and leaves. He saw that the door of the house, which was closed, somehow had the look of about always being closed, and that most of the windows were barred with thick shutters.
“Appears rather deserted, doesn't it?” said the newcomer, striving to show a proper appreciation of the courtesy that was being visited upon him. “There isn't any one living there at present, is there?”
“Sure there is,” said Mayor McGlynn. “Old Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th, who's the present head of the family, and his two old-maid sisters, Miss Rachael and Miss Harriet—they all live there together. Miss Rachael is considerably older than Miss Harriet, but they're both regular old maids—guess they always will be. The brother never married, either—couldn't find anybody good enough to share the name, I suppose. Anyhow he's never married. And besides I guess it keeps him pretty busy living up to the job of being the head of the oldest family in this end of the state. That's about all he ever has done.”
“Then he isn't in any regular business or any profession?”
“Business!” Mayor McGlynn snorted. “I should say not! All any one of the Van Nichts has ever done since anybody can remember was just to keep on being a Van Nicht and upholding the traditions and the honours of the Van Nichts—and this one is like all his breed. The poorer he gets the more pompous and the more important acting he gets—that's the funny part of it.”
“Apparently not a very lucrative calling, judging by the general aspect of the ancestral manor,” said Olcott, who was beginning now to be interested. “How do they manage to live?”
“Lord knows,” said the mayor. “How do the sparrows manage to live? I guess there're times when they need a load of coal and a market basket full of victuals to help tide 'em over a hard spell, but naturally nobody would dare to offer to help them. They're proud as Lucifer themselves, and the town is kind of proud of 'em. They're institutions with us, as you might say.”
McGlynn, who, as Olcott was to learn later, was a product of new industrial and new political conditions in the community, spoke with the half-begrudged admiration which the self-made so often have for the ancestor-made.
“We ain't got so very many of the real aristocrats in this section any more, what with all this new blood pouring in since our boom started up; and even if they are as poor as Job's turkey, these Van Nichts still count for a good deal round here. Money ain't everything anyway, is it?... Well, Mr. Olcott, if you've seen enough here, we'll turn round and go see something else.” He addressed his chauffeur: “Jim, suppose you take us by the new hosiery mills next. I want Mr. Olcott to see one of the most prosperous manufacturing plants in the state. Employs nine hundred hands, Mr. Olcott, and hasn't been in operation but a little more than three years. That's the way this town is humping itself. You didn't make any mistake, coming here.”
As the car swung about, Olcott gave the Van Nicht place a backward scrutiny over his shoulder and was impressed by its appearance into saying this:
“It strikes me as having a mighty unhealthy air about it. I'd say offhand it was a first-rate breeding spot for malaria and rheumatism. I wonder why they don't trim up that big old tree and give the sunshine and the light a chance to get in under it.”
“For heaven's sake and your own, don't you suggest that to the old boy when you meet him,” said McGlynn with a grin. “He'd as soon think of cutting off his own leg as to touch a leaf on the family tree. It's sacred to him. It represents all the glory of his breed and he venerates it, the same as some people venerate an altar in a church.”
“Then you think I will be likely to meet him? I'd like to—from what you tell me, he must be rather a unique personality.”
“Yes, he's all of that—unique, I mean. And you're pretty sure to meet him before you've been in town many months. He seems to regard it as his duty to call on certain people, after they've been here a given length of time, and extend to them the freedom of the town that his illustrious great-granddaddy founded. If you're specially lucky—or specially unlucky—he may even invite you to call on him, although that's an honour that doesn't come to very many, even among the older residents. The Van Nichts are mighty exclusive and it isn't often that anybody sees what the inside of their house looks like—let alone a stranger.... Say, Jim, after we've seen the hosiery mills, run us on out past the County Feeble-Minded and Insane Asylum. Mr. Olcott will enjoy that!”
Within a month's time from this time, Mayor McGlynn's prophecy was to come true. On a morning in the early part of the summer 01 Olcott sat behind his desk in his office adjoining the city room on the second floor of theNews-Ledgerbuilding, when his office boy announced a gentleman calling to see Mr. Olcott personally.
“See who it is, will you, please, Morgan?” said Olcott to his assistant. Morgan had arrived less than a week before, having been sent on by the syndicate which owned a chain of papers, theNews-Ledger included, to serve under the new managing editor. The syndicate had a cheery little way of shuffling the cards at frequent intervals and dealing out fresh executives for the six or eight dailies under its control and ownership.
“I'm busy as the dickens,” added Olcott as Morgan got up to obey; “so if it's a pest that's outside, give him the soft answer and steer him off!”
In a minute Morgan was back with a cryptic grin on his face.
“You'd better see him—he's worth seeing, all right,” said Morgan.
“Who is it?” asked Olcott.
“It's somebody right out of a book,” answered Morgan; “somebody giving the name of Something Something Van Nicht. I didn't catch all the first name—I was too busy sizing up its proprietor. Says he must see you privately and in person. I gather from his manner that if you don't see him this paper will never be quite the same again. And honestly, Olcott, he's worth seeing.”
“I think I know who it is,” said Olcott, “and I'll see him. Boy, show the gentleman in!”
“I'll go myself,” said Morgan. “This is a thing that ought to be done in style.”
Olcott reared back in his chair, waiting. The door opened and Morgan's voice was heard making formal and sonorous announcement: “Mr. Van Nicht.” And Olcott, looking over his desk top, saw, framed in the doorway, a figure at once picturesque and pitiable.
The first thing, almost, to catch his eye was a broad black stock collar—the first stock collar Olcott had ever seen worn by a man in daytime. Above it was a long, close-shaven, old face, with a bloodless and unwholesome pallor to it, framed in long, white hair, and surmounted by a broad-brimmed, tall-crowned soft hat which had once been black and now was gangrenous with age. Below it a pair of sloping shoulders merging into a thin, meagre body tightly cased in a rusty frock coat, and below the coat skirts in turn a pair of amazingly thin and rickety legs, ending in slender, well-polish-ed boots with high heels. In an instantaneous appraisal of the queer figure Olcott comprehended these details and, in that same flicker of time, noted that the triangle of limp linen showing in the V of the close-buttoned lapels had a fragile, yellowish look like old ivory, that all the outer garments were threadbare and shiny in the seams, and that the stock collar was decayed to a greenish tinge along its edges. Although the weather was warm, the stranger wore a pair of grey cotton gloves.
“Good morning,” said Olcott, mechanically putting a ceremonious and formal emphasis into the words and getting on his feet.
“Good morning, sir, to you,” returned the visitor in a voice of surprising volume, considering that it issued from so slight a frame. “You are Mr. Olcott?”
“Yes, that's my name.” And Olcott took a step forward, extending his hand.
“Mine, sir, is Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th.” The speaker paused midway of the floor to remove one glove and to shift it and his cane to the left hand. Advancing, with a slight limp, he gave to Olcott a set of fingers that were dry and chilly and fleshless. Almost it was like clasping the articulated bones of a skeleton's hand.
“I have come personally, sir, to pay my respects and, as one representing the—ah—the old régime of our people, to bid you welcome to our midst.”
“Thank you very much,” said Olcott, a bit amused inwardly, and a bit impressed also by the air of mouldy grandeur which the other diffused. “Won't you sit down, Mr. Van Nicht?”
“I shall be able to tarry but a short while.” The big voice boomed out of the little dried-up body as the old man took the chair which Olcott had indicated. He took only part of it. He poised himself on the forward edge of its seat, holding his spine very erect and dramatising his posture with a stiff and stately investure.
Olcott caught himself telling himself Morgan had been right: This personage was not really flesh and blood, but something out of a book—an embodied bit of fiction. Why even his language had the stilted shaping of the characters in most of these old-timey classical novels.
“He wasn't really born at all,” Olcott thought. “Dickens wrote him and then Cruikshank drew him and now here he is, miraculously preserved to posterity. But Charlotte Brontë endowed him with his conversation.” What Olcott said—aloud—was something fatuous and commonplace touching on the state of the weather.
“I have yet other motives in presenting myself to-day, in this, your sanctum,” stated Mr. Van Nicht. “First of all, I wish to congratulate you upon what to me appears to be a very gratifying stroke of journalistic enterprise which has come to light in the columns of your valued organ since your advent into the community and for which, therefore, I assume you are responsible.”
“Well,” said Olcott, “we try to get out a reasonably live sheet.”
“Pardon me,” said Mr. Van Nicht, “but I do not refer to the aspect of your news columns. I am speaking with reference to a feature lately appearing in your Sunday edition, in what I believe is known as your magazine section. I have observed that, beginning two weeks ago, you inaugurated a department devoted to the genealogies of divers of our older and more distinguished American families. As I recall, the subjects of your first two articles were the Adams family, of Massachusetts, and the Lee family, of Virginia. It may interest you to know, sir—I trust indeed that it may please you to know—that I, personally, am most highly pleased that you should seek to inculcate in the minds of our people, through the medium of your columns, a knowledge of those strains of blood to which our nation is particularly indebted for much of its culture, much of its social development, many of its gentler and more graceful influences. It is a most worthy movement indeed, a most commendable undertaking. I repeat, sir, that I congratulate you upon it.”
“Thank you,” said Olcott. “This coming Sunday we are going to run a yarn about the Gordon family, of Georgia, and after that I believe come the Clays, of Kentucky.”
“Quite so, quite so,” said Mr. Van Nicht. “The names you have mentioned are names that are permanently embalmed in the written annals of our national life. But may I ask, sir, whether you have taken any steps as yet to in-corporate into your series an epitome of the achievements of the family of which I have the honour to be the head—the Van Nicht family?”
“Well, you see,” explained Olcott apologetically, “these articles are not written here in the office. They are sent to us in proof sheets as a part of our regular feature service, and we run 'em just as they come to us. Probably—probably”—he hesitated a moment over the job of phrasing tactfully his white lie—“probably a story on your family genealogy will be coming along pretty soon.”
“Doubtlessly so, doubtlessly so.” The assent was guilelessly emphatic. “In any such symposium, in any such compendium, my family, beyond peradventure, will have its proper place in due season. Nevertheless, foreseeing that in the hands of a stranger the facts and the dates might unintentionally be confused or wrongly set down, I have taken upon myself the obligation of preparing an accurate account of the life and work of my illustrious, heroic and noble ancestor, Colonel Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, together with a more or less elaboraterésuméof the lives of his descendants up to and including the present generation. This article is now completed. In fact I have it upon my person.” Carefully he undid the top button of his coat and reached for an inner breast pocket. “I shall be most pleased to accord you my full permission for its insertion in an early issue of your publication.” He spoke with the air of one bestowing a gift of great value.
Olcott's practised eye appraised the probable length of the manuscript which this volunteer contributor was hauling forth from his bosom and, inside himself, Olcott groaned. There appeared to be a considerable number of sheets of foolscap, all closely written over in a fine, close hand.
“Thank you, Mr. Van Nicht, thank you very much,” said Olcott, searching his soul for excuses. “But I'm afraid we aren't able to pay much for this sort of matter. What I mean to say is we are not in a position to invest very heavily in outside offerings. Er—you see most of our specials—in fact practically all of them except those written here in the office by the staff—come to us as part of a regular syndicate arrangement.”
Here Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th, attained the physically impossible. He erected his spine straighter than before and stiffened his body a mite stiffer than it had been.
“Pray do not misunderstand me, sir,” he stated solemnly. “I crave no honorarium for this work. I expect none. I have considered it a duty incumbent upon me to prepare it, and I regard it as a pleasure to tender it to you, gratis.”
“But—I'd like to be able to offer a little something anyway—”
“One moment, if you please! Kindly hear me out! With me, sir, this has been a labour of love. Moreover, I should look upon it as an impropriety to accept remuneration for such work. To me it would savour of the mercenary—would be as though I sought to capitalise into dollars and cents the reputation of my own people and my own stock. I trust you get my viewpoint?”
“Oh, yes, indeed”—Olcott was slightly flustered—“very creditable of you, I'm sure. Er—is it very long?”
“No longer than a proper appreciation of the topic demands.” The old gentleman spoke with firmness. “Also you may rely absolutely upon the trustworthiness and the accuracy of all the facts, as herein recited. I had access to the papers left by my own revered grandfather, Judge Cecilius Van Nicht, 2d, son and namesake of the founder of our line, locally. I may tell you, too, that in preparing this compilation I was assisted by my sister, Miss Rachael Van Nicht, a lady of wide reading and no small degree of intellectual attainment, although leading a life much aloof from the world—in fact, almost a cloistered life.”
He arose, opened out the sheaf of folded sheets, pressed them flat with a caressing hand and laid them down in front of Olcott. He spoke now with authority, almost in the tone of a superior giving instructions regarding a delicate matter to an underling:
“I feel warranted in the assumption that you will not find it necessary to alter or curtail my statements in any particular. I have had some previous experience in literary endeavours. In all modesty I may say that I am no novice. A signed article from my pen, entitled The Influence of the Holland—Dutch Strain Upon American Public Life, From Peter Stuyvesant to Theodore Roosevelt, was published some years since in the New YorkEvening Post, afterward becoming the subject of editorial comment in the SpringfieldRepublican, the HartfordCourantand the BostonTranscript. At present I am engaged in a brief history of one of our earlier presidents, the Honourable Martin Van Buren. I have the honour to bid you a very good day, sir.”
Olcott ran the story in his next Sunday issue but one. It stretched the full length of two columns and invaded a third. It was tiresome and long-winded. It was as prosy as prosy could be. To make room for it a smartly done special on the commercial awakening of Schuyler County was crowded out. Olcott's judgment told him he did a sinful thing, but he ran it. He went further than that. Into the editorial page he slipped a paragraph directing attention to “Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht's timely and interesting article, appearing elsewhere in this number.”
He had his reward, though, in the comments of sundry ones of his local subscribers. From these comments, made to him by letter and by word of mouth, he sensed something of the attitude of the community toward the Van Nicht family. As he figured, this sentiment was a compound of several things. It appeared to embody a gentle intolerance for the shell of social exclusiveness in which the present bearers of the name had walled themselves up, together with a sympathy for their poverty and their self-imposed state of lonely and neglected aloofness, and still further down, underlying these emotions and tincturing them, an understanding and an admiration for the importance of this old family as an old family—an admiration which was genuine and avowed on the part of some, and just as genuine but more or less reluctantly bestowed on the part of others. It was as Mayor McGlynn had informed Olcott on their first meeting. The Van Nichts were not so much individuals, having a share in the life of this thriving, striving, overgrown town, as they were historical fixtures and traditional assets. Collectively, they constituted something to be proud of and sorry for.
Soon, too, he had further reward. One afternoon a small and grimy boy invaded his room, without knocking, and laid a note upon his desk.
“Old guy downstairs, with long hair and a gimpy leg, handed me this yere and gimme fi' cents to fetch it up here to you,” stated the messenger.
The note was from Mr. Van Nicht, as a glance at the superscription told Olcott before he opened the envelope. In formal terms Olcott was thanked for giving the writer's offering such prominence in the pages of his valuable paper and was invited, formally, to call upon the undersigned at his place of residence, in order that undersigned might more fully express to Mr. Olcott his sincere appreciation.
On the whole, Olcott was glad of the opportunity to view the inside of that gloomy old house under the big tree out at the end of Putnam Street. He wanted to see more of Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, and to see something of the other two dwellers beneath that ancient roof. Olcott had dreams of some day writing a novel; some day when he had the time. Most newspaper men do have such dreams; or else it is a play they are going to write. Meanwhile, pending the coming of that day, he was storing up material for it in his mind. Assuredly the bleached-out, pale, old recluse in the black stock would make copy. Probably his sisters would be types also, and they might make copy too. Olcott answered the note, accepting the invitation for that same evening.
It was a night of crystal-clear moonlight, and Olcott walked up Putnam Street through an alchemistic radiance which was like a path for a Puck to dance along. But the shimmering aisle broke off short, when he had turned in at the broken gate and had come to the edge of the shade of the Van Nicht elm. Under there the shadow lay so thick and dense that, as he groped through it to the small entry porch, finding the way by the feel of his feet upon the irregular, flagged walk, he had the conviction that he might reach out with his hands and gather up folds of the darkness in his arms, like ells of black velvet. The faint glow which came through a curtained front window of the unseen house was like a phosphorescent smear, plastered against a formless background, and only served to make the adjacent darkness darker still. If the moonlight yonder was a fit place for the fairies to trip it, this particular spot, he thought, must be reserved for ghosts to stalk in.
Fumbling with his hands, he searched out the heavy door knocker. Its resounding thump against its heel plate, as he dropped it back in place, made him jump. At once the door opened. Centred in the oblong of dulled light which came from an oil lamp burning upon a table, behind and within, appeared the slender, warped figure of Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th. With much ceremony the head of the house bowed the guest in past the portals.
Almost the first object to catch Olcott's eye, as he stepped in, was a portrait which, with its heavy frame, filled up a considerable portion of the wall space across the back breadth of the square hallway into which he had entered. Excepting for this picture and the table with the oil lamp upon it and a tall hat-tree, the hall was quite bare.
Plainly pleased that the younger man's attention had been caught by the painted square of canvas, Mr. Van Nicht promptly turned up the wick of the light, and then Olcott, looking closer, saw staring down at him the close-set black eyes and the heavy-jowled, foreign-look-ing face of an old man, dressed in such garb as we associate with our conceptions of Thomas Jefferson and the elder Adams.
“My famous forbear, sir,” stated Olcott's host, with a great weight of vanity in his words, “the original bearer of the name which I, as his great-grandson, have the honour, likewise, of bearing. To me, sir, it has ever been a source of deep regret that there is no likeness extant depicting him in his uniform as a regimental commander in the Continental armies. If any such likeness existed, it was destroyed prior to the colonel's removal to this place, following the close of the struggle for Independence. This portrait was executed in the later years of the original's life—presumably about the year 1798, by order of his son, who was my grandfather. It was the son who enlarged this house, by the addition of a wing at the rear, and to him also we are indebted for the written records of his father's gallant performances on the field of honour, as well as for the accounts of his many worthy achievements in the lines of civic endeavour. Naturally this portrait and those records are our most precious possessions and our greatest heritages.
“The first Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht was by all accounts a great scholar but not a practised scribe. The second of the name was both. Hence our great debt to him—a debt which I may say is one in which this community itself shares.”
“I'm sure of it,” said Olcott.
“And now, sir, if you will be so good, kindly step this way,” said Mr. Van Nicht. “The light, I fear, is rather indifferent. This house has never been wired for electricity, nor was it ever equipped with gas pipes. I prefer to use lights more in keeping with its antiquity and its general character.”
His tone indicated that he did not in the least hold with the vulgarised and common utilities of the present. He led the way diagonally across the hall to a side door and ushered Olcott into what evidently was the chief living room of the house. It was a large, square room, very badly lighted with candles. It was cluttered, as Olcott instantly perceived, with a jumble of dingy-appearing antique furnishings, and it contained two women who, at his appearance, rose from their seats upon either side of the wide and empty fireplace. Simultaneously his nose informed him' that this room was heavy with a pent, dampish taint.
He decided that what it mainly needed was air and sunshine, and plenty of both.
“My two sisters,” introduced Mr. Van Nicht. “Miss Rachael Van Nicht, Mr. Olcott. Miss Harriet Van Nicht, Mr. Olcott.”
Neither of the two ladies offered her hand to him. They bowed primly, and Olcott bowed back and, already feeling almost as uncomfortable as though he had invaded the privacy of a family group of resident shades in their resident vault, he sat down in a musty-smell-ing armchair near the elder sister.
Considered as such, the conversation which followed was not unqualifiedly a success. The brother bore the burden of it, which meant that at once it took on a stiff and an unnatural and an artificial colouring. It was dead talk, stuffed with big words, and strung with wires. There were semioccasional interpolations by Olcott, who continued to feel most decidedly out of place. Once in a while Miss Rachael Van Nicht slid a brief remark into the grooves which her brother channelled out. Since he was called upon to say so little, Olcott was the better off for an opportunity to study this lady as he sat there.