“I was sure you would agree with me,” said Father Wiliston. He felt himself growing weary now and heavy-eyed. Presently somehow he was leaning on Toboso with his head on his shoulder. Toboso's arm was around him, and Toboso began to hum in a kind of wheezing lullaby, “Hey, Jinny! Ho, Jinny!”
“I am very grateful, my dear friends,” murmured Father Wiliston. “I have lived a long time. I fear I have not always been careful in my course, and am often forgetful. I think”—drowsily—“I think that happiness must in itself be pleasing to God. I was often happy before in this room. I remember—my dear mother sat here—who is now dead. We have been quite, really quite cheerful to-night. My mother—was very judicious—an excellent wise woman—she died long ago.” So he was asleep before any one was aware, while Toboso crooned huskily, “Hey, Jinny!” and Boston Alley and the Newark Kid sat upright and stared curiously.
“Holy Jims!” said the Kid.
Toboso motioned them to bring the pulled grass. They piled it on the settle, let Father Wiliston down softly, brought the broken table, and placed it so that he could not roll off.
“Well,” said Toboso, after a moment's silence, “I guess we'd better pick him and be off. He's got sixty in his pocket.”
“Oh,” said Boston, “that's it, is it?”
“It's my find, but seeing you's here I takes half and give you fifteen apiece.”
“Well, that's right.”
“And I guess the Kid can take it out.”
The Kid found the pocketbook with sensitive gliding fingers, and pulled it out. Toboso counted and divided the bills.
“Well,” whispered Toboso thoughtfully, “if the Elder now was forty years younger, I wouldn't want a better pardner.” They tiptoed out into the night. “But,” he continued, “looking at it that way, o' course he ain't got no great use for his wad and won't remember it till next week. Heeled all right, anyhow. Only, I says now, I says, there ain't no vice in him.”
“Mammy tuck me up, no licks to-night,” said the Kid, plodding in front. “I ain't got nothing against him.”
Boston Alley only fingered the bills in his pocket.
It grew quite dark in the room they had left as the fire sunk to a few flames, then to dull embers and an occasional darting spark. The only sound was Father Wiliston's light breathing.
When he awoke the morning was dim in the windows. He lay a moment confused in mind, then sat up and looked around.
“Dear me! Well, well, I dare say Toboso thought I was too old. I dare say”—getting on his feet—“I dare say they thought it would be unkind to tell me so.”
He wandered through the dusky old rooms and up and down the creaking stairs, picking up bits of recollection, some vivid, some more dim than the dawn, some full of laughter, some that were leaden and sad; then out into the orchard to find a bough apple in the dewy grasses; and, kneeling under the gnarled old tree to make his morning prayer, which included in petition the three overnight revellers, he went in fluent phrase and broken tones among eldest memories.
He pushed cheerfully into the grassy road now, munching his apple and humming, “Hey, Jinny! Ho, Jinny!” He examined the tree at the highway with fresh interest. “How singular! It means an empty house. Very intelligent man, Toboso.”
Bits of grass were stuck on his back and a bramble dragged from his coat tail. He plodded along in the dust and wabbled absent-mindedly from one side of the road to the other. The dawn towered behind him in purple and crimson, lifted its robe and canopy, and flung some kind of glittering gauze far beyond him. He did not notice it till he reached the top of the hill above Ironville with Timothy's house in sight. Then he stopped, turned, and was startled a moment; then smiled companionably on the state and glory of the morning, much as on Toboso and the card tricks of the Newark Kid.
“Really,” he murmured, “I have had a very good time.”
He met Timothy in the hall.
“Been out to walk early, father? Wait—there's grass and sticks on your coat.”
It suddenly seemed difficult to explain the entire circumstances to Timothy, a settled man and girt with precedent.
“Did you enjoy it?—Letter you dropped? No, I haven't seen it. Breakfast is ready.”
Neither Bettina nor Mrs. Timothy had seen the letter.
“No matter, my dear, no matter. I—really, I've had a very good time.”
Afterward he came out on the porch with his Bible and Concordance, sat down and heard Bettina brushing his hat and ejaculating, “Fater!” Presently he began to nod drowsily and his head dropped low over the Concordance. The chickens clucked drowsily in the road.
CHARLIE SEBASTIAN was a turfman, meaning that he had something to do with race-horses, and knew property as rolls of bank bills, of which one now and then suddenly has none at all; or as pacers and trotters that are given to breaking and unaccountably to falling off in their nervous systems; or as “Association Shares” and partnership investments in a training stable; all capable of melting and going down in one vortex. So it happened at the October races. And from this it arose that in going between two heated cities and low by the sea he stopped among the high hills that were cold.
He was a tall man with a pointed beard, strong of shoulder and foot, and without fear in his eyes. After two hours' riding he woke from a doze and argued once more that he was a “phenomenally busted man.” It made no difference, after all, which city he was in. Looking out at the white hills that showed faintly in the storm, it occurred to him that this was not the railway line one usually travelled to the end in view. It was singular, the little difference between choices. You back the wrong horse; then you drink beer instead of fizz, and the results of either are tolerable. Let a man live lustily and there's little to regret. He had found ruin digestible before, and never yet gone to the dogs that wait to devour human remnants, but had gotten up and fallen again, and on the whole rejoiced. Stomach and lungs of iron, a torrent of red blood in vein and artery maintain their consolations; hopes rise again, blunders and evil doings seem to be practically outlived. So without theory ran Sebastian's experience. The theory used to be that his sin would find a man out. There were enough of Sebastian's that had gone out, and never returned to look for him. So too with mistakes and failures. A little while, a year or more, and you are busy with other matters. It is a stirring world, and offers no occupation for ghosts. The dragging sense of depression that he felt seemed natural enough; not to be argued down, but thrown aside in due time. Yet it was a feeling of pallid and cold futility, like the spectral hills and wavering snow.
“I might as well go back!”
He tossed a coin to see whether it was fated he should drop off at the next station, and it was.
“Ramoth!” cried the brakeman.
Sebastian held in his surprise as a matter of habit.
But on the platform in the drift and float of the snow-storm he stared around at the white January valley, at the disappearing train, at the sign above the station door, “Ramoth.”
“That's the place,” he remarked. “There wasn't any railroad then.”
There were hidden virtues in a flipped coin. Sebastian had his superstitions.
The road to Ramoth village from the station curves about to the south of the great bare dome that is called Edom Hill, but Sebastian, without inquiry, took the fork to the left which climbed up the hill without compromise, and seemed to be little used.
Yet in past times Edom Hill was noted in a small way as a hill that upheld the house of a stern abolitionist, and in a more secret way as a station in the “underground railroad,” or system by which runaway slaves were passed on to Canada. But when Charlie Sebastian remembered his father and Edom Hill, the days of those activities were passed. The abolitionist had nothing to exercise resistance and aggression on but his wind-blown farm and a boy, who was aggressive to seek out mainly the joys of this world, and had faculties of resistance. There were bitter clashes; young Sebastian fled, and came upon a stable on a stud farm, and from there in due time went far and wide, and found tolerance in time and wrote, offering to “trade grudges and come to see how he was.”
The answer, in a small, faint, cramped, unskilful hand, stated the abolitionist's death. “Won't you come back, Mr. Sebastian. It is lonely. Harriet Sebastian.” And therefore Sebastian remarked:
“You bet it is! Who's she? The old man must have married again.”
In his new-found worldly tolerance he had admired such aggressive enterprise, but seeing no interest in the subject, had gone his way and forgotten it.
Beating up Edom Hill through the snow was no easier than twenty years before. David Sebastian had built his house in a high place, and looking widely over the top of the land, saw that it was evil.
The drifts were unbroken and lay in long barrows and windy ridges over the roadway. The half-buried fences went parallel up the white breast and barren heave of the hill, and disappeared in the storm. Sebastian passed a house with closed blinds, then at a long interval a barn and a stiff red chimney with a snow-covered heap of ruins at its foot. The station was now some miles behind and the dusk was coming on. The broad top of the hill was smooth and rounded gradually. Brambles, bushes, reeds, and the tops of fences broke the surface of the snow, and beside these only a house by the road, looking dingy and gray, with a blackish bam attached, four old maples in front, an orchard behind. Far down the hill to the right lay the road to Ramoth, too far for its line of naked trees to be seen in the storm. The house on Edom Hill had its white throne to itself, and whatever dignity there might be in solitude.
He did not pause to examine the house, only noticed the faint smoke in one chimney, opened the gate, and pushed through untrodden snow to the side door and knocked. The woman who came and stood in the door surprised him even more than “Ramoth!” called by the brakeman. Without great reason for seeming remarkable, it seemed remarkable. He stepped back and stared, and the two, looking at each other, said nothing. Sebastian recovered.
“My feet are cold,” he said slowly. “I shouldn't like to freeze them.”
She drew back and let him in, left him to find a chair and put his feet against the stove. She sat down near the window and went on knitting. The knitting needles glittered and clicked. Her face was outlined against the gray window, the flakes too glittered and clicked. It looked silent, secret, repressed, as seen against the gray window; like something chilled and snowed under, cold and sweet, smooth pale hair and forehead, deep bosom and slender waist. She looked young enough to be called in the early June of her years.
“There's good proportion and feature, but not enough nerves for a thoroughbred. But,” he thought, “she looks as if she needed, as you might say, revelry,” and he spoke aloud.
“Once I was in this section and there was a man named Sebastian lived here, or maybe it was farther on.”
She said, “It was here” in a low voice.
“David Sebastian now, that was it, or something that way. Stiff, sort of grim old—oh, but you might be a relative, you see. Likely enough. So you might.”
“I might be.”
“Just so. You might be.”
He rubbed his hands and leaned back, staring at the window. The wind was rising outside and blew the snow in whirls and sheets.
“Going to be a bad night I came up from the station. If a man's going anywhere tonight, he'll be apt not to get there.”
“You ought to have taken the right hand at the fork.”
“Well, I don't know.”
She rose and took a cloak from the table. Sebastian watched her.
“I must feed the pony and shut up the chickens.”
She hesitated. A refusal seemed to have been hinted to the hinted request for hospitality. But Sebastian saw another point.
“Now, that's what I'm going to do for you.”
She looked on silently, as he passed her with assured step, not hesitating at doors, but through the kitchen to the woodshed, and there in the darkness of a pitch-black corner took down a jingling lantern and lit it. She followed him silently into the yard, that was full of drifts and wild storm, to the barn, where she listened to him shake down hay and bedding, measure oats, slap the pony's flank and chirp cheerfully. Then he plunged through a low door and she heard the bolt in the chicken shed rattle. It had grown dark outside. He came out and held the barn door, waiting for her to step out, and they stood side by side on the edge of the storm.
“How did you know the lantern was there?”
“Lantern! Oh, farmhouses always keep the lantern in the nearest corner of the woodshed, if it isn't behind the kitchen door.”
But she did not move to let him close the bam. He looked down at her a moment and then out at the white raging night.
“Can't see forty feet, can you? But, of course, if you don't want to give me a roof I'll have to take my chances. Look poor, don't they? Going to let me shut this door?”
“I am quite alone here.”
“So am I. That's the trouble.”
“I don't think you understand,” she said quietly, speaking in a manner low, cool, and self-contained.
“I've got more understanding now than I'll have in an hour, maybe.”
“I will lend you the lantern.”
“Oh, you mightn't get it back.” He drew the barn door to, which forced her to step forward. A gust of wind about the corner of the bam staggered and threw her back. He caught her about her shoulders and held her steadily, and shot the bolt with the hand that held the lantern.
“That's all right. A man has to take his chances. I dare say a woman had better not.”
If Sebastian exaggerated the dangers of the night, if there were any for him, looked at from her standpoint they might seem large and full of dread. The wind howled with wild hunting sound, and shrieked against the eaves of the house. The snow drove thick and blinding. The chimneys were invisible. A woman easily transfers her own feelings to a man and interprets them there. In the interest of that interpretation it might no longer seem possible that man's ingratitude, or his failings and passions, could be as unkind as winter wind and bitter sky.
She caught her breath in a moment.
“You will stay to supper,” she said, and stepped aside.
“No. As I'm going, I'd better go.”
She went before him across the yard, opened the woodshed door and stood in it. He held out the lantern, but she did not take it. He lifted it to look at her face, and she smiled faintly.
“Please come in.”
“Better go on, if I'm going. Am I?”
“I'm very cold. Please come in.”
They went in and closed the doors against the storm. The house was wrapped round, and shut away from the sight of Edom Hill, and Edom Hill was wrapped round and shut away from the rest of the world.
Revelry has need of a certain co-operation. Sebastian drew heavily on his memory for entertainment, told of the combination that had “cleaned him out,” and how he might get in again in the Spring, only he felt a bit tired in mind now, and things seemed dead. He explained the mysteries of “short prices, selling allowances, past choices, hurdles and handicaps,” and told of the great October races, where Decatur won from Clifford and Lady Mary, and Lady Mary ran through the fence and destroyed the features of the jockey. But the quiet, smooth-haired woman maintained her calm, and offered neither question nor comment, only smiled and flushed faintly now and then. She seemed as little stirred by new tumultuous things as the white curtains at the windows, that moved slightly when the storm, which danced and shouted on Edom Hill, managed to force a whistling breath through a chink.
Sebastian decided she was frozen up with loneliness and the like. “She's got no conversation, let alone revelry.” He thought he knew what her life was like. “She's sort of empty. Nothing doing any time. It's the off season all the year. No troubles. Sort of like a fish, as being chilly and calm, that lives in cold water till you have to put pepper on to taste it. I know how it goes on this old hill.”
She left him soon. He heard her moving about in the kitchen, and sometimes the clink of a dish. He sat by the stove and mused and muttered. She came and told him his room was on the left of the stair; it had a stove; would he not carry up wood and have his fire there? She seemed to imply a preference that he should. But the burden and oppression of his musings kept him from wondering when she had compromised her scruples and fears, or why she kept any of them. He mounted the stair with his wood. She followed with a lamp and left him. He stared at the closed door and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then went to work with his fire. The house became silent, except for the outer tumult. She did not mount the stair again; it followed that she slept below.
Sebastian took a daguerreotype from the mantel and stared at it. It was the likeness of a shaven, grim-faced man in early middle life. He examined it long with a quizzical frown; finally went to the washstand, opened the drawer and took out a razor with a handle of yellow bone, carried the washstand to the stove, balanced the mirror against the pitcher, stropped the razor on his hand, heated water in a cup, slowly dismantled his face of beard and mustache, cast them in the stove, put the daguerreotype beside the mirror, and compared critically. Except that the face in the daguerreotype had a straight, set mouth, and the face in the mirror was one full-lipped and humorous and differently lined, they were nearly the same.
“I wouldn't have believed it”
He put it aside and looked around, whistling in meditation. Then he went back again to wondering who the pale-haired woman was. Probably the farm had changed hands. A man whose father had been dead going on twenty years couldn't have that kind of widowed stepmother. He was disqualified.
A cold, unchanging place, Edom Hill, lifted out of the warm, sapping currents of life. It might be a woman could keep indefinitely there, looking much the same. If her pulse beat once to an ordinary twice, she ought to last twice as long. The house seemed unchanged. The old things were in their old familiar places, David Sebastian's books on their shelves in the room below, on the side table there his great Bible, in which he used to write all family records, with those of his reforming activity. Sebastian wondered what record stood of his own flight.
He sat a few moments longer, then took his lamp and crept softly out of the room and down the stairs. The sitting-room was icily cold now; the white curtains stirred noiselessly. He sat down before the little side table and opened the great book.
There were some thirty leaves between the Old and New Testaments, most of them stitched in. A few at the end were blank. Some of the records were obscure.
“March 5th, 1840. Saw light on this subject.”
Others ran:
“Sept. 1 st, 1843. Rec. Peter Cavendish, fugitive.”
“Dec. 3d, ditto. Rec. Robert Henry.”
“April 15th, ditto. Rec. one, Æsop,” and so on.
“Dec. 14th, 1848. Have had consolation from prayer for public evil.”
“April 20th, 1858. My son, Charles Sebastian, born.”
“April 7th, 1862. My wife, Jane Sebastian, died.”
“July 5th, 1862. Rec. Keziah Andrews to keep my house.”
The dates of the entries from that point grew further apart, random and obscure; here and there a fact.
“Nov. 4th, 1876. Charles Sebastian departed.”
“June 9th, 1877. Rec. Harriet.”
“Jan. 19th, 1880. Have wrestled in prayer without consolation for Charles Sebastian.”
This was the last entry. A faint line ran down across the page connecting the end of “Harriet” with the beginning of “Charles.” Between the two blank leaves at the end was a photograph of himself at seventeen. He remembered suddenly how it was taken by a travelling photographer, who had stirred his soul with curiosity and given him the picture; and David Sebastian had taken it and silently put it away among blank leaves of the Bible.
Sebastian shivered. The written leaves, the look of himself of twenty years before, the cold, the wail of the wind, the clicking flakes on the window panes, these seemed now to be the dominant facts of life. Narrow was it, poor and meagre, to live and labor with a barren farm? The old abolitionist had cut deeper into existence than he had. If to deal with the fate of races, and wrestle alone with God on Edom Hill, were not knowledge and experience, what was knowledge or experience, or what should a man call worth the trial of his brain and nerve?
“He passed me. He won hands down,” he muttered, bending over the page again. “'Rec. Harriet.' That's too much for me.” And he heard a quick noise behind him and turned.
She stood in the door, wide-eyed, smooth, pale hair falling over one shoulder, long cloak half slipped from the other, holding a shotgun, threatening and stem.
“What are you doing here?”
“Out gunning for me?” asked Sebastian gravely.
She stared wildly, put the gun down, cried:
“You're Charlie Sebastian!” and fell on her knees beside the stove, choking, sobbing and shaking, crouching against the cold sheet iron in a kind of blind memory of its warmth and protection.
“You still have the drop on me,” said Sebastian.
She shivered and crouched still and whispered:
“I'm cold.”
“How long have you been here freezing?”
Sebastian thrust anything inflammable at hand into the stove, lit it and piled in the wood.
“Not long. Only—only a few moments.”
“You still have the advantage of me. Who are you?”
“Why, I'm Harriet,” she said simply, and looked up.
“Just so. 'Received, 1877.' How old were you then?”
“Why, I was eight.”
“Just so. Don't tell lies, Harriet. You've been freezing a long while.”
She drew her cloak closer over the thin white linen of her gown with shaking hand.
“I don't understand. I'm very cold. Why didn't you come before? It has been so long waiting.”
The draft began to roar and the dampers to glow. She crept in front of the glow. He drew a chair and sat down close behind her.
“Why didn't you come before?”
The question was startling, for Sebastian was only conscious of a lack of reason for coming. If David Sebastian had left him the farm he would have heard from it, and being prosperous, he had not cared. But the question seemed to imply some strong assumption and further knowledge.
“You'd better tell me about it.”
“About what? At the beginning?”
“Aren't you anything except 'Received, Harriet'?”
“Oh, I hadn't any father or mother when Mr. Sebastian brought me here. Is that what you mean? But he taught me to say 'Harriet Sebastian,' and a great many things he taught me. Didn't you know? And about his life and what he wanted you to do? Because, of course, we talked about you nearly always in the time just before he died. He said you would be sure to come, but he died, don't you see? only a few years after, and that disappointed him. He gave me the picture and said, 'He'll come, and you'll know him by this,' and he said, 'He will come poor and miserable. My only son, so I leave him to you; and so, as I did, you will pray for him twice each day.' It was just like that, 'Tell Charles there is no happiness but in duty. Tell him I found it so.' It was a night like this when he died, and Kezzy was asleep in her chair out here, and I sat by the bed. Then he told me I would pay him all in that way by doing what he meant to do for you. I was so little, but I seemed to understand that I was to live for it, as he had lived to help free the slaves. Don't you see? Then he began calling, 'Charles! Charles!' as if you were somewhere near, and I fell asleep, and woke and lay still and listened to the wind; and when I tried to get up I couldn't, because he held my hair, and he was dead. But why didn't you come?”
“It looks odd enough now,” Sebastian admitted, and wondered at the change from still impassiveness, pale and cool silence, to eager speech, swift question, lifted and flushed face.
“Then you remember the letters? But you didn't come then. But I began to fancy how it would be when you came, and then somehow it seemed as if you were here. Out in the orchard sometimes, don't you see? And more often when Kezzy was cross. And when she went to sleep by the fire at night—she was so old—we were quite alone and talked. Don't you remember?—I mean—But Kezzy didn't like to hear me talking to myself. 'Mutter, mutter!' like that. 'Never was such a child!' And then she died, too, seven—seven years ago, and it was quite different. I—I grew older. You seemed to be here quite and quite close to me always. There was no one else, except—But, I don't know why, I had an aching from having to wait, and it has been a long time, hasn't it?”
“Rather long. Go on. There was no one else?”
“No. We lived here—I mean—it grew that way, and you changed from the picture, too, and became like Mr. Sebastian, only younger, and just as you are now, only—not quite.”
She looked at him with sudden fear, then dropped her eyes, drew her long hair around under her cloak and leaned closer to the fire.
“But there is so much to tell you it comes out all mixed.”
Sebastian sat silently looking down at her, and felt the burden of his thinking grow heavier; the pondering how David Sebastian had left him an inheritance of advice, declaring his own life full and brimming, and to Harriet the inheritance of a curious duty that had grown to people her nights and days with intense sheltered dreams, and made her life, too, seem to her full and brimming, multitudinous with events and interchanges, himself so close and cherished an actor in it that his own parallel unconsciousness of it had almost dropped out of conception. And the burden grew heavier still with the weight of memories, and the record between the Old and New Testaments; with the sense of the isolation and covert of the midnight, and the storm; with the sight of Harriet crouching by the fire, her story, how David Sebastian left this world and went out into the wild night crying, “Charles! Charles!” It was something not logical, but compelling. It forced him to remark that his own cup appeared partially empty from this point of view. Harriet seemed to feel that her hour had come and he was given to her hands.. Success even in methods of living is a convincing thing over unsuccess. Ah, well! too late to remodel to David Sebastian's notion. It was singular, though, a woman silent, restrained, scrupulous, moving probably to the dictates of village opinion—suddenly the key was turned, and she threw back the gates of her prison; threw open doors, windows, intimate curtains; asked him to look in and explore everywhere and know all the history and the forecasts; became simple, primitive, unrestrained, willing to sit there at his feet and as innocent as her white linen gown. How smooth and pale her hair was and gentle cheek, and there were little sleepy smiles in the corners of the lips. He thought he would like most of all to put out his hand and touch her cheek and sleepy smiles, and draw her hair, long and soft and pale, from under the cloak. On the whole, it seemed probable that he might.
“Harriet,” he said slowly, “I'm going to play this hand.”
“Why, I don't know what you mean.”
“Take it, I'm not over and above a choice selection. I don't mention details, but take it as a general fact. Would you want to marry that kind of a selection, meaning me?”
“Oh, yes! Didn't you come for that? I thought you would.”
“And I thought you needed revelry! You must have had a lot of it.”
“I don't know what you mean. Listen! It keeps knocking at the door!”
“Oh, that's all right. Let it knock. Do you expect any more vagrants?”
“Vagrants?”
“Like me.”
“Like you? You only came home. Listen! It was like this when he died. But he wouldn't come to-night and stand outside and knock, would he? Not to-night, when you've come at last. But he used to. Of course, I fancied things. It's the storm. There's no one else now.”
A thousand spectres go whirling across Edom Hill such winter nights and come with importunate messages, but if the door is close and the fire courageous, it matters little. They are but wind and drift and out in the dark, and if one is in the light, it is a great point to keep the door fast against them and all forebodings, and let the coming days be what they will.
Men are not born in a night, or a year.
But if David Sebastian were a spectre there at the door, and thought differently on any question, or had more to say, he was not articulate. There is no occupation for ghosts in a stirring world, nor efficiency in their repentance.
Has any one more than a measure of hope, and a door against the storm? There was that much, at least, on Edom Hill.
SOME years ago, of a summer afternoon, a perspiring organ-grinder and a leathery ape plodded along the road that goes between thin-soiled hillsides and the lake which is known as Elbow Lake and lies to the northeast of the village of Salem. In those days it was a well-travelled highway, as could be seen from its breadth and' dustiness. At about half the length of its bordering on the lake there was a spring set in the hillside, and a little pool continually rippled by its inflow. Some settler or later owner of the thin-soiled hillsides had left a clump of trees about it, making as sightly and refreshing an Institute of Charity as could be found. Another philanthropist had added half a cocoanut-shell to the foundation.
The organ-grinder turned in under the trees with a smile, in which his front teeth played a large part, and suddenly drew back with a guttural exclamation; the leathery ape bumped against his legs, and both assumed attitudes expressing respectively, in an Italian and tropical manner, great surprise and abandonment of ideas. A tall man lay stretched on his back beside the spring, with a felt hat over his face. Pietro, the grinder, hesitated. The American, if disturbed and irascible, takes by the collar and kicks with the foot: it has sometimes so happened. The tall man pushed back his hat and sat up, showing a large-boned and sun-browned face, shaven except for a black mustache, clipped close. He looked not irascible, though grave perhaps, at least unsmiling. He said: “It's free quarters, Dago. Come in. Entrez. Have a drink.”
Pietro bowed and gesticulated with amiable violence. “Dry!” he said. “Oh, hot!”
“Just so. That a friend of yours?”—pointing to the ape. “He ain't got a withering sorrow, has he? Take a seat.”
Elbow Lake is shaped as its name implies. If one were to imagine the arm to which the elbow belonged, it would be the arm of a muscular person in the act of smiting a peaceable-looking farmhouse a quarter of a mile to the east. Considering the bouldered front of the hill behind the house, the imaginary blow would be bad for the imaginary knuckles. It is a large house, with brown, unlikely looking hillsides around it, huckleberry knobs and ice-grooved boulders here and there. The land between it and the lake is low, and was swampy forty years ago, before the Rand boys began to drain it, about the time when R. Rand entered the third quarter century of his unpleasant existence.
R. Rand was, I suppose, a miser, if the term does not imply too definite a type. The New England miser is seldom grotesque. He seems more like congealed than distorted humanity. He does not pinch a penny so hard as some of other races are said to do, but he pinches a dollar harder, and is quite as unlovely as any. R. Rand's methods of obtaining dollars to pinch were not altogether known, or not, at least, recorded—which accounts perhaps for the tradition that they were of doubtful uprightness. He held various mortgages about the county, and his farm represented little to him except a means of keeping his two sons inexpensively employed in rooting out stones.
At the respective ages of sixteen and seventeen the two sons, Bob and Tom Rand, discovered the rooting out of stones to be unproductive labor, if nothing grew, or was expected to grow, in their place, except more stones; and the nature of the counsels they took may be accurately imagined. In the autumn of '56 they began ditching the swamp in the direction of the lake, and in the summer of '57 raised a crop of tobacco in the northeast corner, R. Rand, the father, making no comment the while. At the proper time he sold the tobacco to Packard & Co., cigar makers, of the city of Hamilton, still making no comment, probably enjoying some mental titillation. Tom Rand then flung a rock of the size of his fist through one of the front windows, and ran away, also making no comment further than that. The broken window remained broken twenty-five years, Tom returning neither to mend it nor to break another. Bob Rand, by some bargain with his father, continued the ditching and planting of the swamp with some profit to himself.
He evidently classed at least a portion of his father's manner of life among the things that are to be avoided. He acquired a family, and was in the way to bring it up in a reputable way. He further cultivated and bulwarked his reputation. Society, manifesting itself politically, made him sheriff; society, manifesting itself ecclesiastically, made him deacon. Society seldom fails to smile on systematic courtship.
The old man continued to go his way here and there, giving account of himself to no one, contented enough no doubt to have one reputable son who looked after his own children and paid steady rent for, or bought piece by piece, the land he used; and another floating between the Rockies and the Mississippi, whose doings were of no importance in the village of Salem. But I doubt, on the whole, whether he was softened in heart by the deacon's manner or the ordering of the deacon's life to reflect unfilially on his own. Without claiming any great knowledge of the proprieties, he may have thought the conduct of his younger son the more filial of the two. Such was the history of the farmhouse between the years '56 and '82.
One wet April day, the sixth of the month, in the year '82, R. Rand went grimly elsewhere—where, his neighbors had little doubt. With true New England caution we will say that he went to the cemetery, the little grass-grown cemetery of Salem, with its meagre memorials and absurd, pathetic epitaphs. The minister preached a funeral sermon, out of deference to his deacon, in which he said nothing whatever about R. Rand, deceased; and R. Rand, sheriff and deacon, reigned in his stead.
Follow certain documents and one statement of fact:
Document 1.
Codicil to the Will of R. Rand.
The Will shall stand as above, to wit, my son, Robert Rand, sole legatee, failing the following condition: namely, I bequeath all my property as above mentioned, with the exception of this house and farm, to my son, Thomas Rand, provided, that within three months of the present date he returns and mends with his own hands the front window, third from the north, previously broken by him.
(Signed) R. Rand.
Statement of fact.On the morning of the day following the funeral the “condition” appeared in singularly problematical shape, the broken window, third from the north, having been in fact promptly replacedby the hands of Deacon Rand himself. The new pane stared defiantly across the lake, westward.
Document 2.
Leadville, Cal., May 15.
Dear Bob: I hear the old man is gone. Saw it in a paper. I reckon maybe I didn't treat him any squarer than he did me. I'll go halves on a bang-up good monument, anyhow. Can we settle affairs without my coming East? How are you, Bob?
Tom.
Document 3.
Salem, May 29.
Dear Brother: The conditions of our father's will are such, I am compelled to inform you, as to result in leaving the property wholly to me. My duty to a large and growing family gives me no choice but to accept it as it stands, and I trust and have no doubt that you will regard that result with fortitude. I remain yours,
Robert Rand.
Document 4.
Leadville, June 9.
A. L. Moore.
Dear Sir: I have your name as a lawyer in Wimberton. Think likely there isn't any other. If you did not draw up the will of R. Rand, Salem, can you forward this letter to the man who did? If you did, will you tell me what in thunder it was?
Yours, Thomas Rand.
Document 5.
Wimberton, June 18.
Thomas Rand.
Dear Sir: I did draw your father's will and enclose copy of the same, with its codicil, which may truly be called remarkable. I think it right to add, that the window in question has been mended by your brother, with evident purpose. Your letter comes opportunely, my efforts to find you having been heretofore unsuccessful. I will add further, that I think the case actionable, to say the least. In case you should see fit to contest, your immediate return is of course necessary. Very truly yours,
A. L. Moore,
Attorney-at-Law.
Document 6. Despatch.
New York, July 5.
To Robert Rand, Salem.
Will be at Valley Station to-morrow. Meet me or not.
T. Rand.
The deacon was a tall meagre man with a goatee that seemed to accentuate him, to hint by its mere straightness at sharp decision, an unwavering line of rectitude.
He drove westward in his buckboard that hot summer afternoon, the 6th of July. The yellow road was empty before him all the length of the lake, except for the butterflies bobbing around in the sunshine. His lips looked even more secretive than usual: a discouraging man to see, if one were to come to him in a companionable mood desiring comments.
Opposite the spring he drew up, hearing the sound of a hand-organ under the trees. The tall man with a clipped mustache sat up deliberately and looked at him. The leathery ape ceased his funereal capers and also looked at him; then retreated behind the spring. Pietro gazed back and forth between the deacon and the ape, dismissed his professional smile, and followed the ape. The tall man pulled his legs under him and got up.
“I reckon it's Bob,” he said. “It's free quarters, Bob. Entrez. Come in. Have a drink.”
The deacon's embarrassment, if he had any, only showed itself in an extra stiffening of the back.
“The train—I did not suppose—I was going to meet you.”
“Just so. I came by way of Wimberton.”
The younger brother stretched himself again beside the spring and drew his hat over his eyes. The elder stood up straight and not altogether unimpressive in front of it. Pietro in the rear of the spring reflected at this point that he and the ape could conduct a livelier conversation if it were left to them. Pietro could not imagine a conversation in which it was not desirable to be lively. The silence was long and, Pietro thought, not pleasant.
“Bob,” said the apparent sleeper at last, “ever hear of the prodigal son?”
The deacon frowned sharply, but said nothing. The other lifted the edge of his hat brim.
“Never heard of him? Oh—have I Then I won't tell about him. Too long. That elder brother, now, he had good points;—no doubt of it, eh?”
“I confess I don't see your object—”
“Don't? Well, I was just saying he had good points. I suppose he and the prodigal had an average good time together, knockin' around, stubbin' their toes, fishin' maybe, gettin' licked at inconvenient times, hookin' apples most anytime. That sort of thing. Just so. He had something of an argument. Now, the prodigal had no end of fun, and the elder brother stayed at home and chopped wood; understood himself to be cultivating the old man. I take it he didn't have a very soft job of it?”—lifting his hat brim once more.
The deacon said nothing, but observed the hat brim.
“Now I think of it, maybe strenuous sobriety wasn't a thing he naturally liked any more than the prodigal did. I've a notion there was more family likeness between 'em than other folks thought. What might be your idea?”
The deacon still stood rigidly with his hands clasped behind him.
“I would rather,” he said, “you would explain yourself without parable. You received my letter. It referred to our father's will. I have received a telegram which I take to be threatening.”
The other sat up and pulled a large satchel around from behind him.
“You're a man of business, Bob,” he said cheerfully. “I like you, Bob. That's so. That will—I've got it in my pocket. Now, Bob, I take it you've got some cards, else you're putting up a creditable bluff. I play this here Will, Codicil attached. You play,—window already mended; time expired at twelve o'clock to-night. Good cards, Bob—first-rate. I play here”—opening the satchel—“two panes of glass—allowin' for accidents—putty, et cetera, proposing to bust that window again. Good cards, Bob. How are you coming on?”
The deacon's sallow cheeks flushed and his eyes glittered. Something came into his face which suggested the family likeness. He drew a paper from his inner coat pocket, bent forward stiffly and laid it on the grass.
“Sheriff's warrant,” he said, “for—hem—covering possible trespassing on my premises; good for twenty-four hours' detention—hem.”
“Good,” said his brother briskly. “I admire you, Bob. I'll be blessed if I don't. I play again.” He drew a revolver and placed it on top of the glass. “Six-shooter. Good for two hours' stand-off.”
“Hem,” said the deacon. “Warrant will be enlarged to cover the carrying of concealed weapons. Being myself the sheriff of this town, it is—hem—permissible for me.” He placed a revolver on top of the warrant.
“Bob,” said his brother, in huge delight, “I'm proud of you. But—I judge you ain't on to the practical drop.Stand back there!” The deacon looked into the muzzle of the steady revolver covering him, and retreated a step, breathing hard. Tom Rand sprang to his feet, and the two faced each other, the deacon looking as dangerous a man as the Westerner.
Suddenly, the wheezy hand-organ beyond the spring began, seemingly trying to play two tunes at once, with Pietro turning the crank as desperately as if the muzzle of the revolver were pointed at him.
“Hi, you monk! Dance!” cried Pietro; and the leathery ape footed it solemnly. The perspiration poured down Pietro's face. Over the faces of the two stern men fronting each other a smile came and broadened slowly, first over the younger's, then over the deacon's.
The deacon's smile died out first. He sat down on a rock, hid his face and groaned.
“I'm an evil-minded man,” he said; “I'm beaten.”
The other cocked his head on one side and listened. “Know what that tune is, Bob? I don't.”
He sat down in the old place again, took up the panes of glass and the copy of the will, hesitated, and put them down.
“I don't reckon you're beaten, Bob. You ain't got to the end of your hand yet. Got any children, Bob? Yes; said you had.”
“Five.”
“Call it a draw, Bob; I'll go you halves, counting in the monument.”
But the deacon only muttered to himself: “I'm an evil-minded man.”
Tom Rand meditatively wrapped the two documents around the revolvers.
“Here, Dago, you drop 'em in the spring!” which Pietro did, perspiring freely. “Shake all that. Come along.”
The two walked slowly toward the yellow road. Pietro raised his voice despairingly. “No cent! Not a nicka!”
“That's so,” said Tom, pausing. “Five, by thunder! Come along, Dago. It's free quarters. Entrez. Take a seat.”
The breeze was blowing up over Elbow Lake, and the butterflies bobbed about in the sunshine, as they drove along the yellow road. Pietro sat at the back of the buck-board, the leathery ape on his knee and a smile on his face, broad, non-professional, and consisting largely of front teeth.