"The same," answered Dolan, "the same it is, and by the same authority apples of gold in pictures of silver is a word fitly spoken to a man like Gabe Gamine." He whittled for a few minutes while the harness maker worked, and then sticking his pocket-knife into the chair between his legs, said: "But what I came in to tell you was about Lige Bemis; did you know he"s in town? Well, he is. Johnnie Barclay wired him to leave the dump up in the City and come down here, and what for, do you think? "Tis this. The council was going to change the name of Ellen Avenue out by the college to Garfield, and because it was named for that little girl of Mart"s that died right after the war, don"t you think Johnnie"s out raising h.e.l.l about it, and brought Lige down here to beat the game. He"ll be spending a lot of money if he has to.
Now you wouldn"t think he"d do that for old Mart, would you? He"s too many for me--that Johnny boy is. I can"t make him out." The Irishman played with his knife, sticking it in the chair and pulling it out for a while, and then continued: "Oh, yes, what I was going to tell you was the little spat me and Lige had over Johnnie. Lige was in my room in the court-house waiting to see a man in the court, and was bragging to me about how smart John was, and says Lige, "He"s found some earth over in Missouri--yellow clay," he says, "that"s just as good as oatmeal, and he ships it all over the country to his oatmeal mills and mixes it with the real stuff and sells it." I says: "He does, does he?
Sells mud mixed with oatmeal?" and Lige says, "Yes, sir, he"s got a whole mountain of it, and he"s getting ten dollars a ton net for it, which is better than a gold mine." "And you call that smart?" says I.
"Yes," says he, "yes, sir, that"s commercial instinct; it"s perfectly clean mud, and our chemist says it won"t harm any one," says he. "And him president of the Golden Belt Elevator Co.?" says I. "He is," says Lige. "And don"t need the money at all?" says I. "Not a penny of it,"
says he. "Well," says I, "Lige Bemis," says I, "when Johnnie gets to h.e.l.l,--and he"ll get there as sure as it doesn"t freeze over," says I, "may the devil put him under that mountain of mud and keep his railroad running night and day dumping more mud on while he eats his way out as a penance," says I. And you orto heard "em laugh." Dolan went on cutting curly-cues from the leather, and McHurdie kept on sewing at his bench. "It is a queer world--a queer world; and that Johnnie Barclay is a queer duck. Bringing Lige Bemis clear down here to help old Mart out of a little trouble there ain"t a dollar in; and then turning around and feeding the American people a mountain of mud.
Giving the town a park with his mother"s name on it, and selling little tin strips for ten dollars apiece to pay for it. He"s a queer duck. I"ll bet it will keep the recording angel busy keeping books on Johnnie Barclay."
"Oh, well, Jake," replied McHurdie, after a silence, "maybe the angels will just drop a tear and wipe much of the evil off."
"Maybe so, Watts McHurdie, maybe so," returned Dolan, "but there won"t be a dry eye in the house, as the papers say, if they keep up with him." And after delivering himself of this, Dolan rose and yawned, and went out of the shop singing an old tune which recited the fact that he had "a job to do down in the boulevard."
Looking over the years that have pa.s.sed since John Barclay and Sycamore Ridge were coming out of raw adolescence into maturity, one sees that there was a miracle of change in them both, but where it was and just how it came, one may not say. The town had no special advantages. It might have been one of a thousand dreary brown unpainted villages that dot the wind-swept plain to-day, instead of the bright, prosperous, elm-shaded town that it is. John Barclay in those days of his early thirties might have become a penny-pinching dull-witted "prominent citizen" of the Ridge, with no wider sphere of influence than the Sycamore Valley, or at most the Corn Belt Railroad.
But he and the town grew, and whether it was destiny that guided them, or whether they made their own destiny, one cannot say. The town seemed to be struggling and fighting its way to supremacy in the Sycamore Valley; and the colonel and the general and Watts McHurdie, sitting in the harness shop a score of years after those days of the seventies, used to try to remember some episode or event that would tell them how John fought his way up. But they could not do so. It was a fight in his soul. Every time his hand reached out to steal a mill or crush an opponent with the weapon of his secret railroad rebates, something caught his hand and held it for a moment, and he had to fight his way free. At first he had to learn to hate the man he was about to ruin, and to pretend that he thought the man was about to ruin him. Then he could justify himself in his greedy game. But at last he worked almost merrily. He came to enjoy the combat for its own sake. And sometimes he would play with a victim cat-wise, and after a victory in which the mouse fought well, John would lick his chops with some satisfaction at his business prowess. Mill after mill along the valley and through the West came under his control. And his skin grew leathery, and the bra.s.s l.u.s.tre in his eyes grew hard and metallic.
When he knew that he was the richest man in Garrison County, he saw that there were richer men in the state, and in after years when he was the richest man in the state, and in the Missouri Valley, the rich men in other states moved him by their wealth to work harder. But before he was thirty, his laugh had become a cackle, and Colonel Martin Culpepper, who would saunter along when Barclay would limp by on Main Street, would call out after him, "Slow down, Johnnie, slow down, boy, or you"ll bust a biler." And then the colonel would pause and gaze benignly after the limping figure bobbing along in the next block, and if there was a bystander to address, the colonel would say, "For a flat-wheel he does certainly make good time." And then if the bystander looked worth the while, the colonel, in seven cases out of ten, would pull out a subscription paper for some new church building, or for some charitable purpose, and proceed to solicit the needed funds.
BOOK II
BEING NO CHAPTER AT ALL, BUT AN INTERLUDE FOR THE ORCHESTRA
And so the years slipped by--monotonous years they seem now, so far as this story goes. Because little happened worth the telling; for growth is so still and so dull and so undramatic that it escapes interest and climax; yet it is all there is in life. For the roots of events in the ground of the past are like the crowded moments of our pa.s.sing lives that are recorded only in our under-consciousnesses, to rise in other years in character formed, in traits established, in events fructified. And in the years when the evil days came not, John Barclay"s tragedy was stirring in the soil of his soul.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the management, let us thank you for your kind attention, during the tedious act which has closed. We have done our best to please you with the puppets and have cracked their heads together in fine fashion, and they have danced and cried and crackled, while we pulled the strings as our mummers mumbled. But now they must have new clothes on. Time, the great costumer, must change their make-up. So we will fold down the curtain.
John Barclay, a Gentleman, must be painted yellow with gold. Philemon Ward, a Patriot, must be sprinkled with gray. Martin Culpepper"s Large White Plumes must be towsled. Watts McHurdie, a Poet, must be bent a little at the hips and shoulders. Adrian Brownwell, a Gallant, must creak as he struts. Neal Dow Ward, an Infant, must put on long trousers. E. W. Bemis, a Lawyer, must be dignified; Jacob Dolan, an Irishman and a Soldier, must grow unkempt and frowsy. Robert Hendricks, Fellow Fine, must have his blond hair rubbed off at the temples, and his face marked with maturity. Lycurgus Mason, a Woman Tamer, must get used to wearing white shirts. Gabriel Carnine, a Money Changer, must feel his importance; and Oscar Fernald, a Tavern Keeper, must be hobbled by the years. All but the shades must be refurbished.
General Hendricks and Elmer, his son, must fade farther into the mists of the past, while Henry Schnitzler settles comfortably down in storied urn and animated bust.
There they hang together on the line, these ba.s.swood folk, and beside them wave their womankind. These also must be repaired and refitted throughout, as Oscar Fernald"s letter-heads used to say of the Thayer House. Jane Barclay, Wife of John, must have the "star light, star bright" wiped out of her eyes. Mary Barclay, Mother of the Same, must have her limbs trimmed gaunt, and her face chiselled strong and indomitable. Jeanette Barclay, a Toddler, must grow into dresses.
Molly Culpepper, a Dear, must have her heart taken out, and her face show the shock of the operation. Nellie Logan, a poet"s Wife, must join all the lodges in the Ridge to help her husband in politics.
Trixie Lee, little Beatrix Lee, daughter of J. Lord and Lady Lee, must have her childish face scarred and her eyes glazed. Mrs. Hally Bemis, a Prodigal, must be swathed in silk. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward and all her sisters must be put in the simple garb of school-teachers.
Miss Hendricks, a Mouse, must hide in the dusky places; and Ellen Culpepper, a Memory, must come to life.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, while we have been diverting you, Time has been at work on the little people of the pa.s.sing show, and now before we draw back the curtain to let them caper across your hearts, let us again thank you one and all for your courtesy in staying, and hope that what you see and hear may make you wiser and kinder and braver; for this is a moral entertainment, good people, planned to show you that yesterday makes to-day and they both make to-morrow, and so the world spins round the sun.
CHAPTER XVII
The rumble of the wheels in the great stone mill across the Sycamore and the roar of the waters over the dam seem to have been in Jeanette Barclay"s ears from the day of her birth; for she was but a baby when the stone mill rose where the little red mill had stood, and beside the stone mill there had grown up the long stone factory wherein Lycurgus Mason was a man of consequence. As the trains whirled by strangers could see the signs in mammoth letters, "The Golden Belt Mills" on the larger building and on the smaller, "The Barclay Economy Door Strip Factory." Standing on the stone steps of her father"s house the child could read these signs clear across the mill-pond, and from these signs she learned her letters. For her father had more pride in that one mill on the Sycamore than in the scores of other mills that he controlled. And even in after years, when he controlled mills all over the West, and owned railroads upon which to take his flour to the sea, and ships in which to carry his flour all over the world, the Golden Belt Mill at Sycamore Ridge was his chief pride. The rumble of the wheels and the hoa.r.s.e voice of the dam that seemed to Jeanette like the call of the sea, were so sweet to her father"s ears that when he wearied of the work of the National Provisions Company, with its two floors of busy offices in the Corn Exchange Building in the great city, he would come home to Sycamore Ridge, and go to his private office in the mill. The child remembers what seemed like endless days, but what in truth were only a few hours in a few days in a few years, when Daddy Barclay carried her on his shoulders across the bridge and sat her down barefooted and bareheaded to play upon the dam, while he in his old clothes prodded among the great wheels near by or sat beside her telling her where he caught this fish or that fish or a turtle or a water moccasin when he was a little boy. At low water, she remembers that he sometimes let her wade in the clear stream, while he sat in his office near by watching her from the window. That was when she was only four years old, and she always had the strangest memory of a playfellow on the dam, a big girl, who fluttered in and out of the shadows on the stones. Jeanette talked with her, but no one else could see her, and once the big girl, who could not talk herself, stamped her feet and beckoned Jeanette to come away from a rock on which she was playing, and her father, looking out of a window, turned white when he saw a snake coiled beside the rock. But Jeanette saw the snake and was frightened, and told her father that Ellen saw it too, and she could not make him understand who Ellen was. So he only trembled and hugged his little girl to him tightly, and mother would not let the child play on the dam again all that summer.
She made songs to fit the rhythmic murmur of the wheels. And always she remembered the days she had spent with Daddy Mason in the factory where the machines thumped and creaked, and where the long rubber sheets were cut and sewed, and the clanking rolls of tin and zinc curled into strips, and Daddy Mason made her a little set of dishes and all the things she needed in her playhouse from the sc.r.a.ps of tin and rubber, and she learned to twist the little tin strips on a stick and make the prettiest bright shiny tin curls for her dolls that a little girl ever saw in all the world. And once Ellen came from among the moving shadows of the wheels and drew Jeanette from beneath a great knife that fell at her feet, and when Daddy Mason saw what had happened he fainted, poor man, and made her promise never, never, so long as she lived, to tell Grandma Mason. And then he drove her up town, and they had some ice-cream, and she was sent to bed without her lunch because she would not tell Grandma Mason why grandpa bought ice-cream for her.
It was such a beautiful life, so natural and so exactly what a little girl should have, that even though she went to the ocean and crossed it as a child with her mother and grandmother, and even though she went to the mountains many times, her childish heart always was homesick for the mill, and at night in her dreams her ears were filled with the murmur of waters and the wordless song of ceaseless wheels.
And once when she came back a big girl,--an exceedingly big girl with braids down her back, a girl in the third reader in fact, who could read everything in the fourth reader, because she had already done so, and who could read Eugene Aram in the back of the sixth, only she never did find out what "gyves upon his wrists" meant,--once when she came back to the dam and was sitting there looking at the sunset reflected in the bubbling, froth-flecked water at her feet, Ellen came suddenly, under the noise of the roaring water, and frightened Jeanette so that she screamed and jumped; and Ellen, who was much older than Jeanette--four or five and maybe six years older--ran right over the slippery, moss-covered ridge of the dam, and was gone before Jeanette could call her back. The child never saw her playmate again, though often Jeanette would wonder where Ellen lived and who she was. As the years went by, Jeanette came to remember her playmate as her dream child, and once when she was a young miss of eighteen, and something in her hurt to be said, she tried to make a little poem about her dream-child playmate, but all she ever got was:--
"O eyes, so brown and clear like water sparkling over mossy stones."
So she gave it up and wrote a poem about a prince who carried away a maiden, and then she tore up the prince and the maiden, and if it were not for that line about the eyes in the back of her trigonometry, with a long list of words under it rhyming with "stones," she would have forgotten about her playfellow, and much of the memory of the dam and the pride she took as a child in the great letters upon the high stone walls of the mills, and of the word "Barclay" on the long low walls of the factory, might have pa.s.sed from her consciousness altogether. By such frail links does memory bind us to our past; and yet, once formed, how like steel they hold us! What we will be, grows from what we are, and what we are has grown from what we were. If Jeanette Barclay, the only child of a man who, when she was in her twenties, was to be one of the hundred richest men in his country,--so far as mere money goes,--had been brought up with a governess and a maid, and with frills and furbelows and tucks and Heaven knows what of silly kinks and fluffy stuff in her childish head, instead of being brought up in the Sycamore Ridge public schools, with Grandmother Barclay to teach her the things that a little girl in the fourth reader should know, and with a whole community of honest, hard-working men and women about her to teach her what life really is, indeed she would have lived a different life, and when she was ready to marry--But there we go looking in the back of the book again, and that will not do at all; and besides, a little blue-eyed girl in gingham ap.r.o.ns, sitting on a cool stone with moss on its north side, watching the ba.s.s play among the rocks in a clear, deep, sun-mottled pool under a great elm tree, has a right to the illusions of her childhood and should not be hustled into long dresses and love affairs until her time has come.
But the recollection of those days, so vivid and so sweet, is one of her choicest treasures. Of course things were not as she saw them.
Jake Dolan was only in his forties then, and considered himself a young man. But the child remembers him as a tall, brown-eyed man whom she saw on state occasions in his faded blue army clothes, and to her he has always been the picture of a veteran. Some one must have told her--though she cannot remember who it was--that as Jake Dolan gently descended the social and political scale, he sloughed off his worldly goods, and as he moved about in the court-house from the sheriff"s office to the deputy"s office, and from the deputy"s to the bailiff"s, and from the bailiff"s to the constable"s, and from the constable"s to the janitor"s room in the bas.e.m.e.nt, he carried with him the little bundle that contained all his worldly goods, the thin blue uniform, spotless and trim, and his lieutenant"s commission, and mustering-out papers from the army. It is odd, is it not, that this prosaic old chap, who smoked a clay pipe, and whose only accomplishment was the ability to sing "The Hat me Father Wore," under three drinks, and the "Sword of Bunker Hill," under ten, should have epitomized all that was heroic in this child"s memory. As for General Philemon Ward,--a dear old crank who, when Jeanette was born, was voting with the Republican party for the first time since the war, and who ran twice for President on some strange issue before she was in long dresses,--General Ward, whose children"s ages could be guessed by the disturbers of the public peace, whose names they bore,--Eli Thayer, Mary Livermore, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, Neal Dow, Belva Lockwood, and Helen Gougar,--General Ward, who scorned her father"s offer of ten thousand dollars a year as state counsel for the National Provisions Company, and went out preaching fiat money and a subtreasury for the farmers" crops, trusting to G.o.d and the flower garden about his little white house, to keep the family alive--it is odd that Jeanette"s childish impression was that General Ward was a man of consequence in the world. Perhaps his white necktie, his long black coat, and his keen lean face, or his prematurely gray hair, gave her some sort of a notion of his dignity, but whatever gave her that notion she kept it, and though in her later life there came a pa.s.sing time when she hated him, she did not despise him. And what with the song that she heard the bands playing all over the country, the song that the bands sometimes played for Americans in Europe, very badly, as though it was being translated from English into broken French or Italian, what with Watts McHurdie"s fame and with his verses that appeared in the _Banner_ on formal occasions, the girl built a fancy of him as one of the world"s great poets--some one like Shakespeare or Milton; and she was well into her teens before she realized the truth, that he was an excellent harness maker who often brought out of his quaint little dream world odd-shaped fancies in rhyme,--some grotesque, some ridiculous, and some that seemed pretty for a moment,--and who under the stress of a universal emotion had rhymed one phase of our common nature and set it to a simple tune that moved men deeply without regard to race or station. So she lived in her child world--a world quite different from the real world--a world gilded by the sunrise of consciousness; and because the angels loved her and kept her heart clean, the gilding never quite wore off her heroes. And nothing that Heaven gives us in this world is so blessed as to have the gilding stick to the images of our youth. In Jeanette"s case even Lige Bemis--Judge Bemis, she had been taught to call him--never showed the tar under the gilding to her eyes. Her first memory of him was in her father"s office in the big City. He was a tall man, with gray hair that became him well, with sharp black eyes, and enough flesh on his bones to carry the frock-coats he always wore and give him a corporosity just escaping the portly. She remembers seeing the name "E. W. Bemis" in gold letters on the door of his room, and not being able to figure out how a man whose name began with "E"
or "W" could be called Lige. He was General Counsel of the Corn Belt Railroad in those days, when her father was president of the road, and she knew that he was a man always to be considered. And when, as a woman grown, she learned the truth about Lige Bemis, it was hard to believe, for all she could find against him was his everlasting smile.
It is a curious and withal a beautiful thing to see a child come into the worn and weary world that we grownups have made, and make it over into another world altogether. Perhaps the child"s eye and the child"s heart, fresh from G.o.d, see and feel more clearly and more justly than we do. For this much is sure--Jeanette was right in keeping to the end the image of Colonel Martin Culpepper as a knight-errant, who needed only a bespangled steed, a little less avoirdupois, and a foolish cause to set him battling in the tourney. As it was, in this humdrum world, the colonel could do nothing more heroic than come rattling down Main Street into the child"s heart, sitting with some dignity in his weather-beaten buggy, while instead of shining armour and a glistening helmet he wore nankeen trousers, a linen coat, and a dignified panama hat. Moreover, it is stencilled into her memory indelibly that the colonel was the first man in this wide world to raise his hat to her.
Now it should not be strange that this world was a sad jumble of fiction and of facts to a child"s eyes; for to many an older pair of eyes it has all seemed a puzzle. Even the shrewd, kind brown eyes of Jacob Dolan often failed to see things as they were, and what his eyes did see sometimes bewildered him. By day Dolan saw Robert Hendricks, president of the Exchange National Bank, president and manager of the Sycamore Ridge Light, Heat, and Power Company, proprietor of the Hendricks Mercantile Company, treasurer and first vice-president of the new Western Wholesale Grocery, and chairman of his party"s congressional central committee, and Dolan"s eyes saw a hard, busy man--a young man, it is true; a tall, straight, rather lean, rope-haired young man in his thirties, with frank blue eyes, that turned rather suddenly upon one as if to frighten out a secret. The man seemed real enough to Dolan, from the wide crown of his slightly bald, V-shaped head, to his feet with the hard click in the heels; and yet that man paid no particular attention to Dolan. It was "h.e.l.lo, Jake," with a nod, as they pa.s.sed, maybe only an abstracted stare and a grunt. But at night, as they walked together over the town under the stars or moon, a lonely soul rose out of the tall body and spread over the face.
Dolan kept to his pipe and Hendricks to his cigar. But these were the only marks of caste between them. One night Hendricks led the way across the bridge down the river road and into the fields. They walked far up the stream and their conversation had consisted largely of "Watch out," "All right," "I see," "This is the best way." They loitered down a dark lane shaded by hedgerows until they came to a little wooden bridge and sat down. Dolan looked at the stars, while a pipe and a cigar had burned out before Hendricks spoke, "Well, chatterbox?"
"I was bothered with a question of mistaken ident.i.ty," replied Dolan.
To the silence he answered: "Me myself. I"m the man. Do you happen to know who I am?" Hendricks broke a splinter from the wood under him, and Dolan continued: "Of course you don"t, and neither do I. For example, I go down into Union township before election and visit with the boys. I bring a box of cigars and maybe a nip under the buggy seat, and maybe a few stray five-dollar bills for the lads that drive the wagons that haul the voters to the polls. I go home, and I says to myself: "I have that bailiwick to a man. No votes there against Jake."
But the morning after election I see Jake didn"t get but two votes in the township. Very well. Now who did they vote against? Surely not against the genial obliging rollicking Irish lad whose face I shave every other morning. What could they possibly have against him?
No--they voted against that man Dolan, who got drunk, at the Fair and throwed the gate receipts into the well, and tried to shoo the horses off the track into the crowd at the home-stretch of the trotting race.
He"s the man they plugged. And there"s another one--him that confesses to Father Van Sandt." Dolan shook his head sadly and sighed.
"He"s a black-hearted wretch. If you want to see how a soul will look in its underwear, get an Irishman to confess to a Dutchman." The chirp of crickets arose in the silence, and after a time Dolan concluded, "And now there abideth these three, me that I shave, me that they vote against, and me that the Father knows; and the greatest of these is charity--I dunno."
The soul beside him on the bridge came back from a lilac bower of other years, with a girl"s lips glowing upon his and the beat of a girl"s heart throbbing against his own. The soul was seared with images that must never find spoken words, and it moved the lips to say after exhaling a deep breath from its body, "Well, let"s go home."
There, too, was a question of ident.i.ty. Who was Robert Hendricks? Was he the man chosen to lead his party organization because he was clean above reproach and a man of ideals; was he the man who was trusted with the money of the people of his town and county implicitly; or was he the man who knew that on page 234 of the cash ledger for 1879 in the county treasurer"s office in the Garrison County court-house there was a forgery in his own handwriting to cover nine thousand dollars of his father"s debt? Or was he the man who for seven years had crept into a neighbour"s garden on a certain night in April to smell the lilac blossoms and always had found them gone, and had stood there rigid, with upturned face and clenched fists, cursing a fellow-man? Or was he the man who in the county convention of his party had risen pale with anger, and had walked across the floor and roared his denunciation of Elijah W. Bemis as a boodler and a scoundrel squarely to the man"s gray, smirking face and chattering teeth, and then had reached down, and grabbed the trapped bribe-giver by the scruff of the neck and literally thrown him out of the convention, while the crowd went mad with applause? As he went home that night following the convention, walking by the side of Dolan in silence, he wondered which of all his _aliases_ he really was. At the gate of the Hendricks home the two men stopped. Hendricks smiled quizzically as he asked: "Well, I give it up, Jake. By the way, did you ever meet me?"
The brown eyes of the Irishman beamed an instant through the night, before he hurried lightly down the street.
And so with all of this hide-and-seek of souls, now peering from behind eyes and now far away patting one--two--three upon some distant base, with all these queer goings-on inside of people here in this strange world, it is no wonder that when the angels brought Jeanette to the Barclays, they left her much to learn and many things to study about. So she had to ask questions. But questions often reveal more than answers. At least once they revealed much, when she sat on the veranda of the Barclay home a fine spring evening with all the company there. Aunt Molly was there; and Uncle Bob Hendricks was there, the special guest of Grandma Barclay. Uncle Adrian was away on a trip somewhere; but Uncle Colonel and Grandma Culpepper and all the others were there listening to father"s new German music-box, and no one should blame a little girl, sitting shyly on the stone steps, trying to make something out of the absurd world around her, if she piped out when the talk stopped:--
"Mother, why does Aunt Molly cut off her lilac buds before they bloom?"
And when her mother a.s.sured her that Aunt Molly did nothing of the kind, and when Uncle Bob Hendricks looked up and saw Aunt Molly go pale under her powder, and when Aunt Molly said, "Why, Jane--the child must have dreamed that," no one in this wide world must blame a little girl for opening her eyes as wide as she could, and lifting her little voice as strongly as she could, and saying: "Why, Aunt Molly, you know I saw you last night--when I stayed with you. You know I did, "cause I looked out of the window and spokened to you. You know I did--don"t you remember?" And no one must blame the mother for shaking her finger at Jeanette, and no one must blame Jeanette for sitting there shaking a protesting head, and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her little face, trying to make the puzzle out.
And when, later in the evening, Daddy Barclay went over to the mill with his work, and Uncle Bob left in the twilight, and Aunt Molly and mother were alone in mother"s room, how should a little girl know what the crying was all about, and how should a little girl understand when a small woman, looking in a mirror, and dabbing her face with a powder rag, said to mother, who knows everything in the world, and all about the angels that brought you here: "Oh, Jane, Jane, you don"t know--you don"t understand. There are things that I couldn"t make you understand--and I mustn"t even think of them."
Surely it is a curious world for little girls--a pa.s.sing curious world, when there are things in it that even mothers cannot understand.
So Jeanette turned her face to the wall and went to sleep, leaving Aunt Molly powdering her nose and asking mother, "Does it look all right now--" and adding, "Oh, I"m such a fool." In so illogical a world, the reader must not be allowed to think that Molly Brownwell lamented the folly of mourning for a handsome young gentleman in blue serge with white spats on his shoes and a Byronic collar and a fluffy necktie of the period. Far be it from her to lament that sentiment as folly; however, when she looked at her eyes in the mirror and saw her nose, she felt that tears were expensive and reproached herself for them. But so long as these souls of ours, whatever they may be, are caged in our bodies, our poor bodies will have to bear witness to their prisoners. If the soul smiles the body shines, and if the soul frets the body withers. And Molly Brownwell saw in the looking-gla.s.s that night more surely than ever before that her face was beginning to slump. Her cheeks were no longer firm, and at her eyes were the stains of tears that would not wipe off, but crinkled the skin at the temples and deepened the shadows into wide salmon-coloured lines that fell away from each side of the nose so that no trick could hide them.
Moreover, the bright eyes that used to flash into Bob Hendricks"
steady blue eyes had grown tired, and women who did not know, wondered why such a pretty girl had broken so.
The Culpeppers had remained with the Barclays for dinner, and the hour was late for the Ridge--after nine o"clock, and as the departing guests went down the long curved walk of Barclay pride to the Barclay gate, they saw a late April moon rising over the trees by the mill.
They clanged the tall iron gate behind them, and stood a moment watching the moon. For the colonel never grew too old to notice it. He put his arms about his wife and his daughter tenderly, and said before they started up the street, "It never grows old--does it?" And he pressed his wife to him gently and repeated, "Does it, my dear--it"s the same old moon; the one we used to have in Virginia before the war, isn"t it?"
His wife smiled at him placidly and said, "Now, pa--"
Whereupon the colonel squeezed his daughter l.u.s.tily, and exclaimed, "Well, Molly still loves me, anyway. Don"t you, Molly?" And the younger woman patted his cheek, and then they started for home.
"Papa, how much money has John?" asked the daughter, as they walked along.
A man always likes to be regarded as an authority in financial matters, and the colonel stroked his goatee wisely before replying: "U-h-m-m, let me see--I don"t exactly know. Bob and I were talking about it the other day--after I bought John"s share in College Heights--last year, to be exact. Of course he"s got the mill and it"s all paid for--say a hundred thousand dollars--and that old wheat land he got back in the seventies--he"s cleaned all of that up. I should say that and the mill were easily worth half a million, and they"re both clear. That"s all in sight." The colonel ruminated a moment and then continued: "About the rest--it"s a guess. Some say a million, some say ten. All I know in point of fact, my dear, to get right down to bed-rock, is that Lycurgus says they are turning out two or three car-loads of the strips a year. I wouldn"t believe Lycurgus on a stack of Bibles as high as his head, but little Thayer Ward, who works down there in the shipping department, told the general the same thing, and Bob says he knows John gets ten dollars apiece for them now, so that"s a million dollars a year income he"s got. He handles grain and flour way up in Minnesota, and back as far as Ohio, and west to California. But what he actually owns,--that is, whether he rents the mills or, to be exact, steals them,--I haven"t any idea--not the slightest notion in the world, in point of fact--not the slightest notion."