Part 5 (1/2)

It was a poor starved-to-death school that the boys found at Lawrence in those days; with half a dozen instructors--most of whom were still in their twenties; with books lent by the instructors, and with appliances devised by necessity. But John was happy; he was making money with his horses, doing ch.o.r.es for his board, and carrying papers night and morning besides. The boy's industry was the marvel of the town. His limp got him sympathy, and he capitalized the sympathy.

Indeed, he would have capitalized his soul, if it had been necessary.

For his Yankee blood was beginning to come out. Before he had been in school a year he had swapped, traded, and saved until he had two teams, and was working them with hired drivers on excavation contracts. In his summer vacations he went to Topeka and worked his two teams, and by some sharp practice got the t.i.tle to a third. He was rollicking, noisy, good-natured, but under the boyish veneer was a hard indomitable nature. He was becoming a stickler for his rights in every transaction.

”John,” said Bob, one day after John had cut a particularly lamentable figure, gouging a driver in a settlement, ”don't you know that your rights are often others' wrongs?”

John was silent a moment. He looked at the driver moving away, and then the boy's face set hard and he said: ”Well--what's the use of blubbering over him? If I don't get it, some one else will. I'm no charitable inst.i.tution for John Walruff's brewery!” And he snapped the rubber band on his wallet viciously, and turned to his books.

But on the other hand he wrote every other day to his mother and every other day to Ellen Culpepper with unwavering precision. He told his mother the news, and he told Ellen Culpepper the news plus some Emerson, something more of ”Faust,” with such dashes of Longfellow and Ruskin as seemed to express his soul. He never wrote to Ellen of money, and so strong was her influence upon him that when he had written to her after his quarrel with the driver, he went out in the night, hunted the man up, and paid him the disputed wages. Then he mailed Ellen Culpepper's letter, and was a lover living in an ethereal world as he walked home babbling her name in whispers to the stars.

Often when this mood was not upon him, and a letter was due to Ellen, he went downstairs in the house where he lived and played the piano to bring her near to him. That never failed to change his face as by a miracle. ”When John comes upstairs,” wrote Bob Hendricks to Molly, ”he is as one in a dream, with the mists of the music in his eyes. I never bother him then. He will not speak to me, nor do a thing in the world, until that letter is written, sealed, and stamped. Then he gets up, yawns and smiles sheepishly and perhaps. .h.i.ts me with a book or punches me with his fist, and then we wrestle over the room and the bed like bear cubs. After the wrestle he comes back to himself. I wonder why?”

And Ellen Culpepper read those letters from John Barclay over and over, and curiously enough she understood them; for there is a telepathy between spirits that meet as these two children's souls had met, and in that concord words drop out and only thoughts are merchandized. Her spirit grew with his, and so ”through all the world she followed him.”

But there came a gray dawn of a May morning when John Barclay clutched his bedfellow and whispered, ”Bob, Bob--look, look.” When the awakened one saw nothing, John tried to scream, but could only gasp, ”Don't you see Ellen--there--there by the table?” But whatever it was that startled him fluttered away on a beam of sunrise, and Bob Hendricks rose with the frightened boy, and went to his work with him.

Two days later a letter came telling him that Ellen Culpepper was dead.

Now death--the vast baffling mystery of death--is Fate's strongest lever to pry men from their philosophy. And death came into this boy's life before his creed was set and hard, and in those first days while he walked far afield, he turned his face to the sky in his lonely sorrow, and when he cried to Heaven there was a silence.

So his heart curdled, and you kind gentlemen of the jury who are to pa.s.s on the case of John Barclay in this story, remember that he was only twenty years old, and that in all his life there was nothing to symbolize the joy of sacrifice except this young girl. All his boyish life she had nurtured the other self in his soul,--the self that might have learned to give and be glad in the giving. And when she went, he closed his Emerson and opened his Trigonometry, and put money in his purse.[1]

There came a time when Ellen Culpepper was to him as a dream. But she lived in her mother's eyes, and through all the years that followed the mother watched the little girl grow to maturity and into middle life with the other girls of her age. And even when the little headstone on the Hill slanted in sad neglect, Mrs. Culpepper's old eyes still saw Ellen growing old with her playmates. And she never saw John Barclay that she did not think of Ellen--and and what she would have made of him.

And what would she have made of him? Maybe a poet, maybe a dreamer of dreams--surely not the hard, grinding, rich man that he became in this world.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] To the Publisher.--”In returning the Mss. of the life of John Barclay, which you sent for my verification as to certain dates and incidents, let me first set down, before discussing matters pertaining to his later life, my belief that your author has found in the death of Ellen Culpepper an incident, humble though it is, that explains much in the character of Mr. Barclay. The incident probably produced a mental shock like that of a psychological earthquake, literally sealing up the spring of his life as it was flowing into consciousness at that time, and the John Barclay of his boyhood and youth became subterranean, to appear later in life after the weakening of his virility under the strain of the crus.h.i.+ng events of his fifties. Yet the subterranean Barclay often appeared for a moment in his life, glowed in some kind act and sank again. Ellen Culpepper explains it all. How many of our lives are similarly divided, forced upward or downward by events, Heaven only knows. We do not know our own souls. I am sure John never knew of the transformation. Surely 'we are fearfully and wonderfully made.'... The other dates and incidents are as I have indicated.... Allow me to thank you for your kindness in sending me the Mss., and permit me to subscribe myself,

”Yours faithfully,

”Philemon R. Ward.”

CHAPTER VI

John Barclay returned to Sycamore Ridge in 1872 a full-fledged young man. He was of a slight build and rather pale of face, for five years indoors had rubbed the sunburn off. During the five years he had been absent from Sycamore Ridge he had acquired a master's degree from the state university, and a license to practise law. He was distinctly dapper, in the black and white checked trousers, the flowered cravat, and tight-fitting coat of the period; and the first Monday after he and his mother went to the Congregational Church, whereat John let out his baritone voice, he was invited to sing in the choir. Bob Hendricks came home a year before John, and with Bob and Watts McHurdie singing tenor at one end of the choir, and John and Philemon Ward holding down the other end of the line, with Mrs. Ward, Nellie Logan, Molly Culpepper, and Jane Mason of Minneola,--grown up out of short dresses in his absence,--all in gay colours between the sombre clothes of the men, the choir in the Congregational Church was worth going miles to see--if not to hear.

Now you know, of course,--or if you do not know, it is high time you were learning,--that when Fate gives a man who can sing a head of curly hair, the devil, who is after us all, quits worrying about that young person. For the Old Boy knows that a voice and curly hair are mortgages on a young man's soul that few young fellows ever pay off.

Now there was neither curly head nor music in all the Barclay tribe, and when John sang ”Through the trees the night winds murmur, murmur low and sweet,” his mother could shut her eyes and hear Uncle Leander, the black sheep of three generations of Thatchers. So that the fact that John had something over a thousand dollars to put in General Hendricks' bank, and owned half a dozen town lots in the various additions to the town, made the mother thankful for the Grandfather Barclay's blood in him. But she saw a soul growing into the boy's face that frightened her. What others admired as strength she feared, for she knew it was ruthlessness. What others called shrewdness she, remembering his Grandfather Barclay, knew might grow into blind, cruel greed, and when she thought of his voice and his curly hair, and recalled Uncle Leander, the curly-headed, singing ne'er-do-well of her family, and then in the boy's hardening mouth and his canine jaw saw Grandfather Barclay sneering at her, she was uncertain which blood she feared most. So she managed it that John should go into partners.h.i.+p with General Ward, and Bob Hendricks managed it that the firm should have offices over the bank, and also that the firm was made attorneys for the bank,--the highest mark of distinction that may come to a law firm in a country town. The general realized it and was proud. But he thought the young man took it too much as a matter of course.

”John,” said the general, one day, as they were dividing their first five-hundred-dollar fee, ”you're a lucky dog. Everything comes so easily with you. Let me tell you something; I've figured this out: if you don't give it back some way--give it back to the world, or society, or your fellows,--or G.o.d, if you like to bunch your good luck under one head,--you're surely going to suffer for it. There is no come-easy-go-easy in this world. I've learned that much of the scheme of things.”

”You mean that I've got to pay as I go, or Providence will keep books on me and foreclose?” asked John, as he stood patting the roll of bills in his trousers pocket.

”That's the idea, son,” smiled the elder man.

The younger man put his hand to his chin and grinned. ”I suppose,” he replied, ”that's why so many men keep the t.i.tle to their religious proclivities in their wife's name.” He went out gayly, and the elder man heard the boyish limp almost tripping down the stairs. Ward walked to the window, straightening his white tie, and stood looking into the street at the young man shaking hands and bowing and raising his hat as he went. Ward's hair was graying at the temples, and his thin smooth face was that of a man who spends many hours considering many things, and he sighed as he saw John turn a corner and disappear.

”No, Lucy, that's not it exactly,” said the general that afternoon, as he brought the sprinkler full of water to the flower bed for the eighth time, and picketed little Harriet Beecher Ward out of the watermelon patch, and wheeled the baby's buggy to the four-o'clocks, where Mrs. Ward was working. ”It isn't that he is conceited--the boy isn't that at all. He just seems to have too little faith in G.o.d and too much in the ability of John Barclay. He thinks he can beat the game--can take out more happiness for himself than he puts in for others.”