Part 9 (2/2)
It may be well to pause here and present so punctilious a gentleman as Adrian Pericles Brownwell to the reader somewhat more formally than he has been introduced. For he will appear in this story many times. In the first place he wore mustaches--chestnut-coloured mustaches--that drooped rather gracefully from his lip to his jaw, and thence over his coat lapels; in the second place he always wore gloves, and never was without a flower in his long frock-coat; and thirdly he clicked his cane on the sidewalk so regularly that his approach was heralded, and the company was prepared for the coming of a serious, rather nervous, fiery man, a stickler for his social dues; and finally in those days, those sombre days of Sycamore Ridge after the panic of '73, when men had to go to the post-office to get their ten-dollar bills changed, Brownwell had the money to support the character he a.s.sumed. He had come to the Ridge from the South,--from that part of the South that carried its pistol in its hip pocket and made a large and serious matter of its honour,--that was obvious; he had paid Ezra Lane two thousand dollars for the _Banner_, that was a matter of record; and he had marched with some grandeur into General Hendricks' bank one Sat.u.r.day and had clinked out five thousand dollars in gold on the marble slab at the teller's window, and that was a matter attested to by a crowd of witnesses. Watts McHurdie used to say that more people saw that deposit than could be packed into the front room of the bank with a collar stuffer.
But why Adrian Brownwell had come to the Ridge, and where he had made his money--there myth and fable enter into the composition of the narrative, and one man's opinion is as good as another's. Curiously enough, all who testify claim that they speak by the authority of Mr.
Brownwell himself. But he was a versatile and obliging gentleman withal, so it is not unlikely that all those who a.s.sembled him from the uttermost parts of the earth into Sycamore Ridge for all the reasons in the longer catechism, were telling the simple truth as they have reason to believe it. What men know of a certainty is that he came, that he hired the bridal chamber of the Thayer House for a year, and that he contested John Barclay's right to be known as the gla.s.s of fas.h.i.+on and the mould of form in Garrison County for thirty long years, and then--but that is looking in the back of the book, which is manifestly unfair.
It is enough to know now that on that Sunday evening after Memorial Day, in 1874, Adrian P. Brownwell sat on the veranda of the Culpepper home slapping his lavender gloves on his knee by way of emphasis, and told the company what he told General Beauregard and what General Beauregard told him, at the battle of s.h.i.+loh; also what his maternal grandfather, Governor Papin, had said to General Jackson, when his grandmother, then Mademoiselle Dulangpre, youngest daughter of the refugee duke of that house, had volunteered to nurse the American soldiers in Jackson's hospital after the battle of New Orleans; also, and with detail, what his father, Congressman Brownwell, had said on the capitol steps in December, 1860, before leaving for Was.h.i.+ngton to resign his seat in Congress; and also with much greater detail he recounted the size of his ancestral domain, the number of the ancestral slaves and the royal state of the ancestral household, and then with a grand wave of his gloves, and a shrug of which Madam Papin might well have been proud, ”But 'tis all over; and we are brothers--one country, one flag, one G.o.d, one very kind but very busy G.o.d!” And he smiled so graciously through his great mustaches, showing his fine even teeth, that Mrs. Culpepper, Methodist to the heart, smiled back and was not so badly shocked as she knew she should have been.
”Is it not so?” he asked with his voice and his hands at once. ”Ah,”
he exclaimed, addressing Mrs. Culpepper dramatically, ”what better proof would you have of our brotherhood than our common bondage to you? However dark the night of our national discord--to-day, North, South, East, West, we bask in the sunrise of some woman's eyes.” He fluttered his gloves gayly toward Molly and continued:--
”'O when did morning ever break, And find such beaming eyes awake.'”
And so he rattled on, and the colonel had to poke his words into the conversation in wedge-shaped queries, and Mrs. Culpepper, being in due and proper awe of so much family and such apparent consequence, spoke little and smiled many times. And if it was ”Miss Molly” this and ”Miss Molly” that, when the colonel went into the house to lock the back doors, and ”Miss Molly” the other when Mrs. Culpepper went in to open the west bedroom windows; and even if it was ”Miss Molly, shall we go down town and refresh ourselves with a dish of ice-cream?” and even if still further a full-grown man standing at the gate under the May moon deftly nips a rose from Miss Molly's hair and holds the rose in both hands to his lips as he bows a good night--what then? What were roses made for and brown eyes and long lashes and moons and May winds heavy with the odour of flowers and laden with the faint sounds of distant herd bells tinkling upon the hills? For men are bold at thirty-five, and maidens, the best and sweetest, truest, gentlest maidens in all the world, are shy at twenty-one, and polite to their elders and betters of thirty-five--even when those elders and betters forget their years!
As for Adrian P. Brownwell, he went about his daily task, editing the _Banner_, making it as luscious and effulgent as a seed catalogue, with rhetorical pictures about as florid and unconvincing. To him the town was a veritable Troy--full of heroes and demiG.o.ds, and honourables and persons of n.o.bility and quality. He used no adjective of praise milder than superb, and on the other hand, Lige Bemis once complained that the least offensive epithet he saw in the _Banner_ tacked after his name for two years was miscreant. As for John Barclay, he once told General Ward that a man could take five dollars in to Brownwell and come out a statesman, a Croesus or a scholar, as the exigencies of the case demanded, and for ten dollars he could combine the three.
Yet for all that Brownwell ever remained a man apart. No one thought of calling him ”Ade.” Sooner would one nickname a gargoyle on a tin cornice. So the editor of the _Banner_ never came close to the real heart of Sycamore Ridge, and often for months at a time he did not know what the people were thinking. And that summer when General Hendricks was walking out of the bank every hour and looking from under his thin, blue-veined hand at the strange cloud of insects covering the sky, and when Martin Culpepper was predicting that the plague of gra.s.shoppers would leave the next day, and when John Barclay was getting that deep vertical crease between his eyes that made him look forty while he was still in his twenties, Adrian P. Brownwell was chirping cheerfully in the _Banner_ about the ”salubrious climate of Garrison County,” and writing articles about ”our phenomenal prospects for a b.u.mper crop.” And when in the middle of July the gra.s.shoppers had eaten the wheat to the ground and had left the corn stalks stripped like beanpoles, and had devoured every green thing in their path, the _Banner_ contained only a five-line item referring to the plague and calling it a ”most curious and unusual visitation.” But that summer the _Banner_ was filled with Brownwell's editorials on ”The Tonic Effect of the Prairie Ozone,” ”Turn the Rascals Out,” ”Our Duty to the South,” and ”The Kingdom of Corn.” As a writer Brownwell was what is called ”fluent” and ”genial.” And he was fond of copying articles from the Topeka and Kansas City papers about himself, in which he was referred to as ”the gallant and urbane editor of the _Banner_.”
But then we all have our weaknesses, and be it said to the everlasting credit of Adrian Brownwell that he understood and appreciated Watts McHurdie and Colonel Culpepper better than any other man in town, and that he printed Watts' poems on all occasions, and never referred to him as anything less than ”our honoured townsman,” or as ”our talented and distinguished fellow-citizen,” and he never laughed at General Ward. But the best he could do for John Barclay--even after John had become one of the world's great captains--was to wave his gloves resignedly and exclaim, ”Industry, thy name is Barclay.” And Barclay in return seemed never to warm up to Brownwell. ”Colonel,” replied John to some encomium of his old friend's upon the new editor, ”I'll say this much. Certainly your friend is a prosperous talker!”
CHAPTER XI
The twenty-fifth of July, 1874, is a memorable day in the life of John Barclay. For on that day the gra.s.shoppers which had eaten off the twenty thousand acres of wheat in the fields of the Golden Belt Wheat Company, as though it had been cropped, rose and left the Missouri Valley. They will never come back, for they are ploughed under in the larva every year by the Colorado farmers who have invaded the plains where once the ”hoppers” had their nursery; but all this, even if he had known it, would not have cheered up John that day. For he knew that he owed one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Eastern stockholders of the company, and he had not a dollar to show for it.
He had expected to borrow the money needed for the harvesting in the fall, and over and over and over again he had figured with paper and pencil the amount of his debt, and again and again he had tried to find some way to pay even the interest on the debt at six per cent, which the bank had guaranteed. While the locusts were devouring the vegetation, he walked the hemp carpet that ran diagonally across his office, and chased phantom after phantom of hope that lured him up to the rim of a solution of the problem, only to push him back into the abyss. He walked with his hands deep in his trousers pockets and his head down, and as General Ward was out organizing the farmers in a revolt against the dominant party in the state, Barclay was alone most of the time. The picture of that barren office, with its insurance chromos, with its white, cobweb-marked walls, with its dirty floor partly covered with an ”X” of red-bordered hemp carpet reaching from the middle to the four corners, the picture of the four tall unwashed windows letting in the merciless afternoon sun to fade the grimy black and white lithograph of William Lloyd Garrison above the general's desk, never left John Barclay's memory. It was like a cell on a prisoner's mind.
As he paced the room that last day of the visit of the gra.s.shoppers, General Hendricks came in. His hair had whitened in the summer. The panic and the plague of the locusts had literally wrung the sap out of his nerves. Old age was pressing inexorably upon him, palsying his hands on its rack, tripping his feet in its helpless mazes. His dimmed eyes could see only ruin coming, coming slowly and steadily toward him. In the panic, it came suddenly and inspired fight in him. But this year there was something diabolical in its resistless approach.
So he shrank from his impending fate as a child trembles at some unknown terror. But Barclay did not swerve. He knew the affairs of the bank fairly well. He was a director who never signed the quarterly statement without verifying every item for himself. He had dreaded the general's visit, yet he knew that it must come, and he pulled toward the general a big hickory chair. The old man sank into it and looked helplessly into the drawn hard face of the younger man and sighed, ”Well, John?”
Barclay stood before him a second and then walked down one arm of the ”X” of the carpet and back, and up another, and then turned to Hendricks with: ”Now, don't lose your nerve, General. You've got to keep your nerve. That's about all the a.s.set we've got now, I guess.”
The general replied weakly: ”I--I, I--I guess you're right, John. I suppose that's about it.”
”How do you figure it out, General?” asked Barclay, still walking the carpet.
The general fumbled for a paper in his pocket and handed it to Barclay. He took it, glanced at it a moment, and then said: ”I'm no good at translating another man's figures--how is it in short?--Right down to bed-rock?”
Hendricks seemed to pull himself together and replied: ”Well, something like ten thousand in cash against seventy thousand in deposits, and fifty thousand of that time deposits, due next October, you know, on the year's agreement. Of the ten thousand cash, four thousand belongs to Brownwell, and is on check, and you have two thousand on check.”
”All right. Now, General, what do you owe?”
”Well, you know that guarantee of your and Bob's business--that nine thousand. It's due next week.”
”And it will gut you?” asked Barclay.
The old man nodded and sighed. Barclay limped carefully all over his ”X,” swinging himself on his heels at the turns; his mouth was hardening, and his eyes were fixed on the old man without blinking as he said: ”General--that's got to come. If it busts you--it will save us, and we can save you after. That has just absolutely got to be paid, right on the dot.”
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