Part 15 (2/2)
that he wrote a poem for the _Banner_ about the return of the ”Prodigal Daughter,” which may be found in Garrison County sc.r.a.p-books of that period. As for Mr. Bemis, he went slinking about the outskirts of the crowd, showing his teeth considerably, and making it obvious that he was there.
So as John Barclay rode his ”Evening Star” to glory, in the next room General Ward turned to the colonel, who stood puffing in the doorway of the general's law-office. ”Martin, did John Barclay make you invite that woman to your house--that Bemis woman?”
The colonel got his breath slowly after climbing the stair, and he did not reply at once. But he smiled, and stood with his arms akimbo a few seconds before he spoke. ”Well now, General--since you ask it, I may as well confess it pointedly--I am ashamed to say he did!”
Ward motioned the colonel to a seat and asked impatiently, ”Ashamed?”
”Well,” responded Culpepper, as he put his feet in the window ledge, ”she's as good as I am--if you come down to that! Why shouldn't I, who pretend to be a gentleman,--a Virginia gentleman, I may say, sir,--why shouldn't I be ashamed, disgraced, sir, disgraced in point of fact, that I had to be forced to invite any person in all G.o.d's beautiful world to my home?”
Ward looked at the colonel coldly a moment and then blurted out: ”Ah, shucks, sir--stuff and nonsense! You know what she was before the war--Happy Hally! My gracious, Martin, how could you?”
Martin Culpepper brought his chair down with a bang and turned squarely to Ward. ”General, the war's over now. I knew Happy Hally--and I knew the Red Legs she trained with. And we're making senators and governors and state officers and indeed, I may say, prominent citizens out of them. Why not give Hally her show? You d.a.m.n cold-nosed Yankee Brahmins--you have Faith and you have Hope, but you have no more Charity than a sausage-grinder.” The colonel rose, and cried with some asperity, ”General, if you'd preach about the poor less, and pray with 'em more, you'd know more about your fellow-men, sir!”
Perhaps this conversation should not have been set down here; for it has no direct relation to the movement of this narrative. The narrative at this point should be hurrying along to tell how John Barclay and Bob Hendricks cleared up a small fortune on their wheat deal, and how that autumn Barclay bought the mill at Sycamore Ridge by squeezing its owner out, and then set about to establish four branches of the Golden Belt Wheat Company's elevator service along the line of the new railroad, and how he controlled the wheat output of three counties the next year through his enterprise. These facts carry John Barclay forward toward his life's goal. And while these two middle-aged gentlemen--the general and the colonel--were in the next room wrangling over the youthful love affairs of a middle-aged lady, a great dream was shaping in Barclay's head, and he did not heed them.
He was dreaming of controlling the wheat market of the Golden Belt Railroad, through railroad-rate privileges, and his fancy was feeling its way into flour, and comprehending what might be done with wheat products.
It was a crude dream, but he was aflame with it, and yet--John Barclay, aged twenty-five, was a young man with curly hair and flattered himself that he could sing. And there was always in him that side of his nature, so the reader must know that when Nellie Logan came to his office that bright summer morning and found him wrapped in his day-dream of power, she addressed herself not to the Thane of Wheat who should be King hereafter, but to the baritone singer in the Congregational choir, and the wheat king scampered back to the dream world when John replied to Nellie's question.
”So it's _your_ wedding, is it, Nellie--your wedding,” he repeated.
”Well, where does Watts come in?” And then, before she answered, he went on, ”You bet I'll sing at your wedding, and what's more, I'll bring along my limping Congregational foot, and I'll dance at your wedding.”
”Well, I just knew you would,” said the young woman.
”So old Watts thought I wouldn't, did he?” asked Barclay. ”The old skeezicks--Well, well! Nellie, you tell him that the fellow who was with Watts when he was shot ten miles from Springfield isn't going to desert him when he gets a mortal wound in the heart.” Then Barclay added: ”You get the music and take it down to Jane, and tell her to teach me, and I'll be there. Jane says you're going to put old Watts through all the gaits.”
He leaned back in his swivel chair and smiled at his visitor. He had a slow drawl that he used in teasing, and one who heard that voice and afterward heard the harsh bark of the man in driving a bargain or browbeating an adversary would have to look twice to realize that the same man was talking. A little over an hour before in that very room he had looked at Bob Hendricks from under wrinkled brows with the vertical line creased between his eyes and snarled, ”Well, then, if you think she's going to marry that fellow because I got him to lend the colonel some money, why don't you go and lend the colonel some more money and get her back?”
But there was not a muscle twitching in his face as he talked to Nellie Logan, not a break in his voice, not a ruffle of a hair, to tell her that John Barclay had broken with the friend of his boyhood and the partner of his youth, and that he had closed and bolted the Door of Hope on Molly Culpepper. He drawled on: ”Jane was saying that you were going to have Bob and Molly for best man and bridesmaid.
Ought you to do that? You know they--”
He did not finish the sentence, but she replied: ”Oh, yes, I know about that. I told Watts he ought to have Mr. Brownwell; but he's as stubborn as a mule about just that one thing. Everything else--the flower girls and the procession and the ring service and all--he's so nice about. And you know I just had to have Molly.”
John slapped the arms of his chair and laughed. ”As old Daddy Mason says, 'Now hain't that just like a woman!' Well, Nellie, it's your wedding, and a woman is generally not married more than once, so it's all right. Go it while you're young.”
And so he teased her out of the room, and when Sycamore Ridge packed itself into the Congregational Church one June night, to witness the most gorgeous church wedding the town ever had seen, John opened the ceremonies by singing the ”Voice that breathed o'er Eden” most effectively, and Sycamore Ridge in its best clothes, rather stuffed and uncomfortable thereby, was in that unnatural att.i.tude toward the world where it thought John Barclay's voice, a throaty baritone, with much affectation in the middle register, a tendency to flat in the upper register, and thick fuzz below ”C,” was beautiful, though John often remembered that night with unalloyed shame. He saw himself as he stood there, primped to kill, like a prize bull at a fair, bellowing out a mawkish sentiment in a stilted voice, and he wondered how the Ridge ever managed to endure him afterwards.
But this is a charitable world, and his temperament was such that he did not realize that no one paid much attention to him, after the real ceremony started. When the bride and the bridesmaid came down the aisle, Nellie Logan radiant in the gown which every woman in the church knew had come from Chicago and had been bought of the drummer at wholesale cost, saving the bride over fifteen dollars on the regular price--what did the guests care for a dapper little man singing a hymn tune through his nose, even if he was the richest young man in town? And when Molly Culpepper--dear little Molly Culpepper--came after the bride, blus.h.i.+ng through her powder, and looking straight at the floor for fear her eyes would wander after her heart and wondering if the people knew--it was of no consequence that John Barclay's voice frazzled on ”F”; for if the town wished to notice a man at that wedding, there was Watts McHurdie in a paper collar, with a white embroidered bow tie and the first starched s.h.i.+rt the town had ever seen him wear, badly out of step with the procession, while the best man dragged him like an unwilling victim to the altar; and of course there was the best man,--and a handsome best man as men go,--fair-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed, with a good glow on his immobile face and rather sad eyes that, being in a man's head, went boldly where they chose and where all the women in the town could see them go. So there were other things to remember that night besides John Barclay's singing and the festive figure he cut at that wedding: there was the wedding supper at the Wards', and the wedding reception at the Culpeppers', and after it all the dance in Culpepper Hall. And all the town remembers these things, but only two people remember a moment after the reception when every one was hurrying away to the dance and when the bridesmaid--such a sweet, pretty little bridesmaid--was standing alone in a deserted room with a tall groomsman--just for a moment--just for a moment before Adrian Brownwell came up bustling and bristling, but long enough to say, ”Bob--did you take my gloves there in the carriage as we were coming home from the church?” and long enough for him to answer, ”Why, did you lose them?” and then to get a good square look into her eyes. It was only a few seconds in the long evening--less than a second that their eyes met; but it was enough to be remembered forever; though why--you say! It was all so commonplace; there was nothing in it that you would have thought worth remembering for a moment. ”Bob, did you take my gloves?” ”Why, did you lose them?” and then a glance of the eyes. Surely there are more romantic words than these. But when a man and a woman go in for collecting antiques in their dialogues, Heaven only knows what old rubbish you will find in their attics, scoured off and rebuilt and polished with secret tears until the old stuff glows like embers.
And that is why, when the music was silent in Culpepper Hall, and the tall young man walked slowly home alone, as he clicked his own gate behind him, he brought from his pocket two little white gloves,--just two ordinary white gloves,--and held them to his lips and lifted his arms in despair once and let them drop as he stood before his doorstep. And that is why a girl, a little girl with the weariest face in the town, looked out of her bedroom window that night and whispered over and over to herself the name she dared not speak. And all this was going on while the town was turning over in its bed, listening to the most tumultuous charivari that Sycamore Ridge has ever known.
Night after night that summer faithful Jake Dolan walked the streets of Sycamore Ridge with Bob Hendricks. By day they lived apart, but at night the young man often would look up the elder, and they would walk and walk together, but never once did Hendricks mention Molly's name nor refer to her in any way; yet Jake Dolan knew why they walked abroad. How did he know? How do we know so many things in this world that are neither seen nor heard? And the Irish--they have the drop of blood that defies mathematics; the Irish are the only people in the world whom kind Providence permits to add two and two together to make six. ”You say 'tis four,” said Dolan, one night, as he and Hendricks stood on the bridge listening to the roar from the dam. ”I say 'tis six. There is this and there is that and you say they make the other.
Not at all; they make something else entirely different. You take your two and your two and make your four and try your four on the world, and it works--yes, it works up to a point; but there is something left over, something unexplained; you don't know what. I do. It's the other two. Therefore I say to you, Mr. Robert Hendricks, that two and two make six, because G.o.d loves the Irish, and for no other reason on earth.”
So much for the dreams of Molly, the memories of Bob, and the vagaries of Mr. Dolan. They were as light as air. But in John Barclay's life a vision was rising--a vision that was real, palpable, and vital; a vision of wealth and power,--and as the days and the months pa.s.sed, the shadow of that vision grew big and black and real in a score of lives.
CHAPTER XV
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