Part 22 (2/2)
He knew she did not care for his wealth, and there were many things about his achievements that he felt she might misunderstand; her att.i.tude often puzzled him. So he sat a moment on her chair arm, and said, ”Well, mother, I have done my best.” It was a question more than a protest.
”Yes, dear,” she replied, ”I know you have--you have done your best--your very best. But I think it is in your blood.”
”What?” he asked.
”Oh, all this,” she answered; ”all this money-getting. I am foolish, John, but some way, I want my little boy back--the one who used to sit with me so long ago, and play on the guitar and sing 'Sleeping, I Dream, Love.' I don't like your new music, John; it's so like clanging cars, and cras.h.i.+ng hammers, and the groans of men at toil.”
”But this is a new world, mother--a new world that is different,”
protested the son, impatiently.
And the mother answered sadly as she looked up at him: ”I know, dear--it is a new world; but the same old G.o.d moves it; and the same faith in G.o.d and love of man move men that always have moved them, and always will move them; there are as many things to live and die for now, as when your father gave up his life, John--just as many.” They rocked together in silence--the boy of forty and the mother of sixty.
Finally she said, ”Johnnie, play me 'Ever of Thee I'm fondly Thinking,' won't you, before you go?”
He sat with his foot on the soft pedal and played the old love song, and as he played his mother wandered over hills he had never seen, through fields he had never known, and heard a voice in the song he might never hear, even in his dreams. When he finished, she stood beside him and cried with all the pa.s.sion her years could summon: ”Oh, John--John--it will come out some way--some day. It's in your soul, and G.o.d in His own way will bring it out.” He did not understand her then, and it was many years before he prayed her prayer.
The next day he went to the City and plunged into his work, and the Ridge and its people and the prayers of his mother became to him only as a dream that comes in the night and fades in the day. Even the shabby figure of Colonel Martin Culpepper, with his market basket on his arm, waving a good-by as the Barclay private car pulled out of the Sycamore Ridge depot, disappeared from his mind, though that pathetic image haunted him for nearly a hundred miles as he rode, and he could not shake it off until he immersed himself in the roar of the great City. He could not know that he had any remote relation with the worry in the old man's eyes. Nor did Martin Culpepper try to s.h.i.+ft his load to John. He knew where the blame was, and he tried to take it like a man. But in reckoning the colonel's account, may not something be charged off to the account of John Barclay, who to save himself and accomplish the Larger Good--which meant the establishment of his own fortunes--sent Adrian Brownwell in those days in the seventies with the money to the colonel, not so much to help the colonel as to save John Barclay? The Larger Good is a slow, vicious, acc.u.mulative poison, and heaven only knows when it will come out and kill.
It was a week after the pipe-organ recital at the church, when Mary Barclay, doing her day's marketing, ran into Colonel Culpepper standing rather forlornly in front of McHurdie's shop. He bowed to her with elaborate graciousness, and she stopped to speak with him. In a moment he was saying, ”So you have not heard, are unaware, entirely ignorant, in point of fact, of my misfortunes?” She a.s.sented, and the colonel went on: ”Well, madam, the end has come; I have played out my hand; I have strutted my hour upon the stage, and now I go off. Old Mart Culpepper, my dear, is no longer the leading citizen, nor our distinguished capitalist, not even the hustling real estate agent of former days--just plain old Mart Culpepper, I may say. He who was, is now a has-been,--just an old man without a business.” He saw that she did not appreciate what had happened, and he smiled gently and said: ”Closed up, my dear madam. A receiver was appointed a few minutes ago for the Culpepper Mortgage Company, and I gave him the key.
Failure--failure--” he repeated the word bitterly--”failure is written over the door of this life.”
Mary Barclay grasped his big fat hand and pressed it, and shook her head. Something in her throat choked her, and she could not speak at first. The two stood a moment in silence before the woman said emphatically, ”No--no! Martin Culpepper, G.o.d is keeping your books!”
The shabby old man stood uncovered, a smile quivering about his eyes.
”Maybe so, Mary Barclay, maybe so,” he said. The smile fell into his countenance as he added, ”That is why I have gone so long without a settlement; with my account so badly overdrawn, too.” Then he turned to go and walked as lightly down the street as a man could walk, broken before his time with the weight of a humiliation upon him and a fear greater than his shame burning in his fluttering old heart.
And now if you are reading this story to be in the company of the rich Mr. Barclay, to feel the madness of his millions, to enjoy the vain delirium of his power, skip the rest of this chapter. For it tells of a shabby time in the lives of all of the threadbare people who move in this tale. Even John Barclay sees the seams and basting threads of his life here, and as for the others,--the colonel and Jake and the general and Watts, and even Molly,--what do these people mean to you, these common people, in their old clothes, with their old hearts and their rusty sins and their homely sorrows? Milord and his lady will not scamper across these pages; no rooms with rich appointments will gladden your eyes, and perhaps in the whole book you will not find a man in evening dress nor a woman in a dinner gown. And now the only thing there is to offer is Jake Dolan, aged fifty-seven, with scanty, grizzled hair, sitting in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the court-house, with the canvas cot he sleeps on for a chair, mending his blue army coat.
Beside him on the bed are his trousers, thin, almost worn through, patched as to the knees and as to other important places, but clean and without a loose thread hanging from them. Surely an old Irishman mending an old army coat under a dusty electric light bulb in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a court-house, wherein he is janitor by grace of the united demand of Henry Schnitzler Post of the G.A.R. No. 432, is not a particularly inspiring picture. But he has bitten the last thread with his teeth, and is putting away the sewing outfit. And now Mr. Dolan, from the drawer of a little table beside the cot,--a table with Bob Hendricks' picture, framed in plush, sitting on the top,--now Mr. Dolan takes from the drawer a tablet of writing paper printed by the county. It is his particular pride, that writing paper. For upon it at the top is the picture of the new one-hundred-thousand-dollar court-house, and beside the court-house picture are these words: ”Office of Jacob Dolan, Custodian of Public Buildings and Grounds of Garrison County.” Mr. Dolan will be writing a letter, and so long as it begins with ”Dear Sir,” and nothing more endearing, surely we may look over his shoulder while he writes,--even though it is bad form. And as Mr. Dolan will be writing to ”Robert Hendricks, care of Cook's Hotel, Cairo, Egypt,”--which he spells with an ”i,” but let that pa.s.s, and let some of his literary style and construction pa.s.s with it,--and as he will be writing to Mr. Hendricks, perhaps Miss Nancy may do well to go sit in the corridor and put her fingers in her ears while we read. For Mr. Dolan is an emotional man, and he is breathing hard, and by the way he grabs his pen and jabs it into the ink one can see that he is angry.
”DEAR SIR (begins Mr. Dolan): I take my pen in hand to answer yours of this date from New York and would have written you anyhow, as there is much on my mind and I would cable you, but I can't, being for the moment short of funds. I write to say, Robert, that we have Mart Culpepper in jail--right across the hall. He came in at nine o'clock to-night, and the d.a.m.n Pop judge put his bail at $15,999 to cover his alleged shortage, and the stinker won't accept us old boys on the bond--Phil and Watts and Os and the Company 'C' boys I could get before the judge went to bed, and Gabe Carnine, the gut, would not sign--would not sign old Mart's bond, sir, and I hope to be in h.e.l.l with a fishpole some day poking him down every time his slimy fingers get on the rim of the kettle. But we'll have him out in the morning, if every man in Garrison County has to go on the bond. They say Mart received money to pay four or five mortgages due to a Vermont Bank, and they sent a detective here about a month ago and worked up the case, and closed his business to-day and waited until to-night to arrest him. I've just come from Mart. It's h.e.l.l. Hoping this will find you enjoying the same I beg my dear sir to sign myself
”Your ob't s'r'v't J. DOLAN.”
When Jacob Dolan finished his letter, he addressed the envelope and hurried away to mail it. And so long as we are here in the court-house, and the custodian is gone, would you like to step in and see Martin Culpepper across the hall? It is still in the bas.e.m.e.nt now, and if you are quiet, so quiet that the slipping patter of a rat's foot on the floor comes to you, a sound as of a faint whining will come to you also. There--now it comes again. No, it is not a dog; it is a man--a man in his agony. Shall we open the great iron door, and go into the cell room? Why, not even you, Miss Nancy--not even you, who love tears so? You would not see much--only a man, with his coat and vest off, an old man with a rather s.h.a.ggy, ill-kept chin whisker and not the cleanest s.h.i.+rt in the world--though it is plaited, and once was a considerable garment. And the man wearing it, who lies prostrate upon his face, once was a considerable man. But he is old now, old and broken, and if he should look up, as you stepped in the corridor before him, you would see a great face ripped and scarred by fear and guilt, and eyes that look so piteously at you--eyes of a man who cannot understand why the blow has fallen, surprised eyes with a horror in them; and if he should speak, you will find a voice rough and mushy with asthma. The heart that has throbbed so many nights in fear and the breath that has been held for so many footsteps, at last have turned their straining into disease. No--let's not go in. He bade his daughter go, and would not see his wife, and they have sent to the City for his son,--so let us not bother him, for to-morrow he will be out on bail. But did you hear that fine, trembling, animal whine--that cry that wrenched itself out of set teeth like a living thing? Come on--let us go and find Jake, and if he is taking a drink, don't blame him too much, Miss Nancy--how would you like to sleep in that room across the corridor?
At nine o'clock the next morning two hundred men had signed the bond the judge required, and Martin Culpepper shambled home with averted eyes. They tried to carry him on their shoulders, thinking it would cheer him up; and from the river wards of the town scores came to give him their hands. But he shook himself away from them, like a great whipped dog, and walked slowly up the hill, and turned into Lincoln Avenue alone.
John Barclay heard the news of the colonel's trouble as he stepped from his private car in the Sycamore Ridge yards that morning, and Jane went to the Culpepper home without stopping at her own. That afternoon, Molly Brownwell knocked at Barclay's office door in the mill, and went in without waiting for him to open it. She was pale and haggard, and she sat down before he could speak to her.
”John,” she said in a dead voice that smote his heart, ”I have come for my reward now. I never thought I'd ask it, John, but last night I thought it all out, and I don't believe it's begging.”
”No,” he replied quietly, ”it's not. I am sure--”
But she did not let him finish. She broke in with: ”Oh, I don't want any of your money; I want my own money--money that you got when you sold me into bondage, John Barclay--do you remember when?” She cried the last words in a tremulous little voice, and then caught herself, and went on before he could put into words the daze in his face. ”Let me tell you; do you remember the day you called me up into your office and asked me to hold Adrian in town to save the wheat company? Yes, you do--you know you do! And you remember that you played on my love for Bob, and my duty to father. Well, I saved you, didn't I?”
”Yes, you did, Molly,” Barclay replied.
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