Part 23 (1/2)
She stared a moment at the framed pictures of mill designs on the wall, and at the wheat samples on the long table near her, and did not speak; nor did he. She finally broke the silence: ”Well, I saved you, but what about father--” her voice broke into a sob--”and Bob--Jane has told you what Bob and I have been--and what about me--what have you taken from me in these twenty years? Oh, John, John, what a fearful wreck we have made of life--you with your blind selfishness, and I with my weakness! Did you know, John, that the money that father borrowed that day, twenty years ago, of Adrian, to lend to you, is the very money that sent him to jail last night? I guess he--he took what wasn't his to pay it back.” Her face twitched, and she was losing control of her voice. Barclay stepped to the door and latched it. She watched him and shook her head sadly. ”You needn't be afraid, John--I'm not going to make a scene.”
”It's all right, Molly,” said Barclay. ”I want to help you--you know that. I'm sorry, Molly--infinitely sorry.”
She looked at him for a moment in silence, and then said: ”Yes, John, I'll give you credit for that; I think you're as sorry as a selfish man like you can be. But are you sorry enough to go to jail a pauper, like father, or wander over the earth alone, like Bob, or come and beg for money, like me?” Then she caught herself quickly and cried: ”Only it's not begging, John--it's my own; it's the price you got when you sold me into bondage; it's the price of my soul, and I need it now.
Those people only want their money--that is all.”
”Yes,” he replied, ”I suppose that is all they want.” He drummed on his desk a moment and then asked, ”Does your father know how much it is?”
”Yes,” she answered, ”I found in his desk at the house last night a paper on which he had been figuring--poor father--all the night before. All the night before--” she repeated, and then sobbed, ”Poor father--all the night before. He knew it was coming. He knew the detective was here. He told me to-day that the sum he had there was correct. It is sixteen thousand five hundred and forty-three dollars.
But he doesn't know I'm here, John. I told him I had some money of my own--some I'd had for years--and I have--oh, I have, John Barclay--I have.” She looked up at him with the pallid face stained with fresh tears and asked, ”I have--I have--haven't I, John, haven't I?”
He put his elbows on the desk and sank his head in his hands and sighed, ”Yes, Molly--yes, you have.”
They sat in silence until the roar of the waters and the murmur of the wheels about them came into the room. Then the woman rose to go.
”Well, John,” she said, ”I suppose one shouldn't thank a person for giving her her own--but I do, John. Oh, it's like blood money to me--but father--I can't let father suffer.”
She walked to the door, he stepped to unlatch it, and she pa.s.sed out without saying good-by. When she was gone, he slipped the latch, and sat down with his hands gripping the table before him. As he sat there, he looked across the years and saw some of the havoc he had made. There was no s.h.i.+rking anything that he saw. A footfall pa.s.sing the door made him start as if he feared to be caught in some guilty act. Yet he knew the door was locked. He choked a little groan behind his teeth, and then reached for the top of his desk, pulled down the rolling cover, and limped quickly out of the room--as though he were leaving a corpse. What he saw was the ghost of the Larger Good, mocking him through the veil of the past, and asking him such questions as only a man's soul may hear and not resent.
He walked over the mill for a time, and then calling his stenographers from their room, dictated them blind and himself dumb with details of a deal he was putting through to get control of the cracker companies of the country. When he finished, the sunset was glaring across the water through the window in front of him, and he had laid his ghost.
But Molly Brownwell had her check, and her father was saved.
That evening the colonel sat with Watts McHurdie, on the broad veranda of the Culpepper home, and as the moon came out, General Ward wandered up the walk and Jake Dolan came singing down the street about ”the relic of old dacincy--the hat me father wore.” Perhaps he had one drink in him, and perhaps two, or maybe three, but he clicked the gate behind him, and seeing the three men on the veranda, he called out:--
”Hi, you pig-stealing Kansas soldiers, haven't ye heard the war is over?” And then he carolled: ”Oh, can't get 'em up, Oh, can't get 'em up, Oh, can't get 'em up in the mornin'--Get up, you”--but the rest of the song, being devoted to the technical affairs of war, and ending with a general exhortation to the soldier to ”get into your breeches,”
would give offence to persons of sensitive natures, and so may as well be omitted from this story.
There was an awkward pause when Dolan came on the veranda. The general had just tried to break the ice, but Dolan was going at too high a speed to be checked.
”Do you know,” he asked, ”what I always remember when I hear that call? You do not. I'll tell you. 'Twas the morning of the battle of Wilson's Creek, and Mart and me was sleeping under a tree, when the bugler of the Johnnies off somewhere on the hill he begins to crow that, and it wakes Mart up, and he rolls over on me and he says: 'Jake,' he says, or maybe 'twas me says, 'Mart,' says I--anyway, one of us says, 'Shut up your gib, you flannel-mouthed mick,' he says, 'and let me pull my dream through to the place where I find the money,' he says. And I says, 'D'ye know what I'm goin' to do when I get home?' says I. 'No,' says he, still keen for that money; 'no,'
says he, 'unless it is you're going to be hanged by way of diversion,'
he says. 'I'm going to hire a bugler,' says I. 'What fer--in the name of all the saints?' says he. 'Well,' says I, 'I'm going to ask him to blow his d.a.m.n horn under my window every morning at five o'clock,' I says, 'and then I'm going to get up and poke my head out of the window and say: ”Mister, you can get me up in the army, but on this occasion would you be obliging enough to go to h.e.l.l”!' And Mart, seeing that the money was gone from his dream, he turns over and wallops me with the blanket till I was merely a palpitating ma.s.s. That was a great battle, though, boys--a great battle.”
And then they shouldered arms and showed how fields were won. Boom!
went Sigel's guns out of the past, and cras.h.!.+ came the Texas cavalry, and the whoop of the Louisiana Pelicans rang in their ears. They marched south after Hindman, and then came back with Grant to Vicksburg, where they fought and bled and died. The general left them and went east, where he ”deployed on our right” and executed flank movements, and watched Pickett's column come fling itself to death at Gettysburg. And Watts McHurdie rode with the artillery through the rear of the rebel lines at Pittsburg Landing, and when the rebel officer saw the little man's bravery, and watched him making for the Union lines bringing three guns, he waved his hat and told his soldiers not to shoot at that boy. The colonel took a stick and marked out on the floor our position at Antietam, and showed where the reserves were supposed to be and how the enemy masked his guns behind that hill, and we planted our artillery on the opposite ridge; and he marched with the infantry and lay in ambush while the enemy came marching in force through the wood. In time Watts McHurdie was talking to Lincoln in the streets of Richmond, and telling for the hundredth time what Lincoln said of the song and how he had sung it. But who cares now what Lincoln said? It was something kind, you may be sure, with a tear and a laugh in it, and the veterans laughed, while their eyes grew moist as they always did when Watts told it. Then they fell to carnage again--a fierce fight against time, against the moment when they must leave their old companion alone. Up hills they charged and down dales, and the moon rose high, and cast its shadow to the eastward before they parted. First Dolan edged away, and then the general went, waving his hand military fas.h.i.+on; and the colonel returned the salute. When the gate had clanged, Watts rose to go. He did not speak, nor did the colonel. Arm in arm, they walked down the steps together, and halfway down the garden path the colonel rested his hand on the little man's shoulder as they walked in silence. At the gate they saw each other's tears, and the little man's voice failed him when the colonel said, ”Well, good-by, comrade--good night.” So Watts turned and ran, while the colonel, for the first time in his manhood, loosed the cords of his sorrow and stood alone in the moonlight with upturned face, swaying like an old tree in a storm.
CHAPTER XXI
And now those who have avoided the gray unpainted shame of these unimportant people of the Ridge may here take up again for a moment the trailing clouds of glory that s.h.i.+mmer over John Barclay's office in the big City. For here there is the sounding bra.s.s and tinkling cymbal of great worldly power. Here sits John Barclay, a little gray-haired, gray-clad, lynx-eyed man, in a big light room at the corner of a tower high over the City in the Corn Exchange Building, the brain from which a million nerves radiate that run all over the world and move thousands of men. Forty years before, when John was playing in the dust of the road leading up from the Sycamore, no king in all the world knew so much of the day's doings as John knows now, sitting there at the polished mahogany table with the green blotting paper upon it, under the green vase adorned with the red rose. A blight may threaten the wheat in Argentine, and John Barclay knows every cloud that sails the sky above that wheat, and when the cloud bursts into rain he sighs, for it means something to him, though heaven only knows what, and we and heaven do not care. But a dry day in India or a wet day in Russia or a cloudy day in the Dakotas are all taken into account in the little man's plans. And if princes quarrel and kings grow weary of peace, and money bags refuse them war, John Barclay knows it and puts the episode into figures on the clean white pad of paper before him.
It is a privilege to be in this office; one pa.s.ses three doors to get here, and even at the third door our statesmen often cool their toes.
Mr. Barclay is about to admit one now. And when Senator Myton comes in, deferentially of course, to tell Mr. Barclay the details of the long fight in executive session which ended in the confirmation by the senate of Lige Bemis as a federal judge, the little gray man waves the senator to a chair, and runs his pencil up a column of figures, presses a b.u.t.ton, writes a word on a sheet of paper, and when the messenger appears, hands the paper to him and says, ”For Judge Bemis.”
”I have just dismissed a Persian satrap,” expands Barclay, ”who won't let his people use our binders; that country eventually will be a great field for our Mediterranean branch.”
Myton is properly impressed. For a man who can make a senator out of Red River clay and a federal judge out of Lige Bemis is a superhuman creature, and Myton does not doubt Barclay's power over satraps.