Part 32 (2/2)
Neal Ward that night, in the _Banner_ office alone, wrote to his sweetheart the daily letter that was never mailed.
”How sweet it is,” he writes, ”to have you at home. Sometimes I hear your voice through the old leaky telephone, talking to Aunt Molly; her phone and ours are through the same board, and your voice seems natural then, and unstrained, not as it is when we meet. But I know that some way we are meeting--our souls--in the infinite realm outside ourselves--beyond our consciousness--either sleeping or waking. Last night I dreamed a strange dream. A little girl, like one of the pictures in mother's old family photograph alb.u.m, seemed to be talking with me,--dressed so quaintly in the dear old fas.h.i.+on of the days when mother taught the Sycamore Ridge School. She seemed to be playing with me in some way, and then she said: 'Oh, yes, I am your telephone; she knows all about it. I tell her every night as we play together.' And then she was no longer a little girl but a most beautiful soul and she said with great gentleness: 'In her heart she loves you--in her heart she loves you. This I know, only she is proud--proud with the Barclay pride; but in her heart she loves you; is not that enough?' What a strange dream! I wonder where we are--we who animate our bodies, when we sleep. What is sleep, but the proof that death is but a sleep? Oh, Jeanette, Jeanette, come into my soul as we sleep.”
He folded the letter, sealed and addressed it, and dated the envelope, and put it in his desk--the desk before which Adrian Brownwell had sat, eating his heart out in futile endeavour to find his place in the world. Neal Ward had cleaned out one side of the desk, and was using that for his own. Mrs. Brownwell kept her papers in the other side, and one key locked them both. As he walked home that night under the stars, his heart was full of John Barclay's troubles. Neal knew Barclay well enough to know that the sensitive nature of the man, with his strongly developed instinctive faculty for getting at the truth, would be his curse in the turmoil or criticism through which he was going. So a day or two later Neal was not surprised to find a long statement in the morning press despatches from Barclay explaining and defending the methods of the National Provisions Company. He proved carefully that the notorious Door Strip saved large losses in transit of the National Provisions Company's grain and grain produce, and showed that in paying him for the use of these strips the railroad companies were saving great sums for widowed and orphaned stockholders of railroads--sums which would be his due for losses in transit if the strips were not used.
Neal Ward knew what it had cost Barclay in pride to give out that statement; so the young man printed it on the first page of the _Banner_ with a kind editorial about Mr. Barclay and his good works.
That night when the paper was off, and young Ward was working on the books of his office, he was called to the telephone.
”Is this you, Nealie Ward?” asked a woman's voice--the strong, clear, deep voice of an old woman. And when he had answered, the voice went on: ”Well, Nealie, I wish to thank you for that editorial about John to-night in the paper; I'm Mary Barclay. It isn't more than half true, Nealie; and if it was all true, it isn't a fraction of what the truth ought to be if John did what he could, but it will do him a lot of good--right here in the home paper, and--Why, Jennie, I'm speaking with Nealie Ward,--why, do you think I am not old enough to talk with Nealie without breeding scandal?--as I was saying, my dear, it will cheer John up a little, and heaven knows he needs something.
I'm--Jennie, for mercy sakes keep still; I know Nealie Ward and I knew his father when he wasn't as old as Nealie--did his was.h.i.+ng for him; and boarded his mother four winters, and I have a right to say what I want to to that child.” The boy and the grandmother laughed into the telephone. ”Jennie is so afraid I'll do something improper,”
laughed Mrs. Barclay. ”Oh, yes, by the way--here's a little item for your paper to-morrow: Jennie's mother is sick; I think it's typhoid, but you can't get John to admit it. So don't say typhoid.” Then with a few more words she rang off.
When the _Banner_ printed the item about Mrs. Barclay's illness, the town, in one of those outbursts of feeling which communities often have, seemed to try to show John Barclay the affection that was in their hearts for the man who had grown up among them, and the family that had been established under his name. Flowers--summer flowers--poured in on the Barclays. Children came with wild flowers, prairie flowers that Jane Barclay had not seen since she roamed over the unbroken sod about Minneola as a girl; and Colonel Culpepper came marching up the walk through the Barclay grounds, bearing his old-fas.h.i.+oned bouquet, as grandly as an amba.s.sador bringing a king's gift. Jane Barclay sent word that she wished to see him.
”My dear,” said the colonel, as he held the flowers toward her, ”accept these flowers from those who have shared your bounty--from G.o.d's poor, my dear; these are G.o.d's smiles that they send you from their hearts--from their very hearts, my dear, from their poor hearts wherein G.o.d's smiles come none too often.” She saw through glistening eyes the broken old figure, with his coat tightly b.u.t.toned on that July day to hide some shabbiness underneath. But she bade the colonel sit down, and they chatted of old times and old places and old faces for a few minutes; and the colonel, to whom any sort of social function was a rare and sweet occasion, stayed until the nurse had to beckon him out of the room over Mrs. Barclay's shoulder.
General Ward sent a note with a bunch of monthly blooming roses.
”MY DEAR JANE (he wrote): These roses are from slips we got from John's mother when we planted our little yard. This red one is from the very bush on which grew the rose John wore at his wedding. Pin it on the old scamp to-night, and see how he will look. He was a dapper little chap that night, and the years have hardly begun their work on him; or perhaps he is such a tough customer that he dulls the chisel of time. I do not know, and so long as it is so, you do not care, but we both know, and are both glad that of all the many things G.o.d has sent you in thirty years, he has sent you nothing so fine as the joy that came with the day John wore this rose for you--a joy that has grown while the rose has faded. And may this rose renew your joy for another thirty years.”
John read the note when he came in from the mill that evening, and Jane watched the years slip off his face. He looked into the past as it spread itself on the carpet near the bed.
”Well, well, well,” he said, as he smiled into the picture he saw, ”I remember as well the general bringing that rose down to the office that morning, wrapped in blue tissue paper from cotton batting rolls!
The package was tied with fancy red braid that used to bind muslin bolts.” He laughed quietly, and asked, ”Jane, do you remember that old red braid?” The sick woman nodded. ”Well, with the little blue package was a note from Miss Lucy, which said that my old teacher could not give me a present that year--times were cruelly hard then, you remember--but that she could and did put the blessing of her prayers on the rose, that all that it witnessed at my wedding would bring me happiness.” He sat for a moment in silence, and, as the nurse was gone, he knelt beside the sick woman and kissed her. And as the wife stroked his head she whispered, ”How that prayer has been answered, John--dear, hasn't it?” And the great clock in the silent hall below ticked away some of the happiest minutes it had ever measured.
But when he pa.s.sed out of the sick room, the world--the maddening press of affairs, and the combat in his soul--snapped back on his shoulders with a mental click as though a load had fallen into its old place. He stood before his organ, and could not press the keys. As he sat there in the twilight made by the shaded electric lamps, the struggle rose in his heart against the admission of anything into his scheme of life but material things, and the conflict raged unchecked.
What a silliness, he said, to think that the mummery of a woman over a rose could affect a life. Life is what the succession of the days brings. The thing is or is not, he said to himself, and the gibber about prayer and the moral force that moves the universe is for the weak-minded. So he took his h.e.l.l to bed with him as it went every night, and during the heavy hours when he could not sleep, he tiptoed into the sick room, and looked at the thin face of his wife, sleeping a restless, feverish sleep, and a great fear came into his heart.
Once as the morning dawned he asked the nurse whom he met in the hall, ”Is it typhoid?”
She was a stranger to the town, and she said to him, ”What does the doctor tell you?”
”That's not the point,” he insisted. ”What do you think?”
She looked at him for an undecided moment and replied, ”I'm not paid to think, Mr. Barclay,” and went past him with her work. But he knew the truth. He went to his bed, and threw himself upon it, a-tremble with remorse and fear, and the sneer in his heart stilled his lips and he could not look outside himself for help. So the morning came, and another day, bringing its thousand cares, faced him, like a jailer with his tortures.
Time dragged slowly in the sick room and at the mill. One doctor brought another, and the Barclay private car went far east and came flying back with a third. The town knew that Mrs. John Barclay was dangerously sick. There came hopeful days when the patient's mind was clear; on one of these days Mrs. McHurdie called, and they let her see the sick woman. She brought some flowers.
”In the flowers, Jane,” she said, ”you will find something from Watts.” Mrs. McHurdie smiled. ”You know he sat up till 'way after midnight last night, playing his accordion. Oh, it's been years since he has touched it. And this morning when I got up, I found him sitting by the kitchen table, writing. It's a poem for you.” Mrs. McHurdie looked rather sheepish as she said: ”You know how Watts is, Jane; he just made me bring it. You can read it when you get well.”
They hurried Mrs. McHurdie out, and when Jane Barclay went to sleep, they found tears on her pillow, and in her hand the verses,--the limping, awkward verses of an old man, whose music only echoed back from the past. The nurses and the young doctor from Boston had a good laugh at it. Each of the four stanzas began with two lines that asked: ”Oh, don't you remember the old river road, that ran through the sweet-scented wood?” To them it was a curious parody on something old and quaint that they had long since forgotten. But to the woman who lay murmuring of other days, whose lips were parched for the waters of brooks that had surrendered to the plough a score of years ago, the halting verses of Watts McHurdie were laden with odours of grape blossoms, of wild cuc.u.mbers and sumach, of elder blossoms, and the fragrance of the crushed leaves of autumn. And the music of distant ripples played in her feverish brain and the sobbing voice of the turtle dove sang out of the past for her as she slept. All through the day and the night and for many nights and days she whispered of the trees and the running water and the wild gra.s.s and the birds.
And so one morning when it was still gray, she woke and said to John, who bent over her, ”Why, dear, we are almost home; there are the lights across the river; just one more hill, dearie, and then--” And then with the water prattling in her ears at the last ford she turned to the wall and sank to rest.
Day after day, until the days and nights became a week and the week repeated itself until nearly a month was gone, John Barclay, dry-eyed and all but dumb, paced the terrace before his house by night, and by day roamed through the noisy mill or wandered through his desolate house, seeking peace that would not come to him. The whole foundation of his scheme of life was crumbling beneath him. He had built thirty-five years of his manhood upon the theory that the human brain is the G.o.d of things as they are and as they must be. The structure of his life was an imposing edifice, and men called it great and successful. Yet as he walked his lonely way in those black days that followed Jane's death, there came into his consciousness a strong, overmastering conviction, which he dared not accept, that his house was built on sand. For here were things outside of his plans, outside of his very beliefs, coming into his life, bringing calamity, sorrow, and tragedy with them into his own circle of friends, into his own household, into his own heart. As he walked through the dull, lonely hours he could not escape the vague feeling, though he fought it as one mad fights for his delusion, that all the tragedies piling up about him came from his own mistakes. Over and over again he threshed the past. Molly Brownwell's cry, ”You have sold me into bondage, John Barclay,” would not be stilled, though at times he could smile at it; and the broken body and shamed face of her father haunted him like an obsession. Night after night when he tried to sleep, Robert Hendricks'
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