Part 72 (1/2)

Some ten days before, in London, having just ended a four weeks' circuit through a region of the Continent where news of Suez was even scarcer than emigrants for Widewood, he had, to his astonishment, met Proudfit.

The colonel had just arrived across. He was tipsy, as usual, and a sad wreck, but bound for Carlsbad, bright in the faith that when he had stayed there two months he would go home cured for life of his ”only bad habit.” March was troubled, and did not become less so when Proudfit explained that his presence was due to the ”kind pressu' of Garnet and othe's.” He knew that Garnet, months before, had swapped his Land Company stock to Proudfit for the Colonel's much better stock in the Construction Company and succeeded him as president of the latter concern.

”As a matteh of fawm--tempora'ily--du'ing my ill health,” said the Carlsbad pilgrim, adding, in an unfragrant stage-whisper, that there was a secret off-setting sale of both stocks back again, the papers of which were in Mrs. Proudfit's custody. Mrs. Proudfit was not with her husband; she was at home, in Blackland.

John knew also how nearly down to nothing the price of his own company's first-mortgage bonds had declined; but the Colonel's tidings of a later fate fell upon him like a thunderbolt. He stood before his informant in the populous street, now too sick at heart for speech, and now throbbing with too resolute a resentment for outward show, but drawn up rigidly with a scowl of indignant attention under his locks that made him the observed of every quick eye. The matter--not to follow Proudfit too closely--was this:

The Construction Company, paid in advance, and in the Land Company's second-mortgage bonds, for its many expensive and recklessly immature works, had promptly sold those bonds to a mult.i.tude of ready takers near and far, but princ.i.p.ally far. When the promised inpour of millers and miners, manufacturers and operatives, so nearly failed that the Land Company could not pay, nor half pay, the interest on its first-mortgage bonds and they ”tumbled,” these second-mortgage bonds were, of course, unsalable at any figure. The smallest child will understand this--and worse to follow--at a glance; but if he doesn't he needn't. At this point Ravenel, who had kept his paper very still, ”persuaded” Gamble and Bulger to buy, at the prices their holders had paid for them, all that smaller portion of these second-mortgage bonds, as well as all small lots of the Land Company's stock, held in the three counties. ”The _Courier_,” he said, with his effectual smile, ”couldn't afford to see home folks suffer,” and he presently had them all well out of it, Parson Tombs among them.

”Thank G.o.d!” rumbled March. ”And then what?”

Then Ravenel, as trustee for the three counties--Uncle Jimmie Rankin was the other, but shrewdly let Jeff-Jack speak and act for him--privately combined with the Construction Company, which, Proudfit pathetically reminded John, was a loser by the Land Company in the discounts at which it had sold that Company's second-mortgage bonds. They went on a still hunt after the first-mortgage bonds, ”bought,” said Proudfit, ”the whole bilin' faw a song,” foreclosed the mortgage, and at the sale of the Land Company's a.s.sets were the only bidders, except Senator Halliday and Captain Shotwell, whom they easily outbid.

”Right smart of us suspicioned those two gentlemen were bidding faw you, John.”

March, who was staring aside in fierce abstraction, started. ”I reckon not,” he said, and stared in the other direction. ”So, then, Widewood and all its costly improvements belong half to the three counties and half to Garnet's construc----”

”John”--the Colonel lifted his pallid hand with an air of amiable greatness--”_my_ construc', seel view play! Not Garnet's.

_I_--Proudfit--am still the invisible head of that comp'ny. Garnet acknowledges it privately to me. He and I have what you may call a per-perfect und-und-unde'standing!”

”Perfect und'--O me!” interrupted March, with a broken laugh and a frown. Proudfit liked his air and tried to reproduce it, but got his features tangled, rubbed his mouth, and closed his eyes. March stared into vacancy again.

The tippler interposed with moist emotion. ”John, we're landless! My plantation b'longs t' my wife. I can sympathize with you, John. As old song says, 'we're landless! landless!' _We_ are landless, John. But you have price--priceless 'dvant'ge over me in one thing, vice-president; you've still got yo' motheh!”

”O!” groaned March, blazing up and starting away; but Proudfit clung.

”My dea' boy! let me tell you, that tendeh little motheh's been a perfect hero! When I told her--in--in t-tears--how sorry I--and Garnet--and all of us--was,--'O Curl Prou'fit,' says she--with that ca'm, sweet, dizda-ainful smile of hers, you know--'it's no supprise to me; it's what I've expected from the beginning.'”

LXXVI.

AGAINST OVERWHELMING NUMBERS

During the boom Tom Hersey's Swanee Hotel--repaired, enlarged, repainted--had become Hotel Swanee. At the corner of the two streets on which it fronted he had added a square tower or ”observatory.” But neither guests nor ”resi_dent_ers” had made use of it as he had designed. Its low top was too high to be reached with that Southern ease which Northern sojourners like, and besides, you couldn't see more than half the earth anyhow when you got up there.

Early, therefore, it had been turned into an airy bed-chamber for Bulger. He, however was gone. He had left Suez for good and all on the same day on which John March arrived from abroad, being so advised to do by Captains Champion and Shotwell, who loved a good joke with a good fat coward to saddle it on, and who had got enough of Bulger on the day of the skirmish mentioned a page or two back. The tower room he left came to be looked upon as specially adapted for the sick, and here, some eleven or twelve months after the wreck of the Three Counties Land and Improvement Company, Limited, John March lay on his bed by night and sat on it by day, wasted, bright-eyed, and pale, with a corded frown forever between his brows save in the best moments of his unquiet sleep.

On the hither side of one of the two streets close under him, his office--the old, first one, reopened on his return--stood closed, the sign renovated and tacked up once more, and the early addendum, _Gentleman_, still a.s.serting itself, firmly though modestly, beneath the new surface of repair. In and from that office he had, for these many months, waged a bloodless but aggressive and indomitable war on the men who, he felt, had robbed, not merely him, but his mother, and the grave of his father, under the forms and cover of commerce and law; yet from whom he had not been able to take their outermost intrenchment--the slothful connivance of a community which had let itself be made a pa.s.sive sharer of their spoils. Now, in that office his desk was covered with ten days' dust. ”If you don't shut this thing up straight off and go, say, to Chalybeate Springs,” the doctor had one day exclaimed, ”you'll not last half through the summer.” March had answered with jesting obduracy, and two nights later had fainted on the stairs of Tom Hersey's hotel. For twenty-four hours afterward he had been ”not expected to live.” During which time Suez had entirely reconsidered him--conduct, character, capacity--and had given him, at the expense of his adversaries, a higher value and regard than ever, and a wholly new affection. It would have been worth all the apothecary's a.r.s.enic and iron for someone just to have told him so.

A Suez physician once said to me--I was struck with the originality of the remark--that one man's cure is another's poison. Not even to himself would March confess that this room, so specially adapted for the average sick man, was for him the worst that could have been picked out. It showed him constantly all Suez. Poor little sweating and fanning Suez, grown fat, and already getting lean again on the carca.s.s of one man's unsalable estate!

”Come here,” said Fannie Ravenel behind the blinds of her highest window, to one who loved her still, but rarely had time to visit her now, ”look. That's John March's room. O sweet, how's he ever again to match himself to our littleness and sterility without shriveling down to it himself? And yet that, and not the catching of scamps or recovery of lands, is going to be his big task. For I don't think he'll ever go 'way from here; he's just the kind that'll always feel too many obligations to stay; and I think his sickness will be a blessing straight from G.o.d, to him and to all of us who love him, if it will only give him time to see what his true work is--G.o.d bless him!” The two stood in loose embrace looking opposite ways, until the speaker asked, ”Don't you believe it?”

”I don't know,” said the other, gently drawing her away from the window.

Fannie yielded a step or two and then as gently resisted. ”Sweetheart,”

she cried, with a melting gaze, ”you don't suppose--just because I choose to remember what he is and what he is suffering--you can't imagine--O if _you_ mistake me I shall simply peris.h.!.+”

”I know you too well, dear,” caressingly murmured the guest, and they talked of other things--”gusset and band and seam”--for it was Sat.u.r.day and there was to be a small occasion on the morrow. But that same night, long after the house's last light was out, the guest said her prayers at that window.

The windows of March's chamber, albeit his bed's head was against the one to the east, opened four ways. The one on the west looked down over the court-house square and up the verdant avenue which became the pike.