John Andross — Dec. 1873-May 1874
PART ONE: CHAPTER I TO CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER I.
THE Niagara Express, just before sunset at the close of a sultry July day, was puffing slowly into Lock Haven, a small lumber-town which is the key of access to the wild mountainous district of Pennsylvania, from the rich coal and oil valleys below. As the smoking engine came in sight, a runner from one of the inns hastily pasted up a written placard on the wooden wall of the station, where it would face the car windows, reading it aloud to half a dozen lounging men and boys:
" ' Mysterious Disappearance--Supposed Murder.' A hope it a'n't no murder, a'm sure. But----," gloomily wiping the paste off his fingers inside of his trousers pockets, "Joe Vanderpoelen came down from the mountains last night, and he says there's them there as hints of suicide, but a says, 'For what reason?' a says. 'A man don't kill and bury hisself out of sight for no reason at all, Joe,' a says. A always did like to get at the common sense of a matter."
"Them Vanderpoelens has always got some cock-and-bull story going," observed the station-master scoffingly, squirting tobacco more vigorously as the train approached.
"This a'n't no Vanderpoelen story," patting down the wet edges of the bill. "Old Judge Maddox is down hisself about it. Hasn't been out of the mountains for two years. Sending telegrams right and left. He come to meet Doctor Braddock when he gets in. He's looked for on this train."
"Rough news for Braddock."
"So a says," eagerly. "A thought of him first one. A just sent Jimmy up for the 'bus, so's a'd be here to break it to him myself in case the judge's not about. Never do for him to hear it first from strangers, or by the placards. Hi! here she is!" as the train came up alongside of the station.
Dr. Braddock and a stranger, a large showily dressed men, came out of the cars and halted, as people do in the country, to watch the train steam leisurely off, leaving a wavering line of bituminous smoke across the hot blue sky. The bill-poster stood irresolute. There was always something in the gloss and primness of the doctor's tall, lank figure which daunted one of the great unwashed, but to come off of a long and dusty journey immaculately gloved, and with such snowy shirt cuffs and a high beaver hat instead of a slouchy felt, was to mark the gulf between them offensively.
Dr. Braddock touched his hat. "My team here, Joseph?"
"No, sir. A'll drive you up to the Fallon House? A'd better now?" Joe needed to bolster his courage before he offered himself as a sympathizing friend to a man who touched his hat to him. The doctor's companion had turned his bold laughing eyes on the men on the platform, called one of them a lout for dropping his valise, and so was hail-fellow-well-met with them already. Dr. Braddock had never been hail-fellow-well-met with anybody in his life.
"No, we'll wait," he said. "Andross," turning to his friend with a polite mannerism that tried to be cordial, "Andross promised to drive down from the mountains to meet us. I depend on him to make your two weeks' holiday what it ought to be. He said the first thing to look to was the larder, and he was right there. The air up yonder makes a stranger ravenous. It's too late for venison, but he promised to have trout and partridges for supper if he scoured the Nittany range for them. Here he is!" as a wagon, swung low for mountain roads, and drawn by a black horse dashed down the dustry street. "Why, that is not John!" crossing the platform; "that's the judge."
Joe, afraid that his ill news would be taken from him, hurried after him. Braddock, zealous Presbyterian as he was, was known to be so irritable a man and so easily rasped by trifles that Joe had a curiosity to see how he would deport himself when met by a great disaster.
"You don't observe the placard, Doctor?" carefully standing in front of it. "'Mysterious disappearance. Murder in the Nittany Ridge.' Why there ha'n't been such eggsitement in Lock Haven since the war--no, sir. Mr. Andross being such a popular man too----"
"Who is murdered?" pushing him aside. "What is this fellow chattering about Andross's popularity for?" sharply to Judge Maddox. But Joe, whose blear eyes were as keen as a ferret's, noticed that the doctor was not startled by the ill news. "If a'd av told him Andross hed killed hisself, he'd not have been surprised. He was lookin' for ill news of him, take my word for that. Lookin' for it;" he told up in the bar-room afterwards.
Judge Maddox, who in his blue cloth coat looked not unlike one of the round-bellied, blue-painted oil-barrels on the platform, gently patted Joe on the back with his pudgy hand. Murder or not, there was no need of offending a possible customer. "Ah! Joseph, is it you? And how's that mare you bought do? Balky, eh? Tut, tut! Just a word with Dr. Braddock. Come in this office, Clay," rolling into a square closet where a man stood writing. "Mr. Stiles? Just give the doctor and me a moment here. Got rid of that dyspepsia yet? Tried podophyllin[1]? Don't dabble in medicines, hey? Right, right!" shutting Stiles out of his office. "It's Andross, Clay. He's gone."
The judge's face was at blood heat, but he did not wipe it. It was noticeable that Dr. Braddock made no exclamation, and before he spoke at all shut the window.
"What do you mean by gone? Is he dead?"
"God knows! How can I tell? Busy at his accounts at nine o'clock Saturday evening, and walks out; walks out without a coat--in his waistcoat--leaves the blotter on the open book, desk unlocked, lamp burning, and never comes back. Just as if the earth had opened and swallowed him. Place all alight from the furnace, yet not one of the hands saw him. I've not eaten a full meal since. Nor slept. Counted the clock strike every hour last night. I said to Anna, if Braddock were here some of the horrible responsibility would be off my shoulders. You and Andross being just like brothers. Very rare to find such friendships between American. Germans, now, are more addicted to that sort of thing. Why I've seen two six-foot red-whiskered fellows kiss like school-girls; but that's not Andross, poor fellow! It's wretched, wretched! Got such a turn after the soup yesterday thinking of him, I couldn't eat another mouthful. Such a light-hearted, jovial fellow you know! 'Poor old baldhead Elisha,' my little Joe called him," chuckling. "I checked that in Joe promptly. Don't like forward children. Well, what do you think, Braddock? I telegraphed for the police. None of your country bunglers--a sharp city practitioner. D'ye think it was suicide? Or how about those old shafts on the ridge? The men tell me there's some man-traps near the ore banks sixty feet deep. Well, what d'ye think, Braddock?"
"You sent for the police? I am sorry for that."
"Hey? You don't say so! Why, I told Anna first words Braddock will speak will be, 'Have you sent for the police?' And you really think we'd better not have them? Well I am astonished! I'll go and telegraph at once for them not to come. Better trust to our own wits. They're a pompous lot! Low, uncultured fellows generally, dressed in the little brief authority of billies and white gloves, you see! Too much for them. Well, what do you think, Braddock? Was it murder?" his bulgy gray eyes quailing a little.
"Murder? What possible motive could anybody have in killing Andross?"
"Just what I said. Best-hearted fellow! Wouldn't hurt a worm! The old shafts now. He might have wandered out, and accidentally--there would not be a chance for him there."
"John knows the Nittany Ridge thoroughly, and it was not likely he would purposely wander beyond it."
Dr. Braddock paused before each reply as if to choose his words. His whole bearing, since he heard the news, had been noticeably cautious and repressed. Even the judge, whose perception was of the dullest, observed this unwonted reticence in the usually quick, outspoken young man. He was, like Joe, disappointed that his news had produced so little sensation.
"I thought, Braddock," irritably, "you would have some plausible theory at least about it?"
"Yes, yes, certainly. Give me time."
"You're in a measure responsible for Andross. You stood sponsor for him at the Works. It was on your recommendation I put him in the office; you know that."
"Well, you've had no reason to regret it, Judge."
"No, not till now. But whatever it is to you this has been a terrible shock to me. If the fellow had died in his bed, like other people, it would have been another thing. But at my age a man is shy of sensations. After fifty all trouble is apt to go to the liver or bowels. Jake at the mill says it was suicide; but that's absurd."
Braddock was silent.
"That's sheer nonsense. What trouble had that fellow to make him go cut his throat? If he had, more likely his brain was affected, and he's wandered off into the mountains and will turn up again all right."
"In that case he would not have left the desk open."
"Stuff! Do you suppose if a man is so mad as not to care for his life he'll care for my cash-box?"
"Yes," promptly. "There's nothing sticks in even the maddest brain like the idea of duty--duty that has been promised and paid for."
"Oh! all men are not machines. Nor Braddocks," chuckling. "You might go hang yourself at twelve o'clock, but you'd wind the mill clock at eleven. Jack was a different breed--a different breed, sir. As jovial, jolly a dog as ever I knew, especially after a glass or two of dry sherry--he always took his wine too dry--but as to a nice sense of honour, I don't know. No. I don't know about that, Clay."
The doctor crossed the room and tried the door.
"Not so loud," he said, irritably. His mouth was parched, and he had the uncertain haste of movement of a horse that has been under the curb too long. "You forget, Judge, that Andross was my friend, and that in all likelihood he is dead."
"Why, nobody heard me. Who is that strange fellow that came with you, anyhow?"
"His name is Ware. A poor devil of a newspaper man out for a holiday."
"And what's he here for, eh? Wants to write up the Works, I suppose? I want nothing written about the Works. I want to run the business clear of print."
This last idea had apparently banished Andross and his mysterious fate from that fat substance inside his pulpy head which the judge frequently mentioned as "the best brain in the state, sir." Two ideas never subsisted there together. Yet it was a serviceable brain in its way; had served to amass a fortune for its owner, and prompted him to show kindness to every unlucky dog, whether man or beast, that crossed his more fortunate path.
"You know well enough, Braddock," he muttered, "that I mean to keep the Works out of sight of the public until I'm sole owner, and now you bring this interviewing pump----"
"He never heard of you or the Works," said Braddock, uncivil and blunt as usual. "He wants," with a shrug, "to interview Nature. He has had a great deal to say on the way up about the Great Mother."
"I wish him joy of her acquaintance. There's no need for him to meddle in this mess about Andross."
"No. There is my horse and wagon at last. I'll drive Ware out," opening the door.
"All right. I'll keep along-side. This ghastly business has knocked me up so that----How this town is looking up, hey? There's a new row of shops now, very neat--very neat. Pay eleven per cent, I judge. But oh! you're off, eh?" turning to find himself alone, and puffing slowly out.
Dr. Braddock's sallow face relaxed as soon as the judge's "chud, chud" of talk died out behind him. He halted a minute on the vacant side of the platform out of sight of Ware and the men. He was a man accustomed to fling all his emotion into words at once. Ill-conditioned and bigoted, both words and emotions often were, perhaps, but always quite open and bare for God and his fellow-man to judge. "It is either a fool or a knave who must have secrets," he always said.
Yet a secret had just been forced on him, and a necessity for controul of tongue and even eye, at the very instant when he fairly staggered under the chance that death had taken out of the world one of the two or three people who were his friends in it. For Braddock was as narrow and bigoted in his affections as his creed.
Mr. Ware, however, soon cut short his pause for breath.
"Where the deuce have you been, Doctor? Sick? You look pinched about the nose and jaws. Nothing wrong, I hope? I should dislike confoundedly to be confined in this dusty town over night. I catch a whiff of the mountain air already!" his wide, red nostrils expanding. "Come, come! Let's go. Why, I looked to see you all fire at the first breath of your native hills. You have no touch of the Swiss homesickness which should belong to all mountaineers."
"There's no necessity for homesickness. I've only been gone two weeks."
"Shall we go?" Mr. Ware drew long breaths as though his chest was oppressed, stretched out his arms, the red rising and fading in his large thin-skinned features. His chest was so broad, the grasp of his arms so wide, his exaltation of feeling so assertant that even Joe repressed his first inclination to snigger, and looked on respectfully. "Pardon my impatience," he said, wiping his forehead with a delicately fine handkerchief, "the near approach to Nature is like music or a fine picture, it affects my nerves like an electric battery and--a--. Some stamina is lacking in my bodily organization which you more phlegmatic, bony people have----"
There he broke off abruptly, turning away as if conscious that his audience would not understand him. It was Mr. Ware's habit to make his small talk into an oration, and thus break off abruptly, his fine brown eyes gazing rapt before him, "finishing his remarks," as some coarse joker had said, "to infinity."
Braddock meanwhile was sponging his horse's nostrils as carefully as if he had been handling a baby. His trouble might pinch his face and load the blood in his veins, but assuredly his nag would not suffer for it. Had he not been rebuked in church session for squandering time and money at horse-fairs, and it was even hinted at horse-races? "He ought to have been fed two hours ago. You know I never drive him on a full stomach!" he said to Joe so fiercely that the judge called from his wagon:
"There, there! Come, Doctor, I want you to be up on the ground early. We must take measures to-night;" and added aside, "What are you hectoring that man for, Clay? he might be of use to you yet; and for a brute beast, too! It's unbecoming a professor of religion," and then bowled off.
Dr. Braddock sat stiffly upright. His companion, big and buoyant, had an air of laying claim to ownership of the sun and all about him. With his rolling dark eyes and large gesticulating hands he gave you the impression that he would have settled himself just as easily on Charlemagne's stone throne or a shoemaker's bench as the buggy-seat. Braddock had no impression about him except to wish heartily that he was back in New York. He had hoped this crisis would never come. Now that it had come, it needed all his skill and well-known friendship for Andross to cover it from ordinary observers. But what could he do with this fellow's absorbing eyes and ready note-book in pocket beside him?
He never had learned to alter one of his words or to conceal a look.
He found out presently that Ware was talking to him. Ware's was a portly orotund voice for a young man, but musical withal.
"Yes, it was an old master's mate gave me that dressing-case--thorough type of the old Jack-tar, as you find him in Cooper. Bit of gratitude, that was. I heard a man was down with Asiatic cholera; went and offered myself as nurse. Town was in an uproar, but I brought the man through. So, after his next voyage he brought me this. Chinese, you see, complete. Look at the carving of that ivory and these inlaid flagons. But you don't care for such things, Braddock? Now I do. I want the commonplaces of every day to be æsthetically shaped and colored before they touch me. I've been a blacksmith in my day, and lived in the ashes and dust; yet it pleases me to think that when my dead bones are in the coffin, white satin padding will come between them and the boards."
"Very sensible people do have such whims sometimes," said Clay apologetically, wishing to be civil.
"Now you are not quite callous to outside impressions," in an encouraging tone; "not quite, or you would not be here. Laird told me how you studied medicine and tried journalism, and finally left New York to be clerk in these out-of-the-way iron works, because here was your home. The mountains had their hold on you."
"I wanted to make money, and I came here as the most likely place to make it."
"Laird told me you had saved some money and were anxious to double it soon," with a quick side glance.
Braddock had no secrets. "A trifle--but my savings for three years: about seven thousand dollars."
"You ought to have put it into Laird's hands. It would have grown like weeds in a barn yard. He is head of a ring in New York and Philadelphia. It's omnipotent, sir. It holds one city at least, lawmakers and lawgivers, so--" closing his large fingers on a dandelion seed on his palm. "Yes. If Laird was a friend of yours your money would have yielded a thousand-fold."
"He was well enough disposed to me. But I may have had a prejudice against planting my money in such dirty ground."
"Oh-h?" with the same quick, furtive glance. "Well, I have had just such a fancy in my time. Porter, the pork dealer in New Haven, asked me once to go in with him. A sure thing it was, but I declined. 'I may have stood over the forge,' said I, 'but I can't see the name of Julius Ware going all over the country cut into greasy hams.' Foolish. But I have these idiosyncrasies. Can't cure myself of them any more than of my cleft chin."
Braddock was silent. They had run into another blind alley of conversation, the only way out of which was that by which they had entered--Ware.
That never-wearied subject sat tranquil, combing his magnificent red beard with his white fingers, and glancing alternately admiringly down on it and questioningly over the rolling hills, as though inquiring whether Nature knew who was coming.
"Oh, by the way!" he said presently, "this friend of yours who was to have provided the trout--Andross--has had some adventure, they say? Missing, eh?"
"Yes."
"Too bad if there has been murder or that sort of thing. But not likely. We newspaper men know how such reports grow. He'll turn up all right. Without the trout, probably. More's the pity."
"Come up, Tom," said Braddock, with a queer tightening of his lips.
Tom was carrying them lightly from the farm lands into the higher levels; they had left Judge Maddox far behind; the sun was bright; a cool damp wind met them from the forests full of astringent piny smells. Ware heaved a sigh of luxury, threw his cap down at his feet, and stretching back, clasped his hands behind his head. He never could be still a moment. He had been the best smith on the forge so far as thundering blows went; now that he had neither hammer nor anvil, and was cased in by broadcloth clothes and an education, some restless force in his blood worked itself off in incessant motion of brain or body. Just now, his brain having nothing before it but Andross, he employed his body in what he would have called "feeling of" himself--the mass of hair (significant live hair he knew it to be); the thick, white prize-fighter's throat; the white, stubby-fingered hands. He glanced critically and approvingly down at his brawny, well-shaped legs and then at Braddock's, all of whose members unfortunately had a lean and hungry look.
"But," appearing to remember lazily after awhile the subject of conversation, "don't you think now, Braddock, it was a little Quixotic in you to bring this Andross into the office with you; to adopt--christen him, eh? A middle-aged poor devil with neither kith nor kin, I hear."
"No; neither kith nor kin."
"No friends but yourself. And you pick him up, charcoal burning and half starved, and get him work--shoulder him? Now, I'm one of the most impulsive of men, but I never go into partnership with incompetency. Never."
"You don't know Andross or you would not use the word."
"I know," with a triumphant laugh, "that he was a man of education burning charcoal at middle-age when you saddled yourself with him. Depend on it, if a man reaches thirty-five without making his mark there's some part of the machine lacking. I wonder what scrape the fellow has tumbled into now? A woman, eh? I heard a hint of that at Lock Haven."
"Your information seems to have been minute, Ware."
"Oh no! Just a few words of gossip with the men on the platform while you swabbed Tom's mouth. I don't confine myself to the Brahmin caste for my friends, I find companions among soldiers, priests, and Pariahs. Besides, the press"--touching himself lightly on his immaculately glossy white shirt--"absorbs information above ground as the long-armed polypi draw in their dinners under water. And it is about as hopeless an undertaking to fight one as to fight the other, eh?"
"I suppose so."
Doctor Braddock sat more stiffly erect, while his companion lolled back again, feeling that he had, by a lucky image, put the relative position of press and public forcibly. His imagery, hair, beard, legs: here was unfailing matter for contemplation with which he never wearied himself, and, oddly enough, seldom tired his companions. There was something so genial and responsive and full-blooded in the intent look of the brown eyes and grasp of the hand of this big, warm-colored, confidential fellow, that most women and all men turned to him with a sense of relief from the ordinary mass of bilious, abstracted American citizens, and listened with interest to the lively disquisitions of Ware on Ware. Just now, however, he represented to the man beside him the world at large. Braddock certainly had shouldered Andross; and he would have liked, according to his custom, to fight his battle for him with a few furious, telling blows. It was terribly hard, he thought, that he was forced to do nothing but sit passive and speak inanely in monosyllables. As for Ware and the press or the world, the simile held good; they were like flabby, long-armed polypi, trying to draw his secret from him.
Stopping to water his horse at a wayside spring, Braddock heard Judge Maddox signalling him behind. Night was beginning to fall, and they had just turned into the gloomy mountain passes; the judge was tired of being without a listener.
"My wagon is stouter than yours, Clay," he said, "I'll take Mr. Ware, if you choose."
He began to reflect that he was horribly cut up just now, and Braddock would be a dull companion for a few days until this miserable business was settled, and Andross, the only good company on the mountain, was gone. Besides, it might be as well to have a friend in a newspaper man, in case he threw the Works into the market.
"I'll take charge of Mr. Ware to-night," he said, after the exchange was made, "while you go to work at the mystery; and for God's sake, Clay, get to the bottom of it to-morrow."
Braddock nodded curtly, and they drove off; he turned the horse up a sharp defile which would bring him half an hour sooner to the Works.
"It's rough on you, I know, old fellow," he said, apologetically to Tom, just as if he had been a man.
Passing a gap he could see the lights twinkling in his mother's window. It was there they were to have had supper, and he thought of Jack, as he had seen him a dozen times, in his shirt sleeves, anxiously broiling the venison, "which nobody but the hunter ought to touch," while his mother stood gravely by, dish in hand. He remembered now another trouble, which this news had driven out of his mind; the difficulty he would have in satisfying his mother that he had done wisely in refusing his money to Laird. She had known Houston Laird when he was a boy in the Jersey village where she was born, and before Clay started had been sounding his praises.
"As pretty a boy as you would see, and good-natured to silliness. No; he played his marbles and mumble-the-peg as fair as need be; and if he were the scoundrel you say, it would have showed itself then. Just as the twig--you know. Sent me a photograph of his wife when he married--quite the family man. You're too suspicious, Clay. Silly, Houstin Laird may be, but he has nothing to do with packed election boxes and Rings, take my word for it."
His mother was Scotch-Irish, and consequently was her own pope, from rules of faith to the colour of a cap ribbon; religiously loved her friends and hated her enemies. She had the Scotch-Irish thrift too, undiluted by American swagger or generosity. She knew to a dollar the amount of Clay's hoardings, and what the especial chance in life was that he hoped to command by them.
"She'll think I ought to have given it to Laird to turn over for me, and asked no questions," moving uneasily on his seat. "But it's clean now anyhow."
He put his hand in his pocket. Braddock had his mother's blood. At any other time he would have enjoyed the rustle of the crisp bank-notes and even the smell of them, and the plodding back over the last five years to think how they had been earned. But he forgot them now, even while he held them. Going by one of those gorges of the Muncey range, in which the mountain has been torn asunder ages ago by volcanic action, he looked into the chasm between the shattered walls of gray rock rising to the sky, down which a low watery moon threw uncertain shadows, and suddenly saw, as in a vision, Andross lying there, his face turned upward to the sky. Who knew but that he lay in that very chasm, "with the old bulgy check suit on at which we laughed," his thoughts ran on, "and the torn felt hat? Such a slouching fellow as he was!" The slouching, yet handsome figure lay stiff, with a bullet through the heart, it might be, or a cut in the throat, which to Braddock meant worse than murder, for he could guess out of what part of Andross's hidden past the stab might have come. He urged Tom up the rocky path. Horses generally filled too large a share of the world to this narrow-minded, few-ideaed young yellow; but just now there seemed to be nothing in it but the slovenly, happy-go-lucky man who lay dead somewhere in these gorges. He had shouldered Andross soul and body, and he set out on the search for him with much of the same feeling a woman has for the child to whom she has given birth.
CHAPTER II.
THE Works, as the Gray Eagle Furnace was called, lay under the shadow of a spur of the mountain. The roofs and walls of the old wooden building, gray with age and charred by falling sparks, were one in color with the limestone rocks about them. Dull reflections from the smouldering furnace threw bars of red light through the rising fogs down as far as Bear Valley. The men came from the inside and stood in the doorway, leaning on their ask-rakes, as the doctor drove up, with the curiosity with which they would look at the chief mourner at a funeral, though every man there knew that he understood Andross better than that fellow Braddock. As for the story that had been whispered about, that Braddock had brought him originally from some coalings in Clinton county, that they could swear was all bosh. Who ever heard of setting charcoal burners to keeping books? You didn't make silk purses out of such sow's ears as that, and Andross was a silk purse; the very finest gentleman they had known; a different make of a man from that supercilious, pious prig, Braddock.
The mystery or murder had warned all Gray Eagle Gap into a genial, excited fellowship. One or two quarrels had been made up, and double drinks had to be taken at the usual times for bittering, such was the heat of public feeling. The men detailed themselves in off hours in voluntary searching parties; popular prejudice ran high against Maddox for not closing the Works, if for nothing else than a mark of respect; a dozen times a day somebody suggested how zealously Andross himself would have gone into the thing and scoured the mountains day and night. It was a thousand pities, as Spellin said, he couldn't have joined in the row his death caused; everybody felt that. Braddock would engineer the matter as though he were on horseback and everybody else on foot. Even Spellin the superintendent, when he came out to meet him, spoke in a critical, defiant way. His broad jaws were a shade less purple than usual, he having lopped off his whiskey a glass or two daily since the occurrence took place. He nodded gruffly.
"I suppose you'll take this business in hand now. It's not been suffered to drag so far. The two cricks has bin dragged up to the gate, and the old ore banks searched; but there's hundreds of worn-out shafts there."
"Yes. Very good. Yes."
Braddock was trying to pass, but Spellin filled up the doorway.
"In my opinion the place to operate in now is Bear Valley. 'N there's no time to lose," sharply. "If he's fell inadvertently, we kin yet save the body."
"Certainly. You're quite right, Mr. Spellin."
"You'll go up to Bear Valley right away, then? In fact I sent the men there to wait your orders."
"At twelve o'clock," deliberately drawing out his watch. "It is now ten. I have business in-doors in the meantime. Don't let me be interrupted. Good evening, Mr. Spellin."
Spellin turned into the Works, not deigning to glance after Braddock as he crossed before the furnace to reach his office. "He takes it as I thought he would, cursedly cool," he thought; "just like his Scotch-Irish blood!" But when one of the men hinted the same thing, he sent him with an oath to the right about pretty quickly. "Bosses" might be disagreeable to each other, but they must preserve the prerogatives of their order.
Braddock shut the door and locked it. The room in which he stood was his own office; inside was Andross's den, as he called it. He struck a light; he had driven with furious haste to come here; had felt as though he could scarcely keep from knocking Spellin down as he barred his way; yet now, being here, he trimmed and retrimmed the lamp, threw some waste-paper in the empty stove, and stood with his back to it, his hands behind him, as if there were a fire, his neatly trimmed whiskers oddly black against his pale face.
He was so sure of what he should find! He looked about his square office as though it were new and unfamiliar to him. There was a queer, suggestive contrast between its trig carpeted comfort and that den beyond. Braddock made a home according to his notions of a home, out of even that twelve by fourteen closet. The stove was polished; the waste-basket held every clipping of paper; desk, inkstand, pens, were in faultless order; the varnished book-shelves were lettered above each department. History, poetry, belles lettres, etc., etc. To be sure, there were not often more than a dozen books in each. Braddock meant to have a complete library, and after the text-books of his humanities, had begun with English standard authors--Hume, Addison, Scott, Chaucer, etc.,[1] all bound alike in durable calf--adding to them steadily as he could. That a book suited his whim or mood never yet had tempted him to buy it. Time to gratify caprices when the proper solid foundation of knowledge was laid. He went to the book-shelves now and took from a locked drawer beneath, the sole volume that was not new and shining. It was a first edition of Dryden[2], tobacco-colored with age, the edges of the leaves clinging in dead bits to his fingers.
When Braddock brought Andross to the Works, that poor creature had only the decent suit which his discoverer had bought at Bellefonte for him; at the end of the first three months, therefore, Braddock handed him his salary, advising him to run down to Philadelphia and get clothing for the winter. Two days after Jack dashed into the office exultant, and unrolled this book from sheets of tissue paper.
"Look at that, Braddock! Heard of the auction of old Pepitt's library in New York just in time to catch the owl train and go over. I knew nothing would delight you more! Just look there!" his eyes sparkling and his fingers unsteady as he turned the mouldy leaves. "A first copy of Dryden, 'Glorious John'! There's no doubt it's genuine, sir, genuine! I know this very book. I was with Louis Pepitt when he bought it. I'd back that old fellow's eye for a genuine first edition against any man's in America! and Lord! what a palate he had for wines. His decision was infallible. There, Braddock. I am so glad to be able to give you a little pleasure," looking full in his face as he handed him the book, with his blue eyes wet and bright.
Braddock would very much have preferred a new copy, in uniform binding with his other books, but he did not say so, knowing that the poor fellow meant well. The rest of his money he had laid out on a vase of rare Venetian glass, big enough to hold a single flower, which he carried up to give to Clay's mother. He was a happy man that morning. His miserable or terrible past, whatever it may have been, weighed no heavier on his light heart than did the shabby coat or trousers patched at the knees. He put a fern leaf or two in the vase and set it on Mrs. Braddock's mantel-shelf between the two enormous potichomania urns of wax fruit which she had made herself.
"I know just where to pick up such things, or of course I could not have afforded it," he said, touching it with a sigh of pleasure. "Who knows now but this may belong to the days before the Marano work? There is not a hint of color in it."
"Oh, Venice, indeed!" said the old lady vaguely. "I remember reading a good deal about those doges and their underhanded ways. When Clay was a baby I had more time for secular reading than I've ever had since. It was kind of you to think of me, Mr. Andross."
She turned the vase about, looking at it admiringly, though secretly she thought it but a poor thing, smoked and cloudy, beside her real cut glass decanters, which Mr. Braddock had given her just before he died, and which were locked up in the spare chamber cupboard with her red and gilt china. The old lady prided herself upon her taste, and when Clay brought her anything which did not suit it ("and Clay had no more eye for colour than a turkey-cock"), she laughed at it and him; but she would no more have so hurt this Andross, whom she had known but a month or two, than she would long ago have thrust pins into her baby, when she had a baby of her own.
Braddock could not help thinking of all this now, nor of how Andross was always ready to go with his mother to the little wooden church to listen to old Macintosh during the long, hot mornings. How her clear, delicate voice (Braddock had always been proud of his mother's voice) was lifted up and strengthened by Jack's wonderful baritone! When the two sang together, all the rest of the congregation halted in their race to get through the tune, and Braddock, who had no ear for music, felt the tears come to his eyes and his throat choke unaccountably. He believed as gospel in the election and fore-ordained damnation which Macintosh preached, but he had often an excuse for staying at home; while Andross, whom he suspected of being an infidel, walked regularly beside the old lady to hear the curses of the law, cheerful and light-hearted as a child.
He was a child in too many of his ways, Braddock thought, going into his den and carefully turning his back upon the desk. When he had money to buy clothes, had he not expended it all upon linen fine enough for a prince of the blood? The fellow dropped money as water from a sieve, for any whim of his own or for whoever chose to fleece him. No use for Braddock to advise or beg him to put his salary in a savings bank, to insure his life, or buy western lands, or to tell him, as an example, of the seven thousand dollars which he himself had been able to save. Look at these heaps of books, now! Some in paper covers, others in costly English editions and bindings, thrown pell-mell in the corner as one would orange rinds after the juice had been sucked. German, French, Greek, all together.
One month Andross would take up Descartes'[3] old doctrine of naturalism, and argue that the complete man must first go back to the savage condition and imbibe all human experiences as he rose slowly to civilization. "Saint Simon[4] had the idea, but was a coward. Could not carry it out," he said. The next day he would be en rapport with nothing but the product of generations of culture; there was a fine flavor of repose, he declared, of certainty in knowledge and assured place in the universe which belonged to the castes of the Brahmin, the Faubourg Saint Germain[5], the slaveholder in a nation; of course, tyranny, slavery, all such things went to make it up, but wasn't it worth the whole of them? A costly thing, but all good things were costly, etc., etc. In an hour he might break out a fiery Radical and outrant any red bonnet of the Commune[6]; for Andross, who would nurse a hurt dog for weeks, was the blood-thirstiest of men in his talk. But whatever the caprice of theory or hobby of study, the books were not spared to humour it, and once having served their purpose were thrown aside.
Braddock, usually as hasty of motion as of tongue, stood hesitating and halting through the office, trying to recall all these faults of the man--how weak he was, vivid, erratic: of different flesh and blood, indeed, from the smart, common-sensed young men who had been Braddock's class-mates in college, "any one of whom would have snapped at the place which he had obtained for Andross." It was such steady-going hacks that were fit for work, he thought, irritably, and not John; John was like those winged creatures you read of in the old mythologies--you never knew one minute whether in the next they would be soaring in the clouds or grovelling in the mud[7]. His vices were vices of the blood, perhaps; and if so, hopeless. The clock pointed to the half hour. He had tried in that wasted time to summon all of Andross's petty faults before him, very much as the judge looks in the face of the convict to find proofs of his evil nature before he pronounces sentence of death on him.
But he could defer his work no longer. He had already heard Spellin tap at the door once or twice and go away swearing at his delay. He lowered the window-shades, tried the lock of the door, turned up the lamp. Then he put his key in the desk and opened it.
When Braddock was in haste to catch a train or finish a job, he fumed and trembled with anxiety and impatience; but once he had gone out to save a drowning man at Cape May, and he had when making ready, they said, been the coolest, quietest man on the beach. He was cool and quiet now. His hand was as steady as that day when it held the drowning wretch with a grip like iron, now as he drew the account books out and opened them.
Nobody had access to these books but himself and Andross. The key to the desk he had in his pocket, the duplicate had been left in the lock the night Andross disappeared.
He turned over the leaves rapidly: when a man knows what footmark he is looked for the trail is easily found. Here in May, on the debit side, the company was charged three thousand for timber: the last cipher was of paler ink than the first; again in November another added cipher. Both marked paid. The alterations had been made within a week; a little more time and they would have been as black as the original writing. Braddock closed the books, took up the lamp, and shifted it to the other side of the desk, set the blotter and pen-holder in order, glancing furtively from side to side, and then took from its inner hiding-place the bank-book. One would have thought from his stealthy, colourless face that he was a thief making his final successful haul, so strongly were guilt and marked on it.
He opened at the last cut pages: "July 18th," the day before Andross's disappearance, a check drawn for six thousand dollars. There was no proof there. The company, of course, banked in Lock Haven, and either Braddock or Andross brought up the money for the monthly payment of the hands, or the debts due on lumber, whenever it was convenient to go down and return in daylight, not deeming it safe to carry large sums of money through the wild, mountainous passes. July the 18th was not the time for paying the hands, but there was no matter for suspicion in the fact that Andross had drawn it then. The fact that the cash-box was empty proved nothing; for only the two men knew of the secret lining in an old unlocked chest of drawers in Andross's room where it was their wont to put the money until pay-day. There was still a chance; what if, after all, he should put his hand into the old hiding-place and pull out the roll of notes? If it was empty Andross was dead. He would never live after he had been dragged so low as to steal. braddock lay down the check-book, got up from the desk-stool, and crossed the room. Heaven knows what spasmodic whim made him try to hum a tune as he went, but it was an effort ghastly enough. He pulled out the rattling drawer (in which, for precaution sake, Andross had stowed some ragged winter clothes, laughing at his skill in blinding the always expected burglar), lifted a thin board at the back and thrust in his hand.
It was empty when he took it out.
Five minutes afterward an authoritative bang came to the door, very different from Spellin's rap.
"Braddock! Doctor, I say! It's not possible the man's asleep! Here, it's I."
"Coming, Judge, coming," unlocking the door. Maddox's round figure pushed it open.
"Just got your friend off to bed. Lord, what a tongue that man has! Always was considered a good listener, but he wore me out! Mixes a nice salad, though; deucedly nice. You might as well have come down to supper as stayed drowsing here. Spellin came to say somebody had better be sent to Bear Valley, but I told him you knew what you were about, and then I just walked over to see what it was you were about."
Braddock not answering, the judge dragged a bench out and sat down on it with a thump.
"Hu! What a pull up hill this is! Here, let me trim that lamp; your hands shake like a drunkard's that hasn't got his bitters. Well, well. No wonder it knocked you up. Andross was as good a fellow----" heaving a sigh and smoothing his fat little legs with melancholy strokes. "Aha! you've been looking over accounts, eh? Well, you are the devil of a fellow for business. Newcome, down at Lock Haven this evening, was running me pretty hard about leaving my affairs to you and Andross. 'Anybody could cheat you out of your eyes, Maddox,' he said. 'Always could.' 'Just the reason,' says I, 'that I get these fellows about me whose eyes nobody will throw sand in.' Eh? But I keep a sharp look out myself," wagging his head. "I mean to go over the books with you and see if Andross had them straight. By the way, there's the check-book. Meant to go into the bank down in town to-day if I'd thought of it. Hand it over here, Clay."
Braddock handed it over. He walked quickly to the window, and stood there with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. The judge spoke to him once or twice, but he did not answer.
In his right breast-pocket there was a roll of greenbacks which he had taken to town to give to Laird. He could feel them pressing against his chest. It seemed to him as if all the days and years of work which he had paid for them came back in that moment.
When he had drawn these savings of his from bank, a short time ago, his mother had touched the money with her finger, laughing significantly. "There is your chance to marry, CLay," she said. She knew very well that Clay, like most quiet, long-headed men, had looked forward to marriage since he was a boy, but she did not know that lately he had done it with a definite, settled purpose. So definite, that these notes seemed to carry not only all his past life but all his future with them.
Andross was dead, of that he felt convinced. To protect his name from shame was he to give up----
"Why, God bless my soul, Braddock, here's ---- Why, Andross drew six thousand dollars the day before he was missing! By George, this puts a different ace on the affair!"
"In what way?" Braddock came up to him slowly.
"He did not leave one dollar in the cash box. Not one single red cent! I searched it myself." The judge was standing now, the blood heating his flabby face, his voice thick.
Braddock took the check-book from him, the leaves of which he was flapping excitedly, and shut it quietly. "Andross never kept large sums of money in the office, sir. We had a place in his chamber where we hid it."
He stopped, took up the lamp and set it down again.
"Well? Well?"
"I'll go and look there."
"Yes. Of course, go and look there. I tell you, if that fellow was a thief, after all ----"
He was out of the room but a minute, and came back with a small brown roll in his hand.
"There is your money, Judge. Six thousand. Count it and see if it is correct."
The judge did count it, wetting his thumb and filliping the notes down on his knee with shaking hands.
"Six thousand--yes. All right. Well, thank God for that! It wasn't the vally of the money, Clay. But I'd not for ten times the sum have thought Andross a thief. One has such a regard for that fellow, you see."
Braddock stood buttoning up his waistcoat, which was open. The dull light made his face ghastly. "Yes, one has a regard for him," he said quietly.
CHAPTER III.
WHEN the two men were outside of the office and Braddock had locked it, the judge folded the money and put it in his pocket. "I'll take charge of this until you come back from Bear Valley, Clay. By the way, you're to stop at the house, and take a cup of coffee or something."
"I haven't time for that."
"Anna wants to speak with you about Andross."
Braddock went without reply, as a matter of course. Anna Maddox when she was a baby in arms had been able to do what she pleased with her father; he had had half a dozen other children, but none of them he thought had a hand so soft or eyes so innocent and affectionate. Every man or boy who came near her since had followed his example. They might love other women better, but it was she whom they obeyed; her whims that they delighted to humour; they wished their own wives or sweethearts had such soft clinging hands, or knew the affectionate trick of her blue eyes.
Braddock, with the stunning fresh weight of his sacrifice upon him, with the thoughts of Andross's dead body so real that he felt as if he could stretch out his hand and touch it, would have given much for one cheery word from the woman whom he meant to make his wife, but would not allow himself or her that comfort; yet he gave half an hour to Anna. Any other man would have done the same. Braddock remembered too as he came up to the door that his trousers were muddy, and his face unwashed. Whereas, if it had been Isabel's door, and he had been covered with Andross's blood, he would not have once thought of any annoyance or feeling she might have had about it.
The garden through which he passed was a real rest and pleasure for any hard-worked eyes and brain. Andross had planted and kept it in order. Andross always said Anna was only an educated Maud Muller[8], and ought to be framed by all the gracefullest simplicity and freshness of Nature; no tree but the elm or waving willow should hedge the house in which she lived; no flower without perfume should bloom in her garden. The very lights, Braddock thought, as he knocked at the hall door, burned more softly here than elsewhere; the lamp-shades were of Andross's choosing; the bow-window for flowers back of the hall he had planned, and, in fact, for lack of carpenters and glaziers, almost built. It made a background of massed colour now for Anna, as she walked up and down the matted floor waiting for Braddock. The scent of the flowers was faint, her dress was delicate and cool; that was all he saw. No man ever went away from Anna and remembered her muslins or merinos; they only felt as never before that they had been in the presence of a woman, and were apt to talk a good deal thereafter of how the tenderer sex was vine-like and helpless and loveable, and to think of themselves in the relation of an oak.
Braddock, when he was with his betrothed, had always been so busy confiding his plans and consulting her that he seldom remembered whether she was a good-looking woman or not, but he noticed the face of the judge's little girl every day. Sometimes she would put roses or starry white flowers in her curly, light hair, and so plumed and vaunted herself that the dullest man would be enchanted with her vanity, as apparent as that of a baby just beginning to be conscious of its body.
To-night, however, her hair was straight, her nose pinched, and her eyes had dark purple rings about them. She hurried up to Braddock, the moment he opened the door, in a timid, fluttering way that reminded him, modest man as he was, of a little boat scudding under shelter of a man-of-war.
"You've heard it?" she cried in her little falsetto of a voice. "Oh, Dr. Braddock, it's so dreadful--so dreadful! You men can bear to talk about him as dead, but it is quite a different thing to me."
The voice was such a weak and plaintive pipe, she looked up at him, patting her hands over her hair, so helplessly, there was such a bloom of youth and innocent passion over her whole delicate body, that Braddock, with all his Scotch common sense and coolness, was bewildered with a new rush of emotion. He felt as if he had not half mourned for Andross, now that this little creature unconsciously gave him a glimpse into her heart.
"I did not know," he said bluntly, "that Andross and you were lovers, Miss Maddox. This makes the matter worse, and God knows it was bad enough."
"Oh, no, no," she protested, "it was not love at all. It was only friendship. But if she is dead, what shall I do? Oh dear, what shall I do?" She shook with her sobs from head to foot, the tears rolled over her small, pale-tinted face as she stood looking up to him.
"Tut, tut!" said Braddock, and took her hand.
He was seriously pained for the silly, indiscreet little thing; but what the deuce had the judge been about to allow a man like Andross to obtain such a control over her? Was he blind? Of course, in the office or with men, John, though taken from a coaling-hearth, was fit for any place. But with this lovely woman, frail and pure as a white rose-bud----.
"Mr. Andross was a friend to us all, Miss Maddox. I am going now to Bear Valley to see what can be done. In the meantime----"
"Not was. Don't say was! He is only a friend to you, but he is all I have. All!"
"In my opinion," sharply, "that's not right. Where is your father, child? Do all his care and love for you go for nothing against this bow-window and flower-pots and jimcracks which a stranger has made for you in a year?"
She drew back from him with a certain childlike dignity which had its force.
"What are his gifts to me?" with an indignant gesture. "He was congenial with me. He understood me. No one else does. I am quite alone now. You do not understand what I have lost."
Dr. Braddock looked down at her in a dumb dismay and then he looked--at his watch.
"If there is any chance that Andross is not dead, every moment we lose may be worth his life. I must go at once. Tell me what can I do for you?" stooping over her with that caressing tone which all men used to Anna.
"Take me with you. It was for that I sent for you."
"With me? To Bear Valley? Impossible."
"It does not matter to me about the possibility," smiling. "I intend to go."
"You forget the danger of the road, and the time of night and ----" stammered Braddock. He could not, with those clear blue eyes looking into his, hint at any other objection which worldlier women would have foreseen. "There comes your father. He will tell you it is impracticable."
"Dr. Braddock," laying her hand on his, "my father is no judge of this matter. Neither are you. If Andross is dead or in danger, it is my right to go to him. If," looking him full in the eye, "he has done wrong, I can bring him back. I am nearer to him than you."
Braddock was silenced as by a blow. After all, there was a higher law of love and helpfulness before which danger and conventionality were trifles. If she loved this poor criminal, a word from her might do more to save him than all his efforts or Macintosh's exhortations. But how did she come to suspect there had been wrongdoing? Women had eyes like ferrets, no matter what their youth and innocence.
Judge Maddox came in while he was searching for a word.
"What, Braddock, not off yet? Anna, you ought to consider poor Andross and not detain the doctor. Andross has been kind to you, I'm sure. The handiest fellow about a house, you see, Braddock."
"So kind that he is quite necessary to me, papa, and I propose to go with Doctor Braddock to find him," tying on a pink opera cloak and drawing its bewitching hood over her head.
"Absurd, Anna! Are you mad?" But Braddock noted that the judge's face wore a look of alarm which hinted that he thought the matter settled when Anna planned it. "Why, the road to Bear Valley is up the steepest side of Gray Mountain, dangerous for the surest-footed horse in daylight. It was there that Roskyns killed a panther last January; and as for rattlesnakes----. Besides, what would people say if you went scouring the country at the dead of night with one young man in search of another?"
Anna's fair skin crimsoned a little.
"Yes, I knew there were snakes, and Roskyns told me himself about the panther," she said so regretfully that Braddock doubted for the moment if the hope of an adventure had not tempted her, and looked at her in perplexed wonder.
It is women like Anna that are sphinxes to men, and are therefore treated with a sort of awe-struck homage.
"Then you'll not go, my dear?" blustered the judge, but doubtfully.
"Certainly not, papa, if you disapprove of it," with a bright, affectionate smile which caused Braddock as never before to reflect how exquisite a thing was filial obedience. The judge began a dribble of directions, warnings, and advice to him, in the midst of which Anna disappeared.
"Here's your horse," as they went out of the door. "Joe has brought him up. Now be off, and good luck, and God bless you."
Braddock lost no time. The heels of his horse struck sparks from the flinty road. In half an hour he had left the Works and all trace of human habitation behind and reached the gorge between the mountains. His only path up the heights was the bed made by the current from a mountain spring, dry in summer, but in which the mossy boulders lay green and slimy. The solitude was absolute; the unbroken forest, filled with the inexplicable noises which belong to the woods at night, stretched like a vast wall on either side of him to the horizon. There was an opening at last, where an old Indian trail crossed the bed of the brook, and in the dim moonlight which the thinner foliage admitted, he saw a dark moving figure waiting apparently for him. Coming closer, he found it to be a horse and a woman on it--a woman with a small-featured, baby face, looking beseechingly at him out of a pink hood.
CHAPTER IV.
"I TOLD you I was coming," said Anna gently.
"What the deuce," Braddock began inwardly, but he only answered, "Yes, Miss Maddox," and quietly dismounted to lead her horse by the rein. If it had been Isabel or anybody amenable to reason, he would have continued hot in his wrath; but who could crush such a white dove as this by displeasure? Before he had gone a dozen yards he forgot, in the feeling of how sublime an act of devotion this was in the child, the discomfort of stumbling up a mountain pass, leading two horses, one or the other of which perpetually tramped upon his shins. She had forgotten danger, propriety, even the obedience to her father which he had thought so admirable, to follow the call from the one human being she loved. Braddock, narrow, clean-minded man, looked at her from time to time with a wordless awe and tenderness. She had dropped the reins instantly at his bidding and sat quite helpless but for his guidance, her hands folded outside of the cloak over her breast, her pure face turned heavenward. As a chance ray of light touched it she seemed a saint to him. If she had persisted in holding the reins and managing for herself, very probably he would have turned back and marched her straight to her father as a self-willed little minx.
Braddock was a commonplace fellow who liked life to go on in an orderly jog-trot way: breakfast, office, dinner, bed, like so many due bills to duty paid and receipted. But to-night with his hand on this girl's rein, passing through these dreadful solitudes, he felt as if he had suddenly opened up the depth of the realities of human life in all its vague mystery--God overhead, the fires of hell waiting, and death at hand. Andross, the stout bright-faced fellow who counted pig-iron with him every day, was in fact a lost soul, that for years had been struggling out of vice and the darkness and underside of life into higher levels--with what fierce agony of effort Braddock now could see. He had failed; if he were dead yonder in the mountains, had failed for all eternity. This little girl at whose silly vain chatter Braddock had laughed indulgently every day, suddenly rose into a height far above him, as one of God's messengers, going through night and danger and risk of shame unappalled upon her errand.
He wondered, with the awe with which one would look at a drama whereof heaven and hell were the background, whether if Andross was alive she could save him; whether he were one of the elect or one of that countless multitude condemned before Time was. These were terrible realities, to which Braddock had hitherto approached only through vague Sunday reflections or Doctor Macintosh's prayers. He had an uncomfortable sense of sacrilege in applying them to this every-day business and these every-day people.
If any human agency could be sent as a Saviour to the lost wandering soul, surely this pure woman was fit for the errand. He thought of Jephthah's daughter going out upon the mountains ere she offered herself a sacrifice[9]; of Una unharmed on her pilgrimage by beasts of prey[10]; whatever images his narrow imagination and scanty reading supplied him with, of fair, of saintly, he bestowed upon her as he walked humbly at her side.
Anna bent down to look curiously at the wet rocks. "Now, I suppose if there are any rattlesnakes anywhere they would be here?"
"Nothing would harm you on your errand," cried Braddock, almost in a state of religious exaltation.
"No, I don't really suppose a snake could reach me up here," she piped in her sweet, pleading little voice, drawing her legs up higher on the horse. "Besides, it would attack you first. Of course you're armed in case we should meet a bear?"
"No. There's no danger from bears in this time of the year. Don't be frightened. Keep your thoughts clear, for your great errand. Though if we find him alive, it will be given to you what to speak."
"Oh! I'm never at a loss for words. Papa calls me a perfect chatter-box. I shall scold Mr. Andross roundly for giving us all such a fright; he'll have no petting from me, you may rest assured of that. Well, now, I was sure we would meet a panther or something," in a most pathetic cadence. "My cousin, Mrs. Large, was in a party once which was attacked by wolves in the Pyrenees, and such a talk as all her family have kept up about it! It has been their cheval de bataille[11] of conversation ever since, and here have I lived all my life right beside wild beasts, plenty of them, and never had an adventure! I was quite sure of one to-night."
There was something dampening to Braddock's enthusiasm, it is true, in these little dribbles, but the fountain was so pure! He looked up at the clear, delicately cut face, and felt the small hand laid confidingly on his shoulder, and was with Una and all the heroic, saintly company again. The child was but a child, but because of her simplicity the fitter for God's messenger. After she had kept silence five minutes it seemed to him that the chance rays of light made a halo for her head.
Anna was thinking what a pretty pose hers was on a horse. Braddock was like a knight--a much better figure for a knight than Andross, who was undeniably stout and wore no beard either; and this cloak she had on, how lucky it was soft cashmere instead of any stiffer stuff--it draped so well. Only, white would have looked better than pink.
They came out now from the thick forest into an open space--a range of ridges from which the underbrush and trees had been partially cleared. Here and there upon the cleared space lay portentous dark shadows.
"You must dismount here," said Braddock. They had reached the district of the abandoned ore-banks full, as he knew, of old shafts from sixty to two hundred feet deep and left open, save for the brambles and berry bushes which covered their tops. "You could not take ten steps here on horseback without peril of your life, and I really don't see," in perplexity, "how it is possible for you to advance even on foot."
"Oh, I am sure you will take care of me," murmured Anna.
Yesterday, indeed up to nine o'clock this evening, Anna had cared for nothing in the world so much as Andross. When she suspected him of guilt, her devotion (very genuine of its kind) rose to fever heat. She remembered one of her songs about the "one who ne'er would flee from the tiger slain, but soothe its dying pain," etc., etc., and had been singing it through her tears all day.
But Andross was so provokingly long in being found, and Braddock was like Greatheart[12] or Sir Galahad[13]. Really, she had never observed how finely cut a nose and chin he had, nor how well his pale, lean face was thrown into relief by the black whiskers. She had always thought him a bigoted and sour sort of man, and a good deal of a prig; but now----
"You will take care of me," she said again, in a musical whisper which would have reminded a sharp woman of Rosalind's murmured, "Woo me, woo me," which thrilled the listening forest of Ardenne.
It thrilled Braddock uncomfortably.
"Perhaps I had better get you to shelter," he said, with awkward haste. "I had a superstitious fancy that you would be guided somehow to Andross, but I can find him as well by myself, probably."
"What are you going to do with me, then?" holding his arm with fluttering, feeble hands.
"I'll take you to Colonel Latimer's. There is a light from his windows--that red speck yonder."
"Oh, dear! Isabel Latimer is such a dreadfully sensible, unfeeling creature! But one would not like to be dragged out of an old shaft like a rat in a hole, to be sure. Well, Dr. Braddock, you can take me wherever you choose."
They reached the colonel's house in a few minutes. It lay in the mouth of the gorge, surrounded by the brawling waters of the creek, but Braddock knew the way too well to be in danger of pitfalls. He knew, too, that the light was in Isabel's window; she had waited, perhaps, for some message, on his return, which he had forgotten to send. No matter; she would forget her disappointment now, in sympathy with this child and her errand. He lifted Anna from her horse as reverently as though it had been Godiva[14] herself, and opened the door, which was unlocked, according to the habit of the mountains.
Miss Latimer came down the stairs the next moment with a light in her hand. Her eyes sparkled at sight of Braddock. The doctor was in such haste to show his heroine to her that he forgot he ahd not seen her for a week. People were more apt to think of Isabel's sympathy than of Isabel herself.
He left the little pink-draped figure by the door.
"It is Anna, Miss Maddox, Bell; come and help the poor child! She--I was going in search of Andross and she would come with me. I thought it would be better to leave her here. You could take care of her."
The sparkle was quite gone out now from Isabel's eyes.
"Miss Maddox would not be very efficient in a searching party, I imagine," eyeing her across the hall with an amused laugh in her face.
Braddock remembered angrily that women were always hard on women, yet even the hardest, he would have supposed, might soften to that lovely little enthusiast.
"At least you will be kind to her, and give her what comfort you can?"
"I should suppose that, just now, would be water and towels. Why, Nannie!" advancing cheerfully, "what a woe-begone, drabbled object you are! Go up to the front chamber, you know the way, and go to bed directly. I must speak to Dr. Braddock alone a moment."
"Sending me off like a baby that she may take possession of the doctor!" thought Anna; and then the vine-like creature, after the habit of vines, being thus summarily robbed of one support, put out its tendrils in search of another.
"To bed, Isabel?" she said coldly. "How can any of us sleep when Mr. Andross is lying dead in the mountains?"
Braddock's face was filled with the tenderest pity, but Isabel listened calmly.
"You at least will be much more apt to sleep if you are in bed," she said good-humouredly, and watched her without speaking until she had gone up the stairs. Then she turned to Braddock:
"You need look no further," she said, "Andross is here."
CHAPTER V.
"ALIVE? Alive?" He could not say anything more. The blood in his veins stood still; something choked his throat. Braddock was surprised at himself; he had not known he cared so much for anybody, much less this idle fellow.
Isabel turned to him suddenly. "You love like a woman, Clay." She had only touched him on the arm, but her eyes grew wet and her cheek burned so that it seemed as if she has kissed him.
"Why didn't you tell that poor little creature and send her to bed comforted?"
"Time enough for her to know to-morrow. Mr. Andross is in the front room. He thought you would be here early in the evening, and has been waiting for you."
"I'll go to him. Good-night, Bell." After he had taken the lamp from her and hurried across the hall, he remembered that they had been separated longer than ever before. He ought to have been more tender in his greeting--have kissed her, he thought, reddening. But then Bell was not a woman to care for caresses or any trivial expressions of affection. Andross was nearly right when he talked of her Roman head; both features, he thought, and character were of the old Roman mould--graver, more liberal than American types. Yet she need not have put that poor little Maddox girl so utterly out of the question to-night in her large, good-humoured way, as though it were a gnat she was brushing aside.
He stopped a minute at the door, behind which was Andross, not to steady his nerves, for Braddock would go about all the business of life in a matter-of-fact way, would die most probably, as he had made love, in a politely respectable fashion. He would have been very glad if Andross could have come right into the office to-morrow morning, and they could have gone on with work, smoking cigars and talking over the morning's Herald and Tribune together as usual, without any pother of welcome or confession or reconciliation. Braddock, the Presbyterian, might hate sin, but Braddock, the man, hated a scene more, and besides he had that terrible embarrassment of shame upon him with which an innocent man faces a guilty one dear to him.
When he opened the door and Andross came to meet him, it was Braddock who looked the criminal.
The men shook hands.
"Ah, Braddock! You came up this evening?" said Andross, gulping through commonplaces as men do, though death be tugging at their throats.
"Yes."
"Have a good run up?"
"No, behind time. The train was delayed at Williamsport as usual. The company takes no oversight of these branch roads. Why, Andross!" as they came up to the light. "You've been ill. Sit down, man, sit down!"
Braddock had never in his life perhaps expressed sympathy with mental trouble, but the gaunt face and sunken eyes of the man whom he had left a fortnight ago plump and hearty were things he could talk of fluently. "What is it, Andross? You look as if you were struck with death!"
"No. I'm too toughly built. A man of my constitution don't die of grief or shame; more's the pity. Twice out in the mountains I tried to put an end to myself this week, but it ended like Göthe's going to bed with a dagger and poison.[15] It seemed to me there must be a chance for me yet, if only in the fact that you could be as patient with such a man of straw as you have been with me." The face he turned on Braddock was full of a fine sensitiveness, and eager and appealing as a woman's. But the doctor turned from it impatiently. A man of straw, indeed! He had not will enough to put the knife to his throat after he had made a thief of himself. Braddock walked up and down once or twice before he could reply.
"Your nervous system is run down, I suspect," he said drily. "Go to bed now, and in the morning I'll see what will be best to give you. Quinine, probably, or bromide of potassium."[16]
Andross laughed. "You're more practical than I thought. You dragged me out of hell once, and you know it; and now, when I have gone back again, you give me bromide of potassium."
"You forget, Andross, that I know nothing of your past life. I never knew what curse had brought you as low as you were when I found you--whether it was drink or cards or women. Nor do I know how it took hold of you again. What does that matter for me? My words of advice would prevail nothing if there is a sentence against you----" He stopped short there. He could not believe Andross was one of the multitude foredoomed for destruction. He was standing in front of Braddock in his shirt sleeves. The light fell on his bared neck and uplifted head. In spite of the gauntness and haggardness of the man there was still that certain air of youth and springiness and wholesome energy about him which Braddock always had told himself could only belong to one whose life had been temperate and cleanly.
"He has been neither profligate nor debauchee," he thought, trying as usual to find a reason for the blind faith he had put in him.
"No. It was none of those ordinary vices that dragged me down. There never seemed to me to be any great temptation in them." He paused a minute. "I don't know why I should say anything more to you. I have no wish to come whining to you about any exceptional hardness in my lot."
"I have no wish to know your secret, Andross," coldly. At that there was a weak, uncertain quiver in the face of the guilty man, peculiar to him. The moment, like a woman, that he had thrust sympathy away, he craved it more greedily.
"It has been harder than other men's. I've been tangled in a net, by no fault of my own, since I was a boy, and it has held me down. You know whether I have struggled faithfully against it or not. It's not worth while to struggle now any longer."
"Bah! That is sheer folly," vehemently. "If you tell me that all your struggles may be unavailing to insure your salvation for the next world, I can understand you. But there's no power which can prevent a man from leading a decent and honest life in this, if he chooses."
Andross had turned from him and stood leaning on the mantel-shelf, still looking down into the open, fireless hearth. He did not move, although the tall, black-a-vised man beside him, in his eagerness, had caught him almost roughly by the arm. Outside, a sickly gray light began to struggle through the night at the east. The wind had died out. There was silence that might be felt in the mountains and in the sky. Even to Braddock's unimaginative soul it seemed as though there was a listening pause in Nature while this man's soul that had come so close at times to God, stood for the last time at the crossing of the ways, to choose between life and death.
And only he, Braddock, held him by the hand. It was he who had been appointed his brother's keeper. It would have been so natural and comfortable to go back to every-day ways and gossip about politics or the next week's yield of pig-iron, and to shut their eyes to this awful undercurrent of sin and remorse and death below. It was the first time in his life Braddock had dared to speak in such wise to a man. The shame and the novelty of it made his voice hoarse and his commonplace salesman's face set and rigid, while Andross, usually all nerve and fire, was heavy and motionless as a log.
"I am not fit to talk to you. I never can talk of religious matters, Jack. If it was Dr. Macintosh now----. But for God's sake, be a man. It seems to me as if you stood on the edge of the pit. There's no force that need compel you to go down it. There are no devils to enter into a man now as in old times."
He stopped, confused. His creed, taught him in the village church, told him that there were devils; that there was no hope for Andross if he had not been born with his name written beforehand in an invisible, unalterable list yonder; but the every-day experience he had gained knocking around from the Works to New York forced him to believe that no man was a thief or liar but by his own free will. A theologian might reconcile the two; but Clay was no theologian.
Andross answered as from far-off reasonings of his own. "You're mistaken. There are forces outside of a man nowadays--here, all about him--just as strong to compel him to ill-doing as ever there were in the wilderness or in hell. Talk of your devils--Satan and Apollyon[16]!" with a sudden discordant laugh. "I don't know them! I'd sooner run the risk of facing the whole batch of them than one little red-headed man I know. They'd do my soul less harm. None of their flames are as terrible as a policeman's tap on the shoulder--that is," catching his breath, "if I were a poor wretch who knew he was in danger of a jail cell while he was trying to be an honest man and a gentleman." He pushed up the window as though choking for air, but none came: a sullen torpor, dark and breathless, held the night.
"I don't follow you clearly," said the doctor drily. He sat down by the table, pushed some books back to make room for his elbow, looked at his pink, well-shaped nails with a face of grave rebuke. "I know that sort of infidel heterodoxy is fashionable, but I confess I never understood it. To compare the Author of all evil to a policeman is a belittling view of the truths of Holy Writ, to my mind."
"I'll tell you frankly, Braddock, where I stand," as though he had not heard him. "For years I have been in the hold--not of a man, nor a devil, but of a corporation. That sounds commonplace enough, don't it? You could easily get out of that halter? Wait one minute, Braddock. The purpose of this club or organization is unmixed evil. As for its power--it has money. Unlimited money. It buys and sells at will the government and interests of the city where it belongs: it controls the press, the pulpit, the courts. The best men are muzzled by it, are forced against their will to serve it. What was I to fight against it? It needed me, and it has an absolute hold on me--I can't tell you now how it gained it." Just then he caught the doctor's keen black eyes under their suspicious brows fixed on him.
"No, I'm not making melodrama out of this matter. I've been the slave of this Thing. I've been forced to work for it with both body and brain; though, you would say, God gave me both to make an honest Christian man out of me. I suppose He did----"
"I think I should have been able to master any such force as that," dogmatically. "If a thing is wrong, there's the law. There's public opinion to back you in putting it down."
"You might fight against a man. But a powerful corporation meets you with the brain power of a multitude of men, but with no conscience, nothing to which you can appeal. It buys the law. It buys public opinion."
Braddock had been reading Andross's face with its protruding forehead and weak chin.
"Now I understand you pretty thoroughly, John," he said frankly. "You'll not mind if I'm candid, eh? I'm a pretty sharp reader of human nature, you know, and it strikes me that the difficulty has been in yourself. Your imagination is always at white heat, you know: you've exaggerated some ordinary political club into a monster that devours men's souls and bodies. You do that sort of thing a good deal, Andross. And then you--well, I don't say that you're not string in a certain way, but----"
"I understand, a man of straw."
"Now don't be hasty. If you'd said a man of wax--. I mean that you are influenced by people whom you like, unwarrantably. Now I should have said to these people calmly, 'I can not do as you require. It is wrong. To the law and the testimony.' What possible hold could they have on you which would resist that?"
There was a pause.
"No matter. They did have it. They have it yet. I can not explain that to you, Braddock," hastily. "I went to the coaling hearths to escape them. When I came here I thought I was still out of their reach. It was the first time I had ever seen the way clear for me to be like other men, even in the matter of earning money honestly and being paid for it. You and Maddox had confidence in me. I thought I could make a position for myself here, and some day marry, and have a home and wife and children as other men can do."
"Yes, I understand, Andross," gently, thinking of the child up stairs. "Well----?"
"That was only a week ago. Then they found me out. I am in their power, Braddock, as if they had a halter about my neck. I had the choice to go with them or buy them off."
Both men were silent for awhile.
"Go on," said Braddock.
"I--bought them off."
He watched the doctor furtively. Braddock stood with his back to him. A damp, chilly wind blew through the room, heavy with fog. There was a break in the solid rampart of gray behind the Muncey range, an opening as into a new firmament full of shifting, uncertain colour. Andross long afterward remembered that red watery depth together with the breathless pause of waiting.
Braddock, he saw, was not surprised at his last words; he knew him already then to be a thief?
While he stood like a miserable convict, his weak mouth open, staring at the doctor's back, Braddock was running over the whole situation in his own mind.
He could not bear that this poor creature should go on and confess his crime; he would as lief have had him commit hari-kari[17] beside him.
Let him confess it to God. If they did talk of the money, then he must explain that he had replaced it, and that would be a miserably mean bit of bragging. It would crush Andross to the earth; for he knew how the money had been saved and for what. "He'd never look me in the face, going about the Works, knowing he owed me such a sacrifice as that," he thought. And he was going to bring back Andross to the Works. He believed he would be honest in future, not because of this rubbish he had told him about a Ring, but because, because----Well, he always had believed in Andross.
For Braddock could give no better reasons for any of his opinions than for having an aquiline nose on his face.
While he was thus sharply debating the matter, and deciding that when Andross was in the office he could keep a supervision over him, that the judge should suffer no loss, that poor wretch came up behind him, and laying his hands on his shoulders, turned him around. His face was ghastly.
"Look here, I'm in your hands, Braddock; you're the only friend I've got in the world. Do what you please with me."
For a moment the doctor could not collect his wits to reply.
"There now! there now!" loosening Andross's hold. "I don't like scenes, John. Go to bed, and report yourself at the Works early in the morning. That's all I can say to you."
"Do you mean----" Could it be that the loss of the money was not yet discovered? There was a chance then that he might replace it? He had meant to replace it until the consciousness of being a thief had driven him mad.
"I mean that you are to come back to the office and go to work. If your old enemies trouble you let me know. I'll attend to them," with an inflexible crook of the eyebrows and cocking of the chin, which in anybody else, Andross would have quizzed as intolerable conceit and priggishness. But the humbled fellow looked up to the young doctor as one of the saints of the earth.
"I'll go down then, Clay. If you say so. It's a chance for me to be a man again."
"Very well. I'm going back to-night. Explain to Miss Latimer in the morning that I've gone."
"Yes. She----it was Miss Latimer found me in the mountain to-day. If it had not been for her I should not have been alive now. I think God made her different from other women."
"Oh, it was she that found you, eh? Well, good night." He took Andross's cold hand and dropped it quickly, going out hurriedly without meeting the dreadful pleading look which he knew was fastened upon him.
"He does not know!" said Andross with a long breath. He felt for the minute as though he were an innocent man.
"He would have been alive whether Bell found him or not," rang the doctor's thoughts. "He has not strength of mind enough to kill himself. And as for Bell, how is she different from all other women? That little thing of the judge's, now--her devotion and exaltation of nature were something really remarkable. Bell is the dearest girl in the world, but as for being different from other women--nonsense '
CHAPTER VI.
AS long as the night lasted, Jack Andross knew that in spite of his reprieve he never should hold up his head among men again. He felt his hands, muttering to himself that this was the flesh of a thief; he recalled the faces of all the men he had seen in rogues' galleries and the dock, and told himself again and again that he was no better than they: just as he had been talking to himself for days up in the hills, taking out his pistol now and then and cocking it. Why in God's name had he not used it, and put an end to all this intolerable misery? Presently, however, the day began to break, and, being feverish, he went to the window to catch the cold air, and then waited to see the red light on the creek beside the house. The water went brawling over the stones; it was like voices talking; another minute and one could tell what they said; the colonel's big dog came rushing through the currant-bushes up to the house knocking the dew off them like rain. Andross whistled to him: "Hah, you scoundrel! After sheep, eh?" he said. Then he leaned farther out to see the chickens come clucking up from the barn, and finding some crackers in his pocket, whistled to them and threw out the crumbs. He must remember to bring the colonel some Poland hens next time he drove over to Millhall. Just then the old black man who was Bell's cook and maid of all work opened the kitchen door, and looking up touched his hat to Andross.
"Pretty fa'h mohnin, sah. Gwine take a bath 's usual?" For Andross often came up to spend the night with the colonel. He nodded and went down to Otho for towels. "'Rival in de night, sah! Doctor from de Wohks and young Miss Maddox."
Andross threw the towels over his arm, and crossed the yard stopping at the gate. "Is Miss Maddox here now, Oth?" he said, without looking back.
"Yes, sah. Doctor's gone back."
As he passed along the creek bank he was conscious only of an agony of shame, not remorse. He could face God or the world, but not this woman.
But the water in the creek was deliciously cold, and as he came back from his bath the wind blew in his face, a flock of king-birds flew about him chirping, his feet sank up to the ankle in mosses: through the brown needles of the pine the Indian pipe thrust its fairy pillars of carved ivory. He stooped to dig out a clump for Bell, remembering that she preferred them to flowers, and then climbed the rocks to gather the laurel whose waxen clusters tinged the whole mountain pink. The laurel and the cold and the dawn, even the chirping birds, in spite of himself, filled him with a strange delight with which Rings and stolen greenbacks had nothing to do. He would not give up his chance! The world was a good and kindly world! If he told the whole story to all his friends in the mountains they would understand and forgive him. He would go and make his confession to Anna--now!
He went scrambling down the cliffs, loaded with his laurel, when he caught sight of the colonel near the barn. After all, what was the use of confessing to everybody? These people were not in God's place to forgive sin. He would tell Braddock, of course. He wished he had done it last night. But he would replace the money--he always meant to replace it--before he told Anna. He could not drive her from him now, until he had won her. In the meantime there was Colonel Latimer, a man of honour like no other, why not consult him? He would go at once and tell him the whole story. So he scrambled on dropping his laurel with his face in quite a glow of satisfaction at his rational decision. The colonel was a man of the world as well as honour. He would know what a Ring was, and why he had been as one might say, compelled to--borrow this money, and would set it in the proper light to Braddock.
The colonel had dragged on his trousers and run down barefooted to stop Towers, the miller, whom he saw going by with a string of eels. "The very thing!" he whispered excitedly to Bell, nearly upsetting her in the hall. "I've lain awake half the night contriving a decent breakfast!" He had just paid Towers double price as Andross came up, and was soothing Oth's wrath about it.
"God bless my soul, man, suppose it was swindling. When you look closely into the matter Towers has eleven children and an aguish wife. Eels are eels in a case like that. Halloo! Mr. Andross," with the eels still in one hand and holding out the other. "I was chagrined beyond measure to be in bed last night when you came. It's this confounded leg of mine. Neuralgic. Not a symptom of gout in it. I'm a little careless, too, for a man of my age. Just ran down barefoot--pressing business with--well, Otho. Look at that, sir. You can understand a sunrise like that better than any man I know."
Rain which was in the air thickened the sky without darkening it, so that it absorbed the dawn into retreating depths of nebulous gray, within which shone a golden lustre. Below, the unbroken hills of green forest rolled wave after wave to the horizon's edge, except where the precipitous heights of the Nittany Range heaped their gray rocks in inextricable confusion.
The colonel's house, standing in the gorge, was shut in on every side by these threatening recesses, which even at noon were gloomy, and fit haunts apparently for any beast of prey; but the damp soft light gave to them now a strange tenderness and cheerfulness: the gigantic cedars on the upper peaks showed but a black fringe against the sky; the mountain springs, discoloured by the pine roots, ran in glittering brown threads over the rocks to the pasture lands. The morning framed it all into one glad homelike picture; the very windows of the dilapidated old house in the gorge behind them shone yellow in the glow, but the whiff of smoke from the chimney was red; the blood-coloured beet-tops and the tomato vines were thick set with dew, every chicken and duck or pigeon scrambling for corn about Oth's heels at the kitchen door had its cheery cackle or coo. The colonel stood in the gateway swinging his eels to and fro in his enthusiasm, waving them to the finest points of view. His suspenders dangled about his legs; his thin, high-nosed face cut the wind like the prow of a boat; his bald pate rose into heights above it as if to assert its baldness; never before, Andross thought, in all his length and leanness, had he been so absurdly long and lean as now. But there had always been something about the colonel from the days when he was a dashing young fellow on the town, which attracted all women: it attracted Andross in precisely the same way now. Braddock was a little ashamed of his father-in-law's vagaries, but Jack watched him with a good deal more tender respect than he would have showed to the colonel's noble daughter.
The colonel turned away with a half sigh when the glow began to fade. "Here, Otho, take your eels. No, Mr. Andross, town can't give us that, eh? I've no doubt that you are homesick as I am sometimes for it; opera, theatre, libraries, and the people, sir, and the stir--the being close to the heart of things, eh? But the sight of the sun coming up over old Nittany sets me all right again. I don't wonder the young fellows born here come back, after trying the West, and fall to ploughing over the boulders. 'Pon my soul! I'm glad to see you!" energetically as they went into the house. "Do you know it's two months since anybody has broken bread with us?"
Andross glanced down at his muddy and ragged trousers; he was beginning to come back to the world and the ways of it. Colonel Latimer whispered more energetically than before: "I see! Hunting rig is not the thing to appear in before the ladies. Now don't say a word, my dear fellow. I'll bring up a pair in five minutes--a little too long, but we'll turn them up. Nothing like soldiering for making a man a tailor. Go right up to your room."
Andross went up dazed and silenced. How could he break in on the old man's single-hearted delight in his guest, or in the pure beauty of the morning with his vile nightmare story of Rings and robbery? Presently, after breakfast, as soon as they were alone. How in the deuce was he to get into the colonel's trousers? He laughed, and with the laugh the story of the stolen money was a dimmer nightmare than ever.
"Here you are!" The colonel tapped at the door. "They're very loose for me--there is a difference in our size probably. Now come down as soon as possible. Bell has a delightful surprise for you: a companion for you over to the Works, if you persist in going."
He knew, of course, that the colonel meant Miss Maddox. She had often last winter driven up with Andross to the gorge and spent the night with them.
Everything then was to go in the old way. Just as though he were not a thief!
He was standing before the glass ready to shave, and saw his face red with pleasure, and his eyes kindled at the thought of Anna. He looked at the razor. Better he should draw it across his bare throat now than deceive her and be as he had been to her!
Here's linen, Mr. Andross; and put this pink bud in your button-hole, and no woman will see the fit of your trousers." He heard the door close behind the colonel, and his steps as he went into his own room, and afterwards, being dressed, down-stairs; but he still stood irresolute, not yet determined how he should go to meet Anna.
In the meantime the poor little woman had seen her lover, whom she supposed to be dead, standing in the gate with the colonel, and had sobbed and cried her joy out behind the window-curtain. The tears were little drops, and the sobs little sobs, perhaps, but they were real. She would like to have gone down and hung on his broad breast, and combed his shaggy hair with her tiny pink fingers and smoothed the pain or trouble out of his heart with her touch. He was all the dearer because of his breadth and shagginess and mysterious grief. A different man from that lank, neat Braddock, that résumé of all the moral virtues! She was glowing through all her delicate flesh while he was in sight, and chilly and shivering from head to foot as soon as he was gone; she was the woman Shakspeare loved to draw; her bounty as boundless as Juliet's, looking and longing from a window long ago, her love (while it lasted) quite as deep.
Usually she did not favour Isabel with her society when in the house, but she crept into her room now, and asked leave to dress there, and hung about Bell, taking down her mass of fine brown hair, and dressing it again with her more skillful, swift fingers. "How white and stately your neck is!" she said, kissing it, and then curling her arm about it and resting her head on Isabel's bosom just as a baby would. Usually Bell was irritable when indifferent people kissed or touched her, but she patted the pale little face kindly enough as she lifted it off.
"Your head aches, Pussy?"
Anna sighed but said nothing. "She thinks nobody can have feelings but herself, the--the intellectual Glumdalclitch[18]," she thought spitefully. She had a nice little talent for giving well-fitting nicknames, and was rather pleased with this. "I did not care for her," she thought, still looking at Bell with wide, tearful eyes. There was an aching weight of love under her doll-like waist to give to somebody, and the soft, red lips were hungry to be kissed. "I'll go down to your father until breakfast is ready." The colonel was always overflowing with tenderness for the pretty little girl, and she felt that she sadly needed a comforter.
"Very well, Nannie."
"I see that Mr. Andross is back," stopping to chirp to the birds pecking at the window-sill. "So nice to see him back all safe again. We're all so fond of Mr. Andross. Tweet! tweet! How can you make these wild birds know you? I have canaries always: Lily, I call my little darling now."
"Don't like to cage things," gruffly.
"Oh, I must have something to pet and love!" turning her pleading eyes to Bell. "I've had such a disappointment in Fidele! I gave her gin regularly every day to keep her the proper size, and in spite of all my care she's grown into a great coarse beast! I had to send her away. I'll run down now. By-by birdies!" and she went down singing in a bird-like voice that made the old house alive with music.
Bell looked after her perplexed. "Well, she's an affectionate little thing! But I really thought she cared for Jack!" She never could have guessed Anna's habit of suddenly folding up her secrets and hiding them just as she did her lace collars and little puffs of scent-bags. The little lady's thoughts did not run into the Land o' the Leal of which she was singing. "Jack called her the 'ox-eyed.' She's like an ox!" nodding her head viciously back. "Just as slow and stupid and obstinate when her feet are down. I threw her off the trail about Andross, at any rate. Poor fellow!" and the soft eyes slowly filled.
"Oh, Colonel! I thought I should find you here!" running up with both hands out. The colonel, his coarse, gray clothes in martinet order, his scant gray hair brushed up in a top-knot to cover the bald pate, took them in his and bowed in a tender, soldierly fashion over them. But Anna could not wait to hear his old-fashioned compliments. "Come out to the garden; we've plenty of time before breakfast, and--I--I have something to say to you. Don't be frightened!" with a piteous sob, when they were seated behind the grape-trellis--"Oh, you dear Colonel, you look more frightened than I am! Oh, if I had such a father as you!"
"Why, the judge spoils you, my child! You're nothing but a petted little baby! Tut! tut!" as her warm tears rained on his wrinkled hand, wondering if Maddox could possibly be stern with such a creature. "Really, my dear! I'll call Bell. Bell is the kindest soul if there's trouble----"
"No, no!" drying her hot cheeks. "I'm quiet now. But I could not control myself any longer. I've been so unhappy! It's about Mr. Andross, sir."
"Mr. Andross?" gravely. "Yes. Well, my dear?"
The colonel suspected no acting in Anna, and indeed there was none. The whole of her force of body and soul spoke truthfully in every look and word.
"He has had some great mysterious trouble, and I must help him. I want to be of some use in the world, and I'm so little!" twisting the soft, snowy hands together. "He's--he's a good friend of mine, sir."
"Yes. I understand, my child."
Her lovely, imploring face was upturned to his. "Now I think," chirping like a bird, "that he has committed some dreadful crime."
"God bless my soul! Andross!"
"Yes, indeed, sir. I suppose that is why he went away the other day. So I thought I'd ask you what it was. Was it drinking? or gambling? or what?"
"Tut! tut! These women! I thought you'd discovered a murder at least. Why no, Miss Maddox. Mr. Andross always appeared to me to be a perfectly temperate man, and so far as I know, can't tell one card from another. I suppose he was out gunning or fishing. It's hardly fair to ask a man to expose every hour of his life, when you look at the thing closely."
"You don't think he is very fond of women, sir? Suppose he had a wife concealed somewhere?"
The colonel reddened like a girl; he turned away from the innocent face watching his. "I never have seen any more dangerous affections in him than for old china or rare editions." He looked at her with a meaning smile. "It's not for me to hint that he cares for her," he thought. "Now, my dear," rising, "we must go into breakfast. My advice to you is to talk to Mr. Andross himself, and offer your air to reform him. You have some unwholesome megrims in your head, and I think Jack can cure them."
He led her gallantly along the unweeded path, joking about every subject but her lover. "For he must be her lover," he thought. "And Maddox approves, or he would not throw them together. God bless them both. I've helped them together with that advice, or I'm mistaken."
For the colonel was a born match-maker. Every young man in his eyes was a noble fellow, and every maiden exceptionally pure and beautiful, and all that was needed to regenerate the world was to drill them in couples, as Noah did the animals into the ark.[19]
CHAPTER VII.
ANNA, with the conviction full upon her that she was the heroine of a tragic drama, thought fit to greet Andross, who was waiting at the hall-door, with a shy blushing dignity, very sweet and lovable.
"You look so well this morning!" said Isabel, holding out her hand to him heartily.
"Come, children! To breakfast! to breakfast!" cried the colonel, as Oth, having slipped on a white apron and turned from cook into waiter, opened the door with a flourish.
The table was bright, the scent of roses and coffee mingled deliciously. They all hurried in together. How could he stop then and there, and begin the dreadful story of his life? He had come down prepared to make confession, and here he was instead, opening his napkin and telling the colonel the price of beef in Lock Haven.
"Try a piece of this sirloin, now. They killed their young heifer at Judge Maddox's yesterday, and Sam brought over this steak a few minutes ago."
"Yes, sah, just in time. Very lucky, sah!" ejaculated Oth.
"It's our turn to kill a sheep to-morrow; don't forget, Bell. The beans are ripe enough to send round with it to the neighbors."
It was just the commonplace homely talk to bring Jack back to his old self. If Braddock had had the weight of crime on his conscience he could neither have eaten nor drunken; but Andross was made of different metal. He had been half starved on the mountains, and the beef was deliciously cooked, the butter fragrant with vernal grass; they all laughed and talked gossip and of the news in last week's papers; they lingered lazily over the meal, after the colonel and Bell's careless, happy fashion; the window was open, and beyond rose old Nittany, his robe of sombre cedar white with chestnut-blooms; the running water outside whispered and talked aloud at times; it was impossible to Jack not to fancy that they were real footsteps and voices growing cheerfuller every minute. The sun struck a warm beam across Anna's tender little face, but he would not look at that; he turned to watch it light the bunch of laurel on the table into rosy splendour. He was going to drive Anna back to Gray Eagle mountain presently, and then go to his work in the office. As for crime or danger it began to be as far off and long ago to him as the old stories of the war which the colonel was telling. He, too, had his old stories to tell, and he knew how Anna hung on every syllable, as Desdemona on the Moor's.[20]
"It was my short-sight that always bothered me," the colonel said. "It never played me such a trick though as in the battle at Antietam[21]--you know, Bell? I've told you the story a dozen times. I suddenly saw an opening where I thought my regiment could be used with effect, Mr. Andross, and brought them up at a gallop, cheering as we came, when I met Joe Thompson--Thompson of Chicago--you may have heard of him; a grain man formerly, colonel like myself; shot before Richmond, poor fellow, plumb through the heart. 'Where the deuce are you going, Tom?' he shouts. 'To the front!' I cry. 'Stop, stop!' he hallooes after me, like John Gilpin's wife when the mare ran away with him.[22] But on we went up the hill, my men cheering louder than ever, and, I fancied, laughing. Well, sir, it wasn't until we had gone up the hill and come back again, bringing the enemy's cannon with us, that I discovered it was Joe's regiment I had taken and left my own in the van. One-third of his poor fellows were left on the ground. But we took the guns!"
"Short sight," laughed Andross, "would have been a serious obstacle in my way; for, when I was appointed to my captaincy, I did not precisely take Hardee's tactics on the parade-ground, but I copied the orders I had to give in shorthand on the palm of my glove, and read them off."
"You were in the army, then?" asked the colonel.
"Yes," with some embarrassment, "for two years. I was forced to give up my commission then and go back to business."
Colonel Latimer caressed his scanty imperial triumphantly and looked at Anna. "Here's a vicious criminal for you! This brave soldier!" his eyes said.
Andross saw the glance, and was driven by it into resolution. The colonel was his ally; he should know all as soon as breakfast was over.
Just as they rose from the table the splash of a horse's feet coming through the ford was heard, and the next minute Braddock came in with an odd air of repressed excitement in his stiff figure and lean face. Anna was first to coo out a welcome, especially cordial because of the admiration she felt for his neat new office suit and dazzlingly white linen.
Andross, dear fellow, always had a towzled look, like a brigand in the chorus of an opera. It was picturesque, but not gentlemanly.
"I came to drive you over home, Miss Maddox," the doctor said. "But I started so early that I shall be glad of a cup of coffee if Miss Latimer will give me one." He sat down by Isabel with that change in his voice as he named her which always brought the blood to her cheeks.
"Why, Andross could have taken charge of our little girl," said Colonel Latimer, bluntly. "Maddox has trusted her to his driving a hundred times."
"I feel responsible for her safe turn this time," replied the doctor drily. "A drop more cream, please."
Anna leaned back in her chair looking at him through her half-shut eyes. She knew as plainly as though he had told her, that for some reason he would not trust her to Andross for an hour. Was it because Jack was less his friend than he had been, or that she--was more? She got up and sauntered thoughtfully out into the garden. Andross, after one angry stare at Braddock, rose with a sudden cowed look.
"Can I speak to you one moment, colonel, before I go?" he said.
Braddock nodded to him kindly as he passed. "I told Sam to bring over the mare for you, Jack."
"Thank you. I don't know yet whether I shall--whether I shall go back to the Works at all or not."
After they had gone out, the doctor said abruptly: "If that man does not come back to the Works, Isabel, it would hurt me as though some one had died. Yet he's very faulty--very faulty, indeed."
"Why would you not leave Anna with him, Clay?"
Now Isabel was too blunt and large-natured to be susceptible to small jealousy; but she was startled at a certain expression in his face, and the effort he made to hide it from her. She had been leaning over to put a laurel-bud in his button-hole; she waited, her gray eyes fixed on his. "You came for that reason? You have had no sleep at all, and certainly did not come directly back to take a cup of coffee with me?"
"No, not you, dear. But Anna--really she's nothing but an innocent baby; and the judge gives her her way too much. She is one of those women whose love is for life and death, Bell. And if she were disappointed in a man it would kill her. She has not your resources of strong common-sense, you see. I think somebody ought to protect her."
"You are very kind, Clay; and right," she added, after a pause. But she began to crumble bread for her sparrows, and the bit of laurel fell to the floor.
"There he is with her now!" starting up. "I must go at once, Isabel," hurrying out to his buggy.
Miss Latimer stood silent and grave in the door for a minute or two, and then went down to the gate, bidding the doctor and his companion good-by, ready to laugh with them both as usual. "One never knows whether Miss Latimer is in earnest or not when she jests with one," complained Anna as they drove off.
The doctor did not answer. Bell's easy good-nature jarred on him. He wished indeed her sensibilities were deeper, more earnest--like this dear little creature's, for instance.
The little creature was dumb and cold to him all the way home however. Andross had spoken but a few words to her, and they were of no import. But his face had appalled her. "What bar did he see between us?" she wrote in her diary that evening. "Was he taking leave of me forever? He is in imminent need and peril. I will be true to him. As for C. B. ----? I shall not deny that there have been times when his soul has called to me and mine has answered. But I am tired of hearing Aristides[23] called the just! I wash my hands of him. I shall leave him to his proper tailor, and proper church, and--proper wife! Let them dwell in decencies forever. While I--alas! What fate betides Andross? There--just Heaven, lies my doom!!"
CHAPTER VIII.
"YOU wished to consult me about something, eh? Take a cigar," said the colonel when they were alone. "He wants to know how best to ask the judge for his daughter," he thought. "The poor fellow has but a clerk's salary, and Maddox has laid by a pretty sum; there's the hitch, no doubt." And the old man knitted his brows, studying over for Jack the old problem which he had not solved for himself, of an empty pocket and the ills which it is heir to.
"I wish," said Andross in a sharp, hurried tone, "to make a plain statement of a business affair to you, and to ask your opinion as a man of honour and of the world. I--I hardly can tell what is right and what is wrong"--leaning against the fence, his hand to his mouth. The colonel, however, unlike Braddock, did not speculate on its weakness.
"Business? Very well, go on," nodding. "I know nothing more of honour than yourself, Mr. Andross; but as for the world, I'd be very sorry," straightening his hat on his gray hair solemnly, "very sorry that such a lad as you had detected his insincerity, the iniquity of it as I have done! Necessarily, sir, necessarily! Age brings us that wisdom." He stopped and waited with the air of a blasé Solomon and Areopagite[24] judge rolled into one. Andross was tempted to laugh, but went on:
"About 1857 a man of much repute in Philadelphia died. He was the father of--of a friend of mine. He belonged to an old Irish-Kentucky family--headlong, generous, fond of good living. A scholarly man, too, but with no more knowledge of money----"
"Than to count the debts he couldn't pay," laughed the colonel. "Bless you, I know dozens of that old stock. Never paid butcher or baker until they came as beggars, and then flung them all that was in his pockets, eh?"
"Something very like that. But no character stood higher than this man's in the city for integrity and benevolence. It does so still. The boy was left at his father's death at college, his bills unpaid, without a penny. A friend of his father's took notice of him--studied his capabilities pretty closely, I suspect, and finally charged himself with his support and education. When he was ready to go to work, through this friend's influence, a situation as superintendent of certain manufactories in an inland town in Pennsylvania was found for him, with a high salary."
"A very unusual post for a college boy."
"Yes; he was totally ignorant of the business, and is so to this day."
"How's that? The friend dropped him into what in Bowery talk was a good thing, eh? Pay and no work?"
"He worked well for his wages," bitterly. "This friend was the president of a great corporation; it does not matter what, but one that needed bills passed at Harrisburgh sometimes, and was able to pay for the passage. To do this they must have tools in the Legislature, and to help elect these tools was the business of this young fellow. He was popular with the workmen; he soon found that this duty was to manipulate them; any man who voted against his employers was discharged. The man was a careless dog, but not unjust; there was much in this sort of work which disgusted him, but what could he do? His benefactor had indulged him like a petted boy, humoured his every whim, nursed expensive and fantastic tastes in him. He loved the man. It was not only for his salary he bent his head until they put the yoke about his neck."
"I'm sure of that!" energetically. "I'm sure he was a noble fellow! Blood tells, sir. He came of a good strain."
"After awhile other work was exacted of him. He was sent to Harrisburgh to 'lobby!' You know what that is. He soon found that the little of good which he had, the lazy good-humour, the friendly manner, was the stock in trade upon which these men were working. They presumed on it--they took him into their secrets, and then, when he rebelled and would have left them and made an honest man of himself, they dared not lose him. He knew too much."
Colonel Latimer nodded gravely, but said nothing. He began to watch Andross closely as he talked, finding apparently some new meaning in his carefully-worded sentences.
"Matters went on in this way for a year. They made him the cat's-paw by which much of the trickery and bribery or dirty work of any kind needed by an unscrupulous, powerful body of men was done. When he----"
"Pardon me! One moment. Your friend's story does not hang together well. A young fellow with abilities as fair as his could have made enough in any legitimate business in six months, to pay off the trifling sum in which he was indebted to his patron. Men are not held as serfs by an I. O. U., Mr. Andross. Or perhaps," noting his change of countenance, "you have not told me all the hold they had upon him."
"No, I have not." After a moment's pause he went on, with a still more guarded and cold manner: "When he began to make arrangements to go into some other business, his patron, as you call him, came to him one day. There was no hint of threat, you understand, of dishonesty in the work they had set him, or of dread that he would betray them. It was all civil, friendly business talk. 'You're talking of leaving us,' he said. 'I'm sorry for that. You've got into the ways of the office and the routine in which the company like things to be done. It will be hard to find another man to fill your place. By the way,' and he drew out his pocket-book and began to unstrap it, 'here is an old document I have had in my possession some ten or twelve years. As long as you were one of the firm, as I might say, it was properly kept in the firm. But when you leave us, of course we shall not feel entitled to retain it. The matter there is of public interest, as you see.'"
"What was in the paper?" eagerly. "A bribe to keep quiet, eh?"
"Such a bribe as no money could have equalled. This--this poor tool's father, it seems, had committed a forgery. It was known only to the leaders of the Ring. They reaped the benefit of it, and afterwards held him by the neck throttled, and drove him as they chose, just as they had driven his son. 'When you leave us,' said this kind guardian, 'to make an honest livelihood, as you say, your love of justice, no doubt, will be gratified by seeing this document in print. It will cause a little stir in Philadelphia, I suppose, for the old man was a favorite there, and it seems a pity, too; now, don't it? for his reputation stands fair to this day.'"
"What did the boy do?"
"He could not sacrifice his father," said Anaross, whose excitement had died out and who stood dully, his hands in his pockets and head sunk on his breast. "Very likely it was all a lie. What did these blood-suckers care for an old man's good name who was dead long ago? But he had no way of proving the lie; and he stayed in the works."
"That was the end of it then?" with a long breath. "He was wrong, sir. He should have held by his integrity. And yet if I thought my child would give up my honourable name from the grave----Well, well! The boy had rough lines."
"So rough and so vile that he escaped; ran away absolutely like a thief in the night, and found a shelter where they could not follow him. As long as they did not know where he was, he was safe from their plan of vengeance. He found at last honourable work and friends; one day an agent, one of the underlings, the spies of this company, stumbled upon him by accident, and threatened to tell of his whereabouts. He was a man to be bought off by a comparatively small sum, and this poor, weak wretch bought him off with money--that he had stolen."
"Good God! What insensate folly!"
"Perhaps so. You would not have done it. Braddock would not have done it. He was a weak man, as I said. Now, Colonel Latimer, what can be done with such a man? Say that I am his friend; am I to stand by him? is there any hope for him, that after knowing his story, you, for example, would take him by the hand--that he could work his way in the business community, in society, love, and marry as other men do?"
Now the colonel, knowing the astuteness of his own judgment and Jack's youthful ignorance of the ways of the world, had been forming during the whole narration his own sagacious interpretation of it. It never occurred to him that Andross was the hero of his own story; but he knew it was some sharper who had trumped it up to impose upon him. The colonel had been, since he was a boy, the victim of every impostor who chose to practice on his credulity; to-morrow, as to-day, he would empty his pockets to the most palpable cheat and swear he was a true man; but in the meantime he inveighed vehemently against the world in general as iniquitous, and perpetually guarded his friends against imaginary swindlers. He was fairly mounted on his hobby, now.
"My dear boy," he said energetically, "depend upon it, you've been scandalously imposed upon! I know the world. Be guided by me. This friend of yours wants, no doubt, to borrow money of you."
"No," with a queer smile.
"Well, he wants you to indorse him socially, back him up somehow; take my word for it." A vivid and bright idea flashed on the colonel. It was this unknown scoundrel lurking in the neighborhood, no doubt, who had tempted Jack into the mountains; he wanted to drag him down into his own slough; it was this disreputable intimacy which stood between Andross and Anna, which she suspected to be secret crime; and Braddock, having discovered it, began to look upon Andross himself with suspicion, as he had seen that morning.
"Now, sir," with vivacity. "Let me judge this man impartially for you."
"It is just that which I ask you to do," said Jack with a pallor about his clean-shaven jaws. All morning he had despised himself, as he talked, for his confidences. Braddock, any other man, in the toils of these men, would have fought out of them, not have gone whining his story to one or another. Andross, like a woman, must have sympathy at every step. But he was satisfied now that it was a wise thing to do. The colonel was a more merciful judge than any other he would meet; if he condemned him it was useless to struggle back for honesty or honourable position again. If he said there was a chance----. "I want your judgment," he repeated. "Much depends on it for me."
"Yes, I see. I see. Well, it is my opinion that this fellow, according to his own story, is a dead-beat, as the police would call him, of the worst kind. Why, look at it; he's the son of a man careless about money, and a forger. Blood tells, sir. No sooner does he leave college than he goes into the business of bribery and corruption up to the elbows; according to his own showing, mind you! Then he runs off from his employers, and when traced by them, steals another man's money to buy them off! It all looks badly, Mr. Andross. Even if the extenuating facts be true, I shall be very much inclined to question whether his birth and the influence of his business had not demoralized his moral sense, so that stealing came confoundedly easy to him. An honest man would never have thought of bribing the agent, certainly not have robbed another man to do it. My advice to you is to let him alone, to dree his own wierd. Don't saddle yourself with a weak, wicked fellow at your age. You have a good prospect before you now, and such a man as that would drag you back irretrievably, injure you in every way, in business, or--or your plans nearer home. You follow me?"
"Yes. You are easily understood, Colonel."
Jack began to button his coat mechanically, turned his face, which was as unlike to the real Jack and as vague and hard as a mask taken after death, down the road, as a man does whose business is finally over, and who is in haste to go.
"One minute, Mr. Andross." The colonel, vain of his shrewd judicial decision, wanted to give the whole of it. "I am the more convinced of the falsity of the whole story, because I happen to know that the statement respecting the power and corruption of the Rings is grossly overstated. That sort of abuse of great corporations if all political jobbery. Why, to credit the newspapers, you'd suppose these men scruple at nothing--not even murder! All clap-trap! Oh! I know the world. These stories are set afloat just before election. Very naturally these great corporations have their favorite candidates, and these vile rumours are started by men envious of their better luck, or by some discharged work-men. Your friend, if not one of those who have originated the scandals, has been weak and wicked enough to believe them."
"Weak and wicked? Yes, I believe you are right."
Was he right?
Andross's brilliant dark eyes stared at the colonel as though he saw a ghost in the daylight; but it was the spectre of himself, as this man showed him. Was all the honesty of which he had boasted a sham? Had his father been a forger and given his tainted blood to him? He had slipped easily into the work of bribery at first: had taken the money with but little hesitation to bribe the spy last Saturday. Braddock would never have been so tempted. To be sure he had been in a hell of remorse ever since, but what did that matter?
"Yes, trust me," the colonel broke in; "the man, even if his story be true, is thoroughly demoralized. Better leave him to his fate."
"Yes, he had better be left to his fate."
"That's all right, then. The fact is, Mr. Andross, I don't want to see you ruin yourself. I take an interest in you--everybody does to a curious degree. You've got that sort of magnetism, that strong personality about you, which makes people your foes or friends on sight." He unlatched the gate, for they had turned to the house, and gossiped on, not noticing that Jack neither heard nor answered. "It's a power, sir. It's not exactly virtue, nor good looks either. Henry Clay[25] had it. By George! there are some tones of that dead man's voice which have more power over me even yet than any living man's logic; and that little doctor, the Boston laureate, he's full of it as a connecting wire with electricity. I dined with all those fellows once, and Emerson[26] appeared to me to be a bit of sheer intellect, looking at men and women as a profitable drama; every one of us gave him our best. Why, even I, a dull experimenter in furnaces, believed I had something for him. Hawthorne[27] was like one of his own beautiful uncanny ghosts; but Holmes[28] was a man of men. Well, you have that same human attraction in you," looking down at him kindly. "Odd, isn't it? Men that have it impress one as women do; that's why I talk in this unpractical fashion to you, I suppose," breaking off with a laugh. "Well, now that this business is settled, what shall we do? stay with us to-day, Mr. Andross, or must you go down to the Works?"
Jack roused himself; he had heard only the last sentence. "I'll go down to the Works. I must see Miss Maddox again before--before I go."
Must he go? Even as he spoke that desperate courage which belongs to men who lack backbone, nerved him. Why not stay, work his way, keep his secret--marry Anna? Why not catch some good from life as it passed?
"I wish you could stay. Or come back this evening. There is a friend of mine coming up to-day from Philadelphia, whom I should like you to meet, to convince you how unjust these stories about Rings are. My friend controls one of the most powerful in Philadelphia and New York, and a more estimable man I defy you to find, in every relation of life. Tender husband and father, head of Christian associations, aged workmen's homes, hospitals--I don't know what charities----"
"What is his name?" Andross stopped short in the wet path. He looked for an instant, white man as he was, like a slave when the bloodhounds catch sight of him hidden in the swamp. But the colonel was busy lifting his tomato-vines on to the posts, and did not answer at once.
"What did you say was your friend's name?"
"Oh? I beg your pardon. These vines are so beaten down by the rain. He's really more a business acquaintance than a friend--Laird is his name. Houston Laird. Are you not going to the house?" as Andross turned and walked hastily but uncertainly away. He followed and fell in step again with him. There was silence which the colonel found awkward.
"How long does Laird stay with you?"
"Only a day or two," looking suddenly at Andross, struck by a change in his tone. "I'll bring him over to the Works to-morrow. In fact, he mentioned having business there with some one, in his letter; probably Maddox. But I want," heartily, pressing closer, "I really am anxious, Mr. Andross, for you to meet Laird. It would tend to disabuse you of your prejudices; and besides he might be able to serve you in business relations. He is really a financial power in the country, as you know; and the most genial, friendliest fellow! He delights in gathering young men about him in his office--religious clubs and so forth--and shaping their future course."
"Yes, I have heard of Mr. Laird and the influence he has over young men."
"Ah?" with another perplexed scrutiny of Andross's face. "I wished to mention you to him especially. It can do no harm?"
"No. It can do no harm. The truth is, Colonel Latimer," abruptly, "I am probably the person Mr. Laird wishes to see in the Works. We have met before in a business relation."
"In a business relation--I did not know that!" stammered the colonel, and a moment after began to talk of his turnips. It was not like Andross to be so reticent, and, considering his anxious efforts to serve him, scarcely civil.
CHAPTER IX.
TOWERS, the miller, who was down in Lock Haven that day, drove Mr. Laird up in his buck wagon. He charged him a dollar and a half: "putting on the fifty cents extra, Colonel," he explained a week afterward, "because he druv the mare as no hurs shud be druv. She's lame ever since. 'He's a millionaire, he can stan' it,' I said to myself. But he lays me down seventy-five cents. It was cursedly shabby."
"Tut, tut, Towers, Mr. Laird had not any change; here's your money," tossing down a note, one of the very thin roll in his watch fob. "The next time, don't talk in that way of a gentleman."
"So he left this fur me, did he, eh?" with a suspicious glance from the note to the colonel.
"That fellow, who brought me up, Latimer," Laird had said ten minutes after arriving, "wanted to over-charge me. Talk of rural simplicity! I find Hodge has just as itching a palm at the plough as his cousin in town. But I let him see I was not to be imposed on."
"Well, well. The poor devil has eleven children and an aguish wife," hesitated the colonel.
"No doubt," promptly. "And I'm ready to give liberally to the wife and children," thrusting his hands into his pockets, his blue eyes lighting his face agreeably as he touched the money. "But how could I give alms if I did not watch these rascally workmen? I venture to say, Latimer, that I pay my employés, from the head clerk to the porter, ten per cent. less than any other man in my business. By prudence like that I am able to give to the poor--pay my tithes to the Lord."
Mr. Laird withdrew to dress for dinner, which he did always as carefully for the colonel's picknicky board as for his own. He stopped on the stairs, however, as Colonel Latimer escorted him up. "You did not answer my letter, Colonel? You have a couple of thousand left of your capital, you say. Let me take charge of it for you. Put it into this new National Transit stock, and I insure it to pay a hundred per cent."
"Tut, Laird. I can't be hampered with thinking of money. Besides, next month I expect to succeed wholly with my experiment. Maddox has consented to give me the furnace for a few days for a final trial, and I shall need all the money I can raise to reimburse him and pay my expenses." They had reached the upper landing by this time. Laird stopped and bridged his hawk-like nose with his glasses. "Pon my soul! I've known many a mad inventor, but you're the worst of the lot. Think of the fortune you've sunk in this thing already, Thomas. You have no right to sacrifice your daughter to your whim: leave her at least enough to keep her from beggary."
The colonel laughed. "What do you want for her? She has plenty to eat and to wear, and that fiddle-faddle work of designing brings her in abundance of pin-money. Bell's like myself. She likes to vagabondize leisurely through life, looking out for the green, warm places, and carrying no impediment in the shape of unnecessary baggage. No, sir. Isabel would rather I should use that money and succeed in making one bar of pig-iron, with wood instead of charcoal, than that you should pay me a thousand per cent."
Laird laughed, looking back with the door-knob of his chamber in his hand. "If the discovery would pay you anything when you make it, there would be some sense in your having made ducks and drakes of all that your father left you."
"Pay me?" his thin face heating. "Why, you certainly understand, Laird, my object is to make this business less a monopoly, to put money into the pockets of the poor man, not to take it out with a royalty. Smelting can be done at one-third the cost by using lumber instead of charcoal, the price of the pig-iron reduced proportionately--and--I'll go for my papers and show you the whole thing in a nutshell. Just wait one minute."
"To-night--after dinner. I'm quite sure I understand all about it now," nodding and laughing as he went in and shut the door. He laughed again to himself now and then while he was dressing, muttering "of all the cursed idiots!" but in the same tone with which he would have spoken to his own children when their childish folly pleased him.
Laird, especially now in his trousers and shirt-sleeves, was a gross-looking fellow: short, squat, his heavy-jawed, high-featured face set off by red whiskers, and mustache. One could guess at a glance that the power indicated in this face was that of a bold, unscrupulous speculator, and that the strongest taste and enjoyment of the man lay in his wine and dinner, the "feeds" with which he and two or three of his clique usually finished the day; but there was a trait, a sixth sense, which lay under his relish for high percentage, or terrapins, that insensibly raised him a level above his compatriot feeders: it hindered him from ever saying a coarse word before his children or such a man as Latimer. When all the betting world was down at Jerome Park, Laird went off for a lazy day's fishing in the hills; when his friends filled their boxes at the Academy of Music, chuckling over the broad shoulders and broader jokes of the Opera Bouffe, or delighted at Edwin Booth's[29] pretty pictures, Laird jeered at them; yet he went night after night to watch old Rip's parting with his daughter, and was not ashamed to be seen wiping the tears off as he came away. The colonel's unconscious self-sacrifice touched him now with a certain pathos, just as did the white hairs of the old man coming back to his own to find himself forgotten. It was a thing which he felt Houston Laird might have done in another and a better world. "'Can't be hampered with thinking of money?'" he repeated, drawing on his boot and looking reflectively at the toe. "That was finely said in Latimer! Confoundedly finely said! And he means it! That old fool don't care for money any more than I do for the dust on my shoes. Neither does old Farroll, starving himself and his family to found his Inebriate Asylum--drunken bloats!" Laird felt himself a better man for Latimer and Farroll's whims just as he did after listening to Joe Jefferson's[30] wonderful rendition of nature, or one of Thomas's noble symphonies; but it did not follow that he had the least intention of imitating those heroic old idiots, any more than he had of going about the country acting or fiddling.
When his boots were on, he dressed himself with scrupulous care and quiet, hanging as sole ornament to his plain black watch-guard a dull, cracked antique, of which he had lately become the blest possessor. He never risked wearing it in town.
"She will appreciate it," he thought. In the hurry of pushing the National Transit stock during the spring he had really forgotten that when he met the Latimers in town at Christmas he had asked Isabel to marry him. Of course it all came freshly back now, and as he trimmed his well-shaped nails he half made up his mind to do it again. "I can afford to marry whom I choose," he thought. It was in obedience to this sixth sense of his that the ideas of a wife and money were kept strictly apart. When he went down the stairs he found Isabel, drawing, as usual, sitting in the window. It was a hot day. Laird's eyes, used to the fulness and rainbow colouring of city drawing-rooms, Persian carpets, brocatelle, buhl pictures, and old china, opened with a sudden sense of coolness and rest on the bareness and still, pale lights of this room; the floor of yellow pine, the sweeping curtains of thin gray lawn, the big round table covered by books, papers, pipers, and sewing, in most comfortable disorder. The light was sifted in through a honeysuckle, its crimson tubes flaming in the sun, and touched Isabel's white neck and reddish-brown hair as she bent over her pencil and blocks of wood. Outside, a purple butterfly sat on the moth-eaten window-sill, and flapped its gold-dusted wings drowsily in the still heat; the mountain alone looked threatening and gloomy, its gray boulders shouldering aside the grass, and coming offensively to view in the bright light; the water of the creek babbled sleepily over the stones all about the house. Miss Latimer turned with a ready smile to meet Laird, and then went on with her work; he put his eye-glass over his nose to regard her. Women just then wore large hoops and stiff stuffs ruffled and fluted and buttoned at every inch. Isabel's lavender-coloured gown was soft and heavy, clung closely, and moved with every motion of her body. It was the fashion, too, to heap the head with false curls and pomatum and jute, height on height, while Bell's own soft hair waved loosely up to a knot above her high, narrow crown. Her truthful appearance, her simple, direct manner, was the charm that had conquered Laird. He began to run over in his mind the lovely girls with their trained manners and artistic dress, whom he was used to see, against the background of those brilliant city rooms. This was like a strain of one of Beethoven's symphonies--they were the Opera Bouffe.
He drew a hickory-woven chair up, and, lying back in it, looked at her at his leisure. Bell dotted and rubbed on composedly. Isabel and her charms were, as usual, so far from her own thoughts that a man's gaze upon her produced no more blushes or shrinking than if he had betaken himself to staring at the mantel-shelf. Men never show fantastic homage to such women, and Laird did not.
"Up in town," he said abruptly, "what with the hurly-burly and the trading, it is hard to imagine the mountain wrapped in his solemn gown, like a monk yonder, and you here, cool and quiet. I wish I could take a picture of you both with me. I've a picture of a winter landscape that I often like to look at in summer; very nicely done, indeed. It's by Richards."
She adjusted her tools.
"I wish old Nittany could have his likeness taken," glancing up the height with kindling eyes.
"And for yourself----. Ah, Miss Latimer," smiling, "it is not your pictured presentment I wish to take with me--it is the real woman. You know that."
"You think so when you see me with old Nittany for a background; but in town you would find me as out of place as one of those boulders stripped of its grass and moss."
There was a short pause.
"You have not reconsidered the subject of which I spoke to you last winter, then?" lowering his voice and leaning forward, his arms resting on his knees. "You have never thought of giving me a different answer?"
Bell looked at him.
"Never. I suppose you had forgotten that matter long ago, Mr. Laird."
Laird could not tell her that he had not thought of her for six months; he heaved a profound sigh and shook his head sadly, sinking back in his chair. She might at least show some little sign of interest in it; a downcast eye, a blush. Her whole mind was given, instead, to trailing the partridge-berry vine properly over the moss which she was copying. When Houston Laird talked of marriage, Bell saw no more cause for blushes than if he had consulted her on the colour of his coat or any other business.
"I wish," he resumed presently, in a low voice which over most women would not have lacked power, "I wish I could make you understand how you represent something which I have not in my life, but should like to have. It is your great simplicity. You are so downright, do you see? I like the very sweep of your garments--straight and full. Yes, I like that in you very much," eyeing her from head to foot. "I wish you would marry me, Isabel. I would be--well, wholesome for me. I could get back to a simpler way of life. I prefer simplicity, a classical severity in dress and music, even in religious rites. Now you did not think that of me, eh? You never would have thought of me as living or dying in the high Roman fashion, I'm certain?"
"No," she laughed. "Cato's[31] was not the rôle I should have chosen for you. To tell you the truth, I always think of you as the modern Aladdin, building palaces of jewels by rubbing on miraculous nothings called stocks, as unreal as old lamps."
He shot a keen glance of suspicion at her; but Isabel never was guilty of a sarcasm in her life. She worked on tranquilly.
"Why not let Aladdin build for you, then, or your father? Put the idea of marriage aside for the present, and let me be your friend. Miss Latimer, I do understand the old lamp, Speculation; with a touch or two on it, Colonel Latimer shall be as rich a man as he was before the war."
Bell was rubbing out a false stroke. She finished before she answered.
"He was no happier man then than now. He slept on the same iron bedstead, wore as coarse clothes, ate a baked potato for his dinner. If he had one dollar or a million, it would go alike into lumber and ore."
"And come out--slag?"
"I'm afraid so," choking down a sigh.
He watched her with a perplexed frown for awhile. "Perhaps," suddenly, "it is this very wealth and luxury you would dread as my wife? The responsibility of the children? They should not be in your way. John is at Annapolis, and the little girl has her governess, and as for the rest it should be in your hands. I'd be glad if you'd remodel the house, unfurnish and ungild as you choose. Now, there's the carriages," thoughtfully; "that gold-mounted harness: I never liked it. It drives everybody to talking of Laird's patent stirrup. I began as a saddler, you know, Miss Latimer. That harness was to please--the children's mother. But we would drive in an undertaker's wagon, if you wished it!"
"I do not wish it. I will never take the place of your children's mother in any way." Isabel's tones were more gentle than before, but Laird knew that he was answered.
"I'm very sorry, Isabel," he said gravely. "You are mistaken, I think."
The pencil paused irresolute in her hand an instant over the block. The natural and decisive way of ending the matter would be to tell him of her engagement; but at the mere resemblance of Braddock, hot blood crept up into Isabel's honest face which had not warmed under the smothered passion of Laird's glances. Even to her father she had never spoken of her lover. She thought of his love secretly even to herself with a shyness akin to pain.
Laird saw the blush and mistook its cause. "I'll have her, soul and body, before the year's out," he thought; her coldness had roused a balked sense of indolent passion within him. But he determined to let the matter rest for the present.
CHAPTER X.
AFTER Mr. Laird's rejection he leaned back so quietly in his chair and looked so persistently at his intaglio[32] in the sun that Miss Latimer began to feel alarmed. He was suffering more deeply than he showed, no doubt, poor man! No matter how little nonsense a woman has in her, she always has a sentimental regard for a rejected lover, and bewails secretly the irreparable wound which she feels he must bear to the grave.
"Aha!" he cried presently. "Who's here? Coming with your father?"
Isabel sighed with relief, but answered rather shortly that "she did not know the man."
"Surely I know that roll and the patriarchal length of beard, and the hat set cock-a-hoop on one side! It certainly is Ware! Prepare yourself for black-mail, Miss Latimer."
"Who is he?"
"Reporter for the Daily Critic. If there's a shameful story to be told of you, he'll write it and charge you so much a line to keep it out of print; if there's a chance for gross flattery of you, he'll print it first, and send you the bill for it as an advertisement next day. But what brings him here?" anxiously. "Ware goes nowhere without the chance of grist to his mill. He follows a crime as a buzzard the carrion. What can he want here?" He rose uncertainly, but sat down again and was idly turning his seal in the sun, and smiling when colonel and Ware entered. The colonel presented his guest with a good deal of empressement to his daughter. He had a measureless respect and awe for the press, and the least worker on it. He only read the papers which defended the opinions he had formed beforehand, and therefore found in them nothing but pure truth.
"Mr. Ware represents the New York Critic, Bell," with an effort to speak coolly. "They have heard of my experiments in New York, it appears. The public want information on the subject, and Mr. Ware is going to furnish it to them."
Miss Latimer's face was in a glow at the words. She stood up. "My father is doing a great work, sir," she said, "for humanity. I don't care so very much about humanity, but I shall be very glad if he is to become famous." She was always a woman of such few words, that now being moved to speech, there was a certain slow, stately force in what she said that for the moment struck Ware dumb. "I never met a woman so lovable or so infernally stupid," he confessed to Laird afterward. "I went on my knees to her at first sight."
It was all because she thought the coarse, blatant fellow held the trump of Fame ready to sound for her father: she always had known the world sometime would recognize with her the colonel and Braddock as demi-gods in it; it was no wonder therefore that Ware was impressed with his welcome; Isabel of Spain[33] could have given no more royal one to the discoverer who had opened to her the treasures of a marvellous unknown world. Ware, who had been quizzing the colonel unmercifully outside, turned to Mr. Laird, flushed and stammering, bowing humbly.
"I am glad to have the honour of meeting you, sir; I hastened up from Gray Eagle as soon as I heard there was a chance of meeting Mr. Laird here. I--I am really going to illustrate Colonel Latimer's process," with an uneasy side glance at the old man's radiant face, "for the Critic. It will make a most readable article--practical, statistical, embellished with fanciful descriptions of scenery--such as the ore drifts and shafts, and charcoal hearths."
"I know very little of the cookery of such literary messes," drily, turning indifferently away. Indeed, an odd change had taken place in Laird since Ware entered. Alone with Bell, he had been an ordinary blunt, outspoken man on the same level as herself. Now, from the glossy curl in his red whiskers to every puffy roll of his stout body he asserted himself a prince of millionaires. Money and the power of it hinted itself, from the comfortable crossing of his feet to the cool gleam of his blue eyes. He had put on the armour before which the average American is always worsted. He held Ware off at a distance, as one does a dangerous dog which may spring, we know not when.
However, the dinner was hearty and pleasant enough. Diogenes[34] himself would have warmed into a tolerably good fellow at Thomas Latimer's table. The old man, when money was plenty with him years ago, had delighted to give splendid banquets to his friends, but none of them had ever paid him then more deference and sincere homage than this Laird, whose soul was popularly believed to be made of money, or this poor reporter known everywhere as a "dead beat," did now, although the cloth was coarse cotton and the forks but plated. How blind they were too, to the homœopathic size of the roast of mutton which he pressed on them so anxiously; how they passed and repassed the bottle of execrable sherry (the colonel never had been a judge of wine), and ate and drank so heartily that he whispered, delighted, to Bell as they went back to the other room, how that the dinner had been a thorough success, that those fellows thought everything delicious and choice--searching in his pockets for the last fifty cents for Oth because the right hand of that famous cook had not lost its cunning.
Bell, happy in the present dinner and future fame, was disposed to be less silent than was her habit. Her father and Ware sat out on the dilapidated old porch to smoke.
"This Mr. Ware appears to be a most discriminating person," she said sententiously. "You were certainly mistaken in all you said about black-mail. It must have been some other Ware."
Mr. Laird was watching him with half-shut eyes, as he had done all evening. "What could have brought him here?" he said.
Ware leaned in the window just then, his big body crushing the honeysuckles. "I found your confidential clerk, Andross, at Gray Eagle, Mr. Laird."
Laird's face suddenly cleared. "Ah-h! Now we have it!" he muttered. "Yes, I understand he is in business here," carelessly.
Ware drew leisurely long whiffs from his cigar into his mouth, and then emitted it in blue rings; Laird leaned back in his chair as leisurely, fingering Bell's tools, but the eyes of each man were fixed on the other without faltering. "What does he know? What will it cost to buy him?" Laird's would have said if they had been suffered to speak, but they were dull and unmeaning; Ware's were eager to articulation. He had almost probed a secret, and a secret of Houston Laird's or his Ring was equal to a good "business connection."
"It was young Kenny who discovered him," he said at last. "He met him accidentally while trouting up in these hill streams."
Laird nodded civilly. The matter apparently did not interest him so much as the sharpening of Miss Latimer's pencils. "Another, Miss Isabel," pausing, penknife in hand.
But Ware was not so easily bluffed. "Kenny," knocking the ashes from his cigar on the sill, "came back to town flush with greenbacks. He's usually as impecunious as the rest of us. He said he had found the Nittany Range a lucky ground for speculation. He put five thousand in Erie the day after he got back."
"Ridiculous!" growled the colonel from outside. "What chance for speculation is there among these trees and boulders? Must have been trading in Lock Haven."
Mr. Laird thought it time now to face the reporter deliberately. The fellow held a checkline and knew that he held it. But what did it amount to? He had discovered that Andross was a confidential agent of the Ring, and was trying to shake loose from their hold. But the man knew that every such organization had such agents, and that once used, for them to be turned loose to chatter and blab was--not expedient. That was all. Andross was not the man to chatter secrets to Ware, however he might loathe and hate the Ring. Laird saw that Miss Latimer also had turned her steady attentive eyes on Ware. But she was too slow a woman to suspect anything.
"Ware," he said gravely.
"Yes?" The big handsome head was thrust eagerly forward.
"I am afraid your cigar ashes will be blown over Miss Latimer's moss; be more careful, pray. That is all."
The protruding brown eyes stared defiantly at Laird a moment, then Ware laughed. "He forgets," he thought, "that when a man lives by his wits, the wits are apt to be a tolerably well managed capital. But," he said aloud, "don't you think it remarkable that Kenny in two days should have turned such a pretty penny among these woods and boulders, as the colonel says?"
"I suppose," said Laird, "that seeing Kenny's big yield of grapes of Eshcol[35], you hurried up to pluck a bunch from the same vine."
"Precisely." He was suffered to puff away in silence so long that when he spoke again he went directly to the attack. "It is no doubt inconvenient for the company to spare Mr. Andross so long?"
"Very inconvenient," calmly.
"He is acquainted with the routine in the office, with your peculiar--system better than any other man could be."
"Undoubtedly," smiling. "But what would you have?"
Ware stared again, perplexed.
"These are not the days of thumbscrews and heated gridirons, remember, Mr. Ware. The Company in a New York business association, not a hierarchy of the dark ages which could compel men to serve them by such secret means. We left those things behind us with the donjons and moats of knightly times. Mr. Andross was a superintendent in our pay, and a very efficient officer he was, by the way. Now he is a clerk in the pay of Judge Maddox. That is all there is of it."
Ware forced his features into a miserable similitude of a grin, and nodded significantly once or twice. "Talking of fires in donjons, Miss Latimer," he said abruptly, "you ought to hear that fellow Wachtel, as Manrico. I saw him in Paris last December," etc., etc.
A moment afterward he took the colonel by the arm and strolled with him down to the creek bank, deep in mystery of lumber and ore.
Mr. Laird waited for Miss Latimer's curiosity respecting Andross and his antecedents to pour itself forth. He knew that she had not known of their connection. The fellow would have kept the history of it, to which Ware had adverted, a secret. But Miss Latimer worked on quietly, as though she had not noticed their conversation. Mr. Laird admired her the more because she was a dull woman, as he thought, who left him to ask all the questions.
"By the way," he said presently, "who is the lady whom our young friend Andross wishes to marry? I have heard such a story."
Miss Latimer answered slowly, as became a dull woman: "I do not believe he wishes to marry anybody."
"What sort of woman is Maddox's little daughter? Pretty? Refined? Andross would not choose a wife who was not both, any more than he would choose to drink out of a tin cup."
Bell laughed. "Miss Maddox might be reckoned among the fine porcelain of womanhood. She even looks like a bit of alabaster."
"It is she, no doubt, then." He rose hastily as if he had finished successfully some task set for him, tossed over the books on the table a minute, and then went out to the men outside. Miss Latimer's steady eyes followed him. "He never heard that Andross meant to marry. He guessed 'the woman!' in the story," she said to herself.
She laid down her work and stood by the window. The night, a dark and threatening night, was settling down upon the far ranges of mountains full of impending storm, but about the house and in the gorge a clear twilight made a singularly bright calm: the near objects came out distinct as photographs. It was home. Some unuttered tumult in her mind made this real to her as never before. Old Nittany and the nameless height at the other side walled her and hers safely in; a late bird or two pecked hurriedly at the vegetables in the garden before flying home to shelter; the bees buzzed gladly into their hives: on the clean stone steps of the kitchen, the fire glowing red within, old Oth sat and smoked and sang a plantation song with which he had many times rocked her to sleep; the water lapped the gray stones below the window, telling its mysterious message; near the barn she could see the colonel's thin stooped shoulders and gray hair as he went about, shutting up for the night, his cow-skin boots sinking deep in the soft, brown mould. She could smell the fresh mould and grass on the damp air. There was not an inch of it which was not dear to the quiet, affectionate girl, simply because her father's feet had so long trod in it; the stars hung burning between the mountain shadows overhead--so near that it seemed to her that happy other life into which she and her father were going some day, was close at hand. But the dark figures of Ware and Laird down by the creek were alien; they did not belong here. This little mountain gap, her father, Braddock--this was her share of the world. What had these men, with their schemes of politics and plunder, to do with it? Isabel, as anybody might know from her firm flesh, square jaws, and large, sweet-tempered mouth, was subject to none of the poignant little loves and hates of Anna Maddox, but a chance word dropped to-night had caused her to put both men into her scales of judgment; and, her mind once made up, it was not likely that any reason would change it.
She looked steadily at the two figures, measuring her strength against them. They should go out of this place and away from her father.
Just then their voices, raised so as to be heard over the rippling of the water, reached her.
"You have a hold on him, then?" said Ware.
"Yes. But I doubt its efficiency, if there be a woman in the case. If he have a fair prospect here, with a chance to marry, the line I have held him by so long will not be strong enough to bring him back."
"But you forget the money he paid to Kenny?" eagerly. "He did pay it--in cash. It is impossible that he could have earned that amount since he came here. There's a thumbscrew for you ready to use. And I'm here to back you. The press, sir! Next to a jail-cell there's nothing a guilty man dreads like the daily newspaper. We reporters are the unpaid police of the country. You had better let me bring Andross over to-night. What d'ye say?"
"I shall see him in the morning," coolly.
The money king however apparently appreciated the power of the unpaid police, and had chosen in the last five minutes to use a much more civil tone to Ware, even when he snubbed him. The fellow had his influence, as he reflected, and it might as well be secured for the company as not. Nothing could be more annoying to a man or a corporation than the incessant barking of these smaller dogs of the press.
"Take a cigar," said Ware confidentially, pulling out a curious Turkish case. "They were brought to me by a friend straight from----"
"Thanks, no," drawing back coldly.
"Now this old fellow, the colonel?" anxiously. "What a queer party he is, anyhow, eh? With his mixture of intelligence and stupidity, and his big bones and flying hair, and then, going hungry to make us eat his bit of roast mutton--a very unusual sort of person, it seems to me. What an excellent figure-head he would make, Mr. Laird."
"I don't understand you."
"In your business. For the company. Agent, say. The kind of man in whom everybody puts confidence; why, his word would go as far as the sight of your securities. Upon my word, sir, he somehow put me so in mind of my childhood and o some that are dead, sitting at the table yonder, that I could hardly command my voice. It would be a capital thing for the company to bring him into their employ, and a capital thing for the old man, too."
"Yes, very probably," but in a tone which dismissed the subject.
"A hold upon Andross? A rod to drive him to their work when he chooses to live and marry here?" Women reason by hints, not syllogisms. Bell saw as though she had heard all the facts. The life-long struggle for freedom which drove Andross first to coaling, half naked, up in the gorges, and then to theft, perhaps, and to hiding half mad like a beast among the rocks. The secret of his struggle might be found quite as much, perhaps, in his own weak jaw and uncertain womanish eyes as in any power of Laird's, but Bell made no allowance for such side issues or reasons.
Did money then rule? Did this man, Laird, dull and uncultured, and a liar at heart, think because of his foundation of solid dollars that her father and Andross were to go under his yoke and become part of his machinery? To her heated brain it was as though she had heard the very words of the devil as he stood plotting in the garden; but beyond the circling mountain range, everything bent to Laird's money. She knew well the world to which he belonged--fashion, false show, plunder--gambling in stock by the pennies or by the millions. Were her father and Andross to go back and take part of that?
"Does he think there is nothing in this world but greed and money? He forgets who will take part against him." The words came out slowly on her tongue. It seemed to her as though He, the great elder Brother, stood on the bank of the creek, brawling yonder down the gorge, as ready to help poor Andross, as he had been to stretch out his hand, eighteen hundred years ago, to any poor Jewish cripple or profligate.
Bell's religion, being a woman without fancy or sentimentality, was as real and hourly a matter of thought to her as the work which her hands fingered. She stood in the unlighted room now until the darkness closed in over the gorge and the house. Laird and Ware had disappeared. She did not know by what strategy or tricks they would attack her father or Andross. The danger was actual and imminent to her. But what was danger, or Laird, or that awful invisible power of evil lurking everywhere? One benignant presence, of all men most a man, was here, close to them all, to bring, as he had done for ages, right out of wrong. Bell never had been sure whether she believed in Apostolic Succession or Pædo-baptism or Predestination or not. She used to toil and tug with her illogical brain through doctrinal books every Sunday afternoon in order to make out a proper creed for herself, and they only wreaked upon her utter confusion of spirit. But she knew Him and trusted Him; and she was so sure now that He would make it all right that she went about the room, closing the curtains, and lighting the lamp, singing at first a hymn, but very soon a song with a merry ringing burden, of which she and her father were both fond. Indeed, she heard presently his cracked voice as he came in from the barn joining in the chorus, and went out to hold the light for him.
"That's right, my dear. Our friends have strolled along the creek; they'll be in presently. We must be up early to-morrow morning; Mr. Laird is going over to the Works."
"Mr. Laird's business here is with Jack?"
"Yes, I suppose it is," in the guarded tone with which the colonel always warned women off the sacred precincts of business. "I am glad Laird knows Andross. He can give him a lift in the world as few men are able to do."
"You think Mr. Laird a good man then, father? honest, fair dealing?"
"Bless my soul! Houston Laird! Why, he is the very centre of commercial activity in this state, and head of religious clubs and--what are you thinking of?"
"I had an impression----"
"Oh, an impression? No, I never knew a woman who would not throw a man's character to the winds, and all the testimony of the world in his favour to boot, if she had 'an impression' against him. You are all alike, Bell!"
Isabel smiled and held fast to her opinion. Her father, she saw, would be no ally on her side.
CHAPTER XI.
DR. BRADDOCK drove Tom back at a spanking pace. If he talked at all, it was of the buckwheat crop or Buck's heifers or pig iron. The little creature beside him was no less Una[36] and Godiva[37] than the night before; but somehow this sublimated homage would not find words in common daylight, and it occurred to him to wonder what Isabel would think of it with an irritated feeling of being in a jail of which Miss Latimer kept the key.
Anna ran up to her room after he had left her (stopping to kiss and hug her papa into good humour on the way); then she prepared to receive Andross in a white frilled wrapper, laughing to think how silly Braddock's scheme was to keep them apart. She knew Jack would follow her in half an hour. Then she ran down to coax Miss Shanks (the "help") into making her favorite pudding for dinner. She was so pretty, and so overflowing with love and wilful baby ways, that that young lady laid aside a sacque she was braiding for camp-meeting and humoured her. Anna having only nibbled a little breakfast, then ate a slice of pound-cake and some pickles, and filled her pockets with nuts, and went back to her chamber to write in her diary. Then she cried over Andross's hard fate (she was really very fond of Andross and her father and Miss Shanks and anything else that came in her way), and slept sweetly until dinner-time. After dinner she dressed again, and it was while she was eating an orange or two in the seclusion of her own chamber, that she finally resolved to marry Andross. Her new poodle, Puck, was there, and she had nursed and kissed and made him beg for cake, before she was led to reflect that one could manage men quite as easily as poodles. It was so absurd and priggish in Dr. Braddock to interfere, when Andross really loved her! It was so absurd in men, at any rate, to wrap themselves up in the dignity of their political schemes and business plans, "when I can do with any of them what I please--just what I please!" nodding her little head. This poor Jack now? What a big, stout fellow he was! and how much more he knew of the world than Dr. Braddock; and yet--Anna stroked and kneaded the fluffy little ball on her lap with her white hands, thinking that Jack was in their grasp more absolutely than this little beast. "Whether he goes up or down in this world or the next depends pretty much on me," murmured the rosebud lips aloud. "He'll be a Christian or a sinner, as I choose to use him, I'm sure. It's a great responsibility!" and she sighed and put Puck down and went for some more pound-cake.
Andross, meantime, at the Works had appeased the curiosity of the men as he best could, and worked steadily at his desk all day. The fingers that held the pen were the fingers of a thief, and Laird was at his back. It would be better he should never look in Anna's face again; and in this mind he remained until evening; then he shut his desk, flung on his hat, and with Braddock looking him sternly in the face, nodded to him, and going out of the door went directly up the path to Judge Maddox's.
Long afterwards it seemed to him that if Braddock had stretched out a kind hand to him at that minute, spoken a single word to him as a friend and a Christian, it would have made his life different to the end. But Braddock could give all his savings and make no sign; yet he could not greet Andross heartily, or keep from snappish answers or suspicious looks. It is very likely, however, that nothing he could have done would really have had any effect.
Jack had every reason to be a miserable, despairing man that evening; but in fact he was reasonably happy. Except in the cleared acre or two about the Works, the great Nittany forest crept down from the mountains and choked all the valleys to the creek's edge. Jack's way lay through it. He could not help noticing how full of rainbow-glimmering dust were the wide beams of light which the low westering sun struck through the aisles of oaks and chestnuts, and how the thick trunks stood out in it, painted green and yellow and crimson with lichen. His feet sank deep in the leaves, rotting for years; he stooped to untwist a creeping vine of morning glory from about his legs, its pink blossoms yet open in the shade. He halted to look down into the strange, green funnel-shaped hollows which the people called witch's holes; at the swarming ant-hills higher than his shoulder; at a fungus standing like a scarlet star on a dung-heap; at the brilliant blue butterflies which he had never seen elsewhere, that darted across the tan-coloured mountain stream; at a saffron night-moth with a white cross on its back, that, shaken from its bough, hung in the air dazed with the late daylight. The air was damp, heavy with wood-scents. He could no more help forgetting himself to notice these things, than the ant could help its poisonous bite, or the moth its blinded eyes. He lay down for awhile on the thick layers of leaves, and actually forgot all about money or the avenger coming, or Anna, in feeling that his clothes were warm and comfortable, and his bed soft, and the air deliciously light to his lungs. There was too, under all, a vague assurance that the Power who had made the world such a delight and comfort, must know that he, Jack, was not a bad sort of a fellow after all, and would have done right if--if----
At any rate it was not hard to do right now. He sprung up and walked buoyantly along, his hat in his hands, that were clasped behind him. His womanish, brilliant eyes glowed with the great thought that had come to him in some way out of the slanting beams and the floating moth and wood-growths. It was the easiest thing to be right! He would own the theft, and if he were allowed to do it, go away to some obscure part of the country, where Laird and his father were unknown, and work until he had paid the money. When he came back with clean hands Anna would marry him. Her love was like that of some redeeming saint--it would be most tender to the sinner. If she did not----he stopped at that suddenly. No matter; he could live alone to the end. "I will lift up my hands unto Thee, O Lord!" he repeated, remembering some of his mother's hymns or psalms. He hurried on; his pulse throbbed; the tears came to his eyes. He reached the judge's house, opened the gate and, crossing the garden paths, came to the window where Anna, after writing in her diary that his doom was hers, and giving her hair a crowning touch of halo-like fluffiness, sat and waited for him.
He tapped at the pane. "Won't you come out?" humbly. "There is a thunder-storm coming up the valley, and the air really takes hold of you like live, damp fingers."
"He looks excited as though he had been drinking," thought Anna, but she only raised her white-lidded eyes to his and put out her hand.
Andross did not touch it. "Come out. I feel as if I could not breathe in-doors to-night. See, old Nittany has wrapped himself in mist already; it is lightening beyond the Muncey mountains." He leaned his elbow on the window-sill, his eyes wandering up and down the valley, while Anna pouted that they could leave her face. "look at that bird with the flash of red on its wing; how low and straight its flight is to its nest. I knew the storm was coming as soon as any swallow of them all," with a boyish exultation. "See how the hollyhocks burn red as the sun goes down! And this clematis about the window; its mass of feathery green makes the right framing for your pale-tinted face."
Anna's rocking-chair was comfortable, and she had her usual fear when lazy of taking cold. But she was that ideal of all men, a yielding woman; if her lover had felt his mission to be a journey into Africa or to the North Pole she would have gone with him with effusion, though if he had left her behind to pack the trunks, she might have married another man before the ship sailed.
She shivered but wrapped her lace shawl about her head and came out. Andross was waiting. He looked at her furtively from head to foot, and then turned away.
"Come to the seat under the chestnut. You can command the valley there. It won't rain for an hour," going before her hastily.
"Won't you take cold?" touching his arm softly; once, no more. Jack laughed from sheer delight. There was something immeasurably exhilarating and delicious to the big, stout fellow in the idea of being taken care of by this feeble mite of a creature. Samson found Delilah[38], without doubt, a little, gentle woman; who petted and coddled his strength out of him. "I forgot," chirped she, like a sweet-voiced bird, "that you were used lately to the night air. Oh! where did you go, Jack?" clasping both hands about his arm and looking straight up into his eyes, "Oh! how could you vex and frighten me so?"
"Did I vex you? God knows--" Jack stopped, pulled her hands from his arms roughly, and walked away.
The chestnut stood over a spring, that bubbled out with a sleepy whisper over the mossy rocks.
"It's easy to be right," Andross said to himself, again and again. But the sleepy, lapping whisper seemed to drown the words. If it had been Bell who sat there he could have grappled with his trouble, told it to her in plain words as to a man, and she would have helped him. But Anna was only a delicate child; he must never forget that.
"Yes, you did. You always do vex me," she moaned. She had seated herself on a knob of the trunk; thick trees shut them in, except where, in front, the valley opened in a gash through the hills, to the gorge in the west, behind which the sun set. Clouds walled this far-off gorge; you could see that it was already raining there; but the light struck up behind the clouds, and filled the upper sky with fervid warmth and colour. The mountain spring sparkled in it, the leaves, with that still shiver of a coming storm, grew darker green in it, but to Andross, the woman, with her reddening cheeks and parted lips, the brown snaky blossoms of the chestnut dropping down on her loose hair and uncovered shoulders, was the centre and meaning of all the heat and brightness--the meaning of life.
"You did vex me," her eyes following him, compelling his to turn. "I knew you fled from here because you were in trouble or shame. Yes, I'll speak the truth. I knew you had committed a crime!"
"What do you mean?" Jack said, drawing farther away.
She sat quite still, her hands held out towards him. "Did I ever ask what it was? Did I care? You are my friend. I would have shared your trouble. I would have gone with you." Still Andross did not take the begging hands. She clasped them over her burning face. "I did what I could. I followed you. I forced Doctor Braddock to take me with him to search for you."
Then a hot drop of water or two forced its way between the little fingers, and rolled over the back of her hand. At that Jack gave a groan. No thought now as to whether it was easy to do right or not. He dragged the little fingers from the flushed, lovely face and looked at it. Her eyes were wet, but laughing. Was this whole dreadful business only a comedy then?
"You can't deceive me," she said; "Spillen says you were out fishing. Papa says the moon had something to do with it, that it affects people who are not quite right," touching her forehead, "and that no man can be quite right and care so much for ragged books and cracked pottery. It was the change of the moon did it, he says."
Jack laughed.
"But I knew it was neither the moon nor fishes. What is this dreadful mystery that hangs over you?" She peered closer into his face, with the ready pout on her lips, when she saw thoughts there that lay deeper than any love for her.
"There's no mystery," said Jack. "I've not been a lucky man. I've never been able to go straight on a beaten road, like Braddock or the colonel. I've been hampered by business relations, dragged this way and dragged that. I've been handcuffed, hobbled. I didn't mind it for awhile. But it seems to me now as if the hold on me was turning into iron, and was going to drag me down always;--after I'm dead, even into that place they call hell, if I can name such a place to you safe, comfortable people."
Even Anna could feel the bitterness under his joking tone. Her responsibility as to his soul's safe conduct flashed upon her. Now was the time to take charge of it.
"I think you're very irreligious, Mr. Andross. You ought not to use such language at all. And besides, it's all nonsense to say any man out of a jail is hampered in this free country. You are free. You can go into business and marry, and vote, or go to housekeeping, or be sent to the legislature, or any of those things. And you can go to church regularly and so on, and then there's no danger of going to that other place. It is all plain and easy, in my opinion."
The words from anybody else might have seemed silly and unfeeling to Jack. But from Anna--the way opened before him in them plain and easy, as she said. The way to safety, to love, to heaven.
"Don't hold my arm so tight. You hurt me!" she cried. "Why do you look at me in that way? You know it's all true what I say. It doesn't matter what you have done, even if it's murder----" shivering with excitement. "God will forgive you. And----" she looked away, "if there is any woman in the world that loves you, she would forgive it too."
"Do you mean----"
In the sudden silence Anna looked up. She started back with a little cry, as if she had thrust her hand into the fire.
"I'm afraid of you." In a moment she controlled herself. "Why do you frighten me so?" patting her wet eyes and burning cheeks with a perfumed handkerchief.
"Oh!" groaned Jack, "for God's sake don't say more than you mean. It's life or death with me to-day. I misunderstood you, may be. But I thought you meant that even if I had committed crime, you could forgive me, and--and love me, Anna."
He did not make love as she had planned it many a time; that was certain. He did not tremble at her touch, nor touch her at all, indeed, but walked off and stood by the spring, with his back to her, grinding the bits of rotten wood under his boot-heel, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. But she felt somehow that the body and soul of the man, both bigger than her own, were undergoing some physical or mental torture. She remembered how Gertrude Von der Wart[39] stood by her dying husband on the rack and put water to his lips. She was sure she loved Jack enough to do that.
"I can't tell you what I mean if you turn your back to me."
He came back slowly.
"If I were a man of honour, I would never look you in the face again."
She drew back.
"Your secret has nothing to do with another wife?"
Jack laughed.
"No. There is no woman in the world who has come into my life in any way but you. You must know that."
Her head dropped on her heaving bosom.
"Then you--you do care for me a little?"
"Care for you?" he cried, still standing off and looking at her as banished Satan might at his lost crown.
After all, why was it lost? This girl, this wife, was his crown of manhood. He was a man like other men; why should he let it slip from him? If she went now, she would never return.
At whatever risk, then--. He put out his hand, but uncertainly, as she saw.
"Why can not he be funny or agreeable when he comes a-wooing, as he used to be?" she thought, impatiently. "A person don't want tragedy all day."
This young Lochinvar[40] came wooing with a mortal sickness at his heart, apparently. All the gayety and electric vigor that had made Andross, Andross, was gone.
He drew her slowly toward him.
"God knows whether I care for you or not. Did you mean just now that you would be my wife? No matter what I have done--that you would marry me?"
"Oh, indeed yes, Jack," she whispered.
Her head sank on his breast, the soft perfumed hair was blown against his mouth, her arms were around his neck. Anna's frail body always exposed every feeling within. Her skin was pale, her eyes languid, her breath came slowly. Nothing could seem more weak or loving or loyal than she, lying there. John Andross had never kissed a pure woman's lips before. When he touched them the warmth and brightness of the day struck home to him. His face glowed, his eyes flashed. What was Laird or stolen money or Rings? He kissed her but once, and then placing her gently on the rock, sat down before her. He had such a reverence for her--such tenderness, akin to pain! He held a bit of her muslin dress in his hand; if he let her go altogether, it seemed as if he should drift away, he knew not into what abyss. That old dreadful life of a minute ago was gone as far as past ages. The time when he doubted, was guilty----. He remembered quickly that she had no mother to guard her now, that love was coming to her. It was quite in the nature of the man to feel, above the hot passion surging in his blood for this woman, an unspeakable respect and awe for her, and all women through her--such as a mother feels for her maiden child. He would take good care of her, from even his own love. Anna put her hand shyly again into his.
"What do you see yonder, Jack? Why are you so quiet? Why, your eyes are wet! I thought a man was glad when he was loved, and did not cry like a woman."
Jack put the little hand on his eyes.
"I never thought this would come to me," he said quietly. "It seems as if----" He stopped. He could not say even to her that he felt as if Christ had forgiven him, and laid His hand on him through her. "I've been a worthless dog," forcing a laugh. "I never thought, since my mother died, that God or man took much account of Jack Andross until now."
It was very disappointing! She had flung herself into the abyss of his despair, and he began to talk about his dead mother! She had never, in opera or tragedy, known a situation which was more dramatic, and Andross always used to look so delightfully like a brigand; and yet he made nothing of it; he was as quiet and respectable in his wooing as Braddock would be, or that old deacon who said grace when he kissed his wife. And she had always known she was a frail, lonely creature! She did so need to be protecting by an engrossing, warm passion!
The rising storm concentrated the heat and light about them; the lapping of the brook grew more drowsy, the shiver of the oaks audible. Oaks and low swooping birds, and the water, red in the oblique light, grew distinct, as the world seemed to Andross to stand off and regard this woman and himself. Her eyes were lowered, her crimson lips apart, her soft hands held one of his between them. He dared not look at her.
"Anna," he said, rising and standing before her, "I'm going to do what's right in this thing. If you are really given to me, I'll take you with clean hands, so help me, God. I'll have no deception about it. I'll go to your father now and tell him my whole story, and then ask you for my wife."
"Yes, Jack," she whispered.
"I know he will give you to me," earnestly. "I believe in myself to-day as I never did before, and I am sure he will believe in me."
"Yes; but papa's such a practical man," cooed Anna, "he is not apt to be influenced by people's moods. I'm afraid he would wish for some indorsement of the future beyond your faith in yourself."
Jack's face fell as if he had received a dash of very cold water indeed. "Then I must prove my faith by my works," smiling. "At least my honest confession of the past will argue in my favour. It would with any man, Anna," he urged as she shook her head, "a practical man, especially."
"W-ell, of course you know. Won't you sit down?" pleadingly. "Keep the sun from me with your broad shoulders--there. And when must you go to papa with this story?" nestling closer, and picking the threads from his cheviot coat.
"I shall not wait a day." If he had stopped there, Anna would have persisted no further. Silence was an unknown quantity, a sign of masculine will which puzzled and daunted her. But there was no argument, however logical, against which she would not fly bird-like, to peck a flaw in it. Andross began to give a reason for his faith to himself. "I never felt what my life was worth until to-day. I must act like a man."
"If it was winning me made you feel that, you are in strange haste to lose me."
"Lose you!"
"Of course, lose me! You go to papa with a crime in one hand, to ask for me for the other! Just as I thought all was so pleasant and nice! I've been so lonely! I thought I had you to care for me and to protect me!" sobbing and cowering close to his side.
"What would you have me do?" He put his arm about her, looking down with stupid dismay.
"Am I to conceal the past from your father? Win you like a thief?"
"Oh! dear, dear! What has papa to do with the past? Of course you must tell him, but not to-day. Let me have one hour of sunshine. To-morrow will do."
Why would not to-morrow do? Why should not he, too, have an hour of sunshine?
The sunlight grew dimmer, the light rose and rested on the tree tops; Andross saw nothing but the face upturned to his.
"Now," she cooed, "tell me your plans for us."
"Plans for us? Here was his very dream of a wife! How could a man go wrong who could bring all his practical work-day thoughts to this little fair woman, whose soul within her was meant to be a pure counsellor--a messenger of God?
He spoke more cheerfully and confidently than he had ever done in his life. "One thing I know, I'll never go astray from the right with you to guide me, Anna. I have not decided on any certain plan, except that we will go as far from the seaboard cities as possible--to the West, probably."
"Chicago? There's a great deal of style in Chicago, I've heard."
"And you want to still hide in the woods, Maud Muller? But you must be practical, darling. I could earn a living more readily in a large city. I could get a position on a paper in Milwaukee, I'm sure--news editor or something--until I looked about me; that would keep us in bread and butter."
"About how much would that pay you?"
"Pay?" a little surprised. "I don't know. Say fifteen or twenty dollars a week."
Anna's cheek was very hot. She sat quite erect.
"But you quite forget papa, Mr. Andross. Of course I don't care for money. I'd be glad to live with you in a hut or a cave. But papa is a very practical man."
"And he would not be willing for me to try to support you on twenty dollars a week?" anxiously.
"Oh! it is absurd to talk of that!" the ready, vexed tears on her lashes. "Heaven knows I would go with you if it was in the dead of night, and you had nothing but your steed and spurs, like the old knights. But papa has refused me to two gentlemen because their incomes were less than his own."
Something very like an oath choked Jack's throat.
"I've neither steed nor spurs," he said. "Nor is there any way for me to gain an income equal to your father's, that I can use--even for you."
"But there is such a way, you mean?" her head dropped plaintively on his bosom.
"Yes. But I shall not use it."
A long silence followed. Anna raised her head at last, and looked at him with swimming eyes.
"I don't blame you, God knows!" cried Jack vehemently. "But you're the only thing in this earth untainted by the greed for money, money! Surely," after a pause, "you wrong your father? He would not insist--when he knew you loved me----"
"Oh! but indeed he would!" hastily. "If he knew it would kill me to forbid it (and I wouldn't be surprised it would drive me into a decline) he would never let me marry even a reasonably poor man. But twenty dollars a week! Why, he would think you mad!"
"I suppose I have been mad."
"I really must go now," rising. "There are some people coming for supper----"
"Anna! Can you talk of supper and people now? There, there! Don't look at me in that terrified imploring way," calling her in his passion and rage a white dove and an injured angel, and himself a brute, walking beside her to the gate, frightened into silence when she resorted again to tears and the handkerchief.
"You--you must not be unjust to poor papa," she sobbed. "It isn't greed. But he's so foolishly fond of me, he thinks nothing good enough for his Nannie----"
"Nothing is good enough! If one of God's angels came down, I couldn't find clothes or lodging fit for it, and that's the way I feel about you. But--I've loved you so! It seems as if my love ought to be enough----"
"And so it would to me," softly. "But poor papa! Those gentlemen were very worthy men, and of the very best position in society, and quite wealthy. And then if you went to him and said I am John Andross, and I have twenty dollars a week, and, and----"
"In danger of the penitentiary. No," with a loud laugh. "You reason correctly; my recommendations are not of the best."
They had reached the gate now. The light was gone. The sycamore trees in front of the house swayed wildly to and fro, and a few large drops fell from the darkness overhead to Anna. "Go, go!" she cried, hurrying under the porch and holding her hand to Jack without. "I can not ask you to come in. Your agitation would betray all."
The door and windows were open, the house was brilliantly lighted: it seemed as if the warmth and light were about to absorb the fair little creature in her fluttering curls and lace; he, without in the rain and night.
"I don't wish to go in. Why should I?" wrenching her hand in his pain until her hurt her. "I may as well say good-by to you now, I suppose, and be done with it all, as any other time."
She leaned a little farther out. "It must be good-by then?"
Andross was silent.
"There is no other way?"
"No," sharply. "There is no other way."
"Because," her breath was warm against his cheek now, "if there was another--- If I could be your wife--oh Jack! I do love you!"
Her lips touched his and she was gone.
Andross went down the mountain, not knowing that the night had come, and a drenching rain was falling. It seemed to his excited brain as if the hell of which Braddock talked lay below, and that he was walking steadily and purposely into it.
Anna hurried to the kitchen to see that Miss Shanks had the best napkins out for tea, and then went to dress. She wore a rose-tinted silk, while lace and tags of ribbon and tiny gold chains made a soft shimmer all over her. She fastened some blue stars of the succory weed in her curls of pale gold, and then stood back from the mirror.
"It is precisely like the pictures of the French marquises that one sees painted on porcelain. He will be sure to notice that."
"He," was Mr. Ware, who was coming for tea.
CHAPTER XII.
SPELLIN, who came into the office next morning for the monthly accounts, was particularly friendly to Jack. "Andross is pulled down as if he'd had a tug with the typhoid," he told the judge that evening. "I had a capital joke on Jake to tell him, and he laughed (he'd laugh in the jaws of death), and then looked at Dr. Braddock as if scared that he'd done it. He's got into some devil of a hobble, Judge. You ought to see to it. I think it's a pity a good-natured, jolly fellow like that can't have his laugh out in this world. Now the doctor--he rayther enjoys trouble; what with his civility and his backbone and religion, he knows how to meet it."
The judge hurried Spellin off, as two gentlemen were going to walk over with him to the Works to see a casting by night--Colonel Latimer, who stood smoking by the stile, and Mr. Laird from Philadelphia. They were waiting on Mr. Laird, in fact, who was lingering beside Miss Maddox in this little parlor. You could hear, now and then, Anna's sweet little pipe of a voice from within and bursts of musical laughter.
"I must go, now," Mr. Laird was saying, as he bent over the piano by which she sat. "There is a young fellow, Andross, at the Works, whom I wish to see. I'm going to tempt him back with me to seek his fortune," looking closely into her face.
"His fortune? Oh! Can you---? But it is no affair of mine," dropping her eyes.
"Can I---?" smiling. "Well, I am no magician with old lamps or magic purses for the young man, Miss Maddox. But I can promise him work suited to his capacity; and if he has that, a brilliant career is before him. It is absurd to see much a man as that at a clerk's desk."
"Yes, indeed!" said Anna warmly, though she had always looked on Jack as necessarily a weak, illiterate fellow, owing to the coaling hearth where he originated. She pinned a rose in Laird's button-hole, and stood by the window waving good-bys to him.
"Your daughter, Judge, is the freshest and sweetest creature I have seen lately! She reminds me of--of strawberries and cream," said Laird gallantly, as they walked down the hill. "She is a good deal interested in young Andross, I find."
"Mr. Laird has promised me to do something for Andross, Judge," interposed the colonel.
"Ah! that's clever of you, Mr. Laird. Yes, Anna's interested in him. We're all interested in poor Jack. If you hold out your hand, the young man's fortune is made, of course."
Maddox was secretly annoyed, and showed it. Where was he to get a clerk who would do Jack's work for such wages?
Andross saw them coming down the side of the hill, picking their steps, for last night's rain had made the ground wet and clammy as a sponge.
He laid down his pen and looked back at the door.
"Mr. Andross!" called Braddock.
Andross did not answer.
Nothing was easier than to go out of that door, and in the gathering shadows of evening take the hill-road to Millheim, and somewhere, in some corner of the world where Laird was unknown, live an honest life. But then he should leave Anna behind him.
If he waited, in five minutes Houston Laird would be in the office. He would offer him the way to win her.
He got down from the desk-stool and took his coat from the peg, being at the time in his shirt sleeves.
"Andross," said the doctor, coming in, "I wish you would notify Spellin that Forbes's account is overdue. There were five loads of slag against flour and----"
He stopped. Jack had not been drinking? His face was livid, his eyes blazed. Braddock tapped on the table.
"What is the matter with you? What are laughing at?"
"I was thinking how you were bringing me slag and flour to balance just now," wildly. "I beg your pardon, Braddock," after a moment. "I'll attend to it. I am a little worried about--about----"
His coat was on, and he had taken up his felt hat, and was brushing it without looking at it.
"You are going out?" said Braddock. "I'll make out the account for Spellin at once, then. Or will you wait until the judge is gone? I see him at the gate yonder with some men."
Jack stood one moment, then he laid down his hat.
"I'll not go," he said.
He sat down and took up his pen, dipped it in the ink. The gate slammed behind them. He could see where their umbrellas shook the rain from the old cedar by the fence. Their heavy boots creaked along the wet boards; they came into Braddock's office; the door was ajar enough for him to hear them as they stood talking and joking with him.
How was this? Laird was not only a companion of Colonel Latimer's, but Braddock met him as an old friend; Braddock had dined with him in Philadelphia; was urging him to go up and see his mother. Had he been mistaken? What if Laird were the genial, honourable man and Christian they held him to be, and he a morbid, suspicious fool?
He shook his head. No. No need to try to hoodwink himself. Right was right, and wrong, wrong clearly enough before him to-night; he knew the man. What he was going to do would be done with his eyes open. He lighted the lamp, stirred the fire which the chilly rain had rendered necessary, until the little office was in a glow of light, then turned to pull down the window shade and shut out the mountain, that filled the melancholy twilight and lowered down on him like an accusing ghost.
While his back was to the door, it was pushed open, and turning he met Houston Laird, the light falling full on his stout, well-dressed figure, his pleasant blue eyes smiling, his fat white hand held out. The other men were behind.
"Here is another old friend! Why, Andross, how hot you are here!" adroitly covering the fact that his hand was not taken, by lifting his beaver hat off, and wiping his forehead. "Jack always had something tropical in his nature," looking back to Maddox. "He has that love of colour, music and the like which we Americans lack. I never ventured on buying a piece of furniture, much less a picture, without consulting him. The fitting of our club-house was left to your taste altogether, you remember, Andross. He's more daring in his effects than most men would venture to be, simply because he knows his ground."
"Yes, I remember the old club-house," said Andross stiffly. "I suppose there is a different set of men there now?"
"No. Very much the old clique: on Friday nights at least, excepting Noyes, who is married, and is given over to literary lectures and family dinners, and poor Fanning, who was sent to Nice on account of his lungs. But they don't make the gap your going did."
Jack smiled. He knew the men had missed him; they were good genial fellows, alive with that ready energy and wit and every-day wisdom which belongs to the present generation of cultured young men in towns; in the club too, Jack knew he was an authority, while Laird, who had nothing but his money, was admitted on sufferance. He warmed insensibly. "And Noyes is married, is he? He was in love once a week. How did the battle about the reading-room end? There was some money to be spent there, and Stewart wanted to put it into a couple of Hamilton's marines, and Fetridge to buy some old historical relics of his family."
"I suppose blood carried it then. There are some rusty swords and chairs and such lumber there."
The bell of the Works tolled.
"That is for the cast, I believe, Mr. Andross. Bring your friend in. Come, gentlemen," said the judge. There was an odd change in his manner to Andross, just as Laird intended there should be. The intimate friend of Houstin Laird, a fashionable club-man and diner-out, was a totally different person from Braddock's protégé, picked up at a coaling hearth.
"There's a queer story going now about Fetridge, by the way," said Mr. Laird, taking Jack's arm as they went out of the office. They stood apart by the furnace, while Laird told it, and when it was finished, Jack shouted with laughter. It brought the old pleasant times vividly before him. Half an hour ago he would have said that this man on whose arm he leaned came there to lead him back into hell; he forgot all about that now. The men gathered in at the tap of the bell: they were covered with grime and naked to the waist. The furnace threw uncertain red gleams through the large wooden shed, on the heaps of cinders and green glassy slag out to the pitchy darkness without, where the rain was beginning to fall and the wind to sough ominously through the mountain gorge. Andross stood apparently watching, like the others, the men draw troughs in the wet sand of the floor. How like the winking eye of a beast of prey the furtive dull gleam of the fire was! there was a fierceness, a homelessness in the moan of the wind which the invigorating breezes in town never had; the men, too (good fellows every one, Jack had thought them in the morning), there was a savage quality in their ignorant faces, due doubtless to the solitude of the huge mountain fastness about them. Fetridge and the others just now were at dinner together somewhere; the gas burned softly; there were flowers on the table; the talk was of the old pictures which Whitten had brought back after the siege of Paris, or of Tom Pool's book, or of any other trifle; but with the subtle free-masonry under all which gave to every word a fine unspoken humour and meaning. After dinner they would drop into the Walnut, or go to listen to Nilsson as Gretchen in the great cathedral scene[41]. The opera with its lights and tier on tier of beautiful women, and music that uttered all passion and pain--that was different from this dingy shed and the slag and rain!
"Very picturesque thing, a casting by night," said the judge, coming up to Laird. "At least so Mr. Andross thinks, and he has a good artistic eye, as you say, sir. Known him long?" lowering his voice.
"Since he was a boy," promptly. "He belongs to a good Delaware county family--none better." For he was determined to smooth all obstacles between Jack and Anna. There, he saw, was his future hold upon him.
"Queer now, his going out to burn charcoal? Braddock found him at a hearth in the mountains. Fact, sir; how do you account for it, eh?"
"Pooh! A boy's whim. He fancied himself tired of excess of civilization, and tried solitude, just as we older men change our liquor, when the taste of one palls."
"You intend to take him back with you?" anxiously.
"If I can. We need a man of just such qualities. There's a high ladder ready for him to climb. But perhaps some mountain beauty has made him too much in love with solitude," with a significant smile.
"Tut! tut! Nothing of that!" But the judge bent anxious looks on the ground. What if this handy, clever fellow, who had been so ready to fetch and carry, should turn out all that Laird prophesied? Where would he find such a match for Anna? "Even if there were such a thing," he said aloud, "it would be better for him to go earn a social position for his wife than to stay drudging here on a sub-clerk's pay."
"Certainly! certainly! Did you speak, Latimer?"
"They are going to draw, now. The melted metal has accumulated behind that iron flap, and the firemen will let it out into the wet troughs of sand."
"I see, I see."
There was some delay, however, in the drawing, and Laird meanwhile went back to Andross where he stood alone. "Jack!" he said, with a certain blunt friendliness in his tone. "Jack, I came up to the mountains purposely to find you."
"I know you did."
Neither of the men lowered his voice. Latimer and Braddock, with some of the workmen, were within hearing. Now that the hand-to-hand struggle had come which was to end in a mastery for life of one over the other, nobody who heard them detected any deeper meaning in their words than an ordinary business parley.
"Yes," said Laird carelessly; "I heard you were here, and I ran up from Harrisburgh to see you. What the deuce is that fellow with the ask-rake doing now? I want you to drop this folly, Jack, and come back to your desk in the office, and to the club, and to your old place in every respect. It will pay you to come."
"And you," quietly.
"And me, of course," smiling. "What else should I come here for? I am not acting as a philanthropist in the matter, by any means." Whatever covert threat lay under Andross's words lost half its force when thus coolly met as a plain, practical argument. "I know your value to the company in a business point of view. You know our routine, our secrets--every company has its secrets;" nodding to Maddox, who stood by attentive, "eh, judge? We have found nobody to take Mr. Andross's place; and, in fact, we want to find nobody. We're ready to bid high for him again."
"Pon my word, I wish such a chance had been put before me at your age, Jack," chuckled the judge.
Andross spoke as deliberately as Braddock would have done, when he did reply, which was after the pause of a minute or two. "You overrate the necessity of my return. Whatever tricks of the trade I may know are safe with me. I shall not disclose them. It is only fair, before you bid, to tell you that."
"As if he expects me to trust him," sneered Laird to himself, "when ten words from him could ruin the business for years," applying inwardly, as he never failed to do, the salving reflection that the business was honest, though it chanced to be run counter to popular prejudices. "Why! you talk as if you were gray-headed!" aloud. "Where is the old headlong Jack gone? You used to be ready to tumble into whatever pitfall offered; but now you mean to pick your steps?" meaningly.
"Yes, I do. I fully expected you to make some offer to me to-night, and I mean to stand quite free-footed in considering it. None of the old reasons which induced me to remain in the employ of the company will weigh with me now."
"One moment, Andross," beckoning him aside but not altering his pleasant voice, and nodding confidentially; "ten words can settle this matter between us now that we are out of hearing of these people. I want you. You know how and why. I am willing to pay you your price. You want me just as much. The company were naturally indignant at your defection; but no exposure has been made by them of that old business concerning your father--stop; hear me out--nor shall be made, if I can prevent it, whether you return or not. Revenge is not business. But look at the matter in the light of your own interest. You remain here, an underling of that prig, Braddock; obscure, poor, unknown. Suppose you wanted to marry (every young man ought to marry, and that early0, what chance have you?" eyeing him sharply, and quite aware when he had touched the quick. "Whereas, if you come with me, in one year, I assure you, not a competency, but what even in town would be called a large fortune. The opportunities thrown in your way of turning over money are treble what they used to be. In addition, I intend that you shall be elected to the state senate this winter. You know what that means. Sheffield, of our district, is dying. A man must go in for the remaining six months. You have the certainty, at option, of reëlection. There is not a mercenary father who would not bestow his daughter as cheerfully upon you as upon Aladdin with his house built out of jewels."
"Now, Mr. Laird," called out the judge, "you observe the man withdraws that block agains the hearth----"
"Yes, I'm watching. What do you say, Andross?"
Andross thought that he had made up his mind before he met Laird, and that the struggle was over. But for a man worthy the name to give up his manhood forever, costs more actual pain usually than the physical loss of life.
"What do you say?" Laird repeated, coming close in the darkness to look up to him. At the moment there was a flash of blinding light from the furnace, and seeing Jack's face close beside him, Laird drew back appalled.
"Poor devil! I wish I'd let him alone in the beginning!" he thought to himself, and walked hastily away. Braddock and Latimer came up to explain the process. The melted iron, like white fiery serpents, crept through the troughs drawn in the wet sand, flinging off myriads of burning sparks. The sooty overhanging roof, the men standing about, the shining glitter of rain in the outside blackness, the far off mountains, were suddenly illuminated with a red, angry glare. Laird could have seen Andross distinctly, but he kept his back turned to him. He was heartily sorry for him, and if the actual existence of the Company had not been involved, would have "let up on him," as he said. But what would become of the National Transit Association, if Andross chose to disclose that it was, in fact, a band of distillers? And where would Houstin Laird be in church, or the "Christian Brotherhood," if it crept into print that their president was head of a Whiskey Ring? As for Jack's religious or honest scruples that was balderdash. But Laird could appreciate a young fellow's dislike to the weight of a yoke about his neck; it appealed to his sentimental nature as would a strain of music.
"It's cursedly hard lines on Jack to have a lot of men say 'go' or 'come' at their pleasure! I wish I could turn the thing for him! But he knows too much. No padlock will serve on a man's mouth, but death or money. Yes, very fine, Judge, very fine! I should like to have seen the effect from a distance through the rain. Ah! Mr. Andross, did you speak?" turning sharply as Jack touched his shoulder.
"I'll go. On my own terms."
"Very well. I'm heartily glad for the sake of the Company," rubbing his hands with congratulation. But he had not the bad taste to offer one of them to Andross. "Our friend Jack has consented to go with me, Judge," in a loud voice.
"Aha! Well done, Andross! Your fortune's made, my lad!" coming up. Latimer and Braddock followed him. But Jack was gone. The momentary illumination was over, and but for a dull glimmer the shed was in darkness.
While the men in a cheerful group took their way to the judge's, a dark figure lagged dully along toward the mountain in the rain. "All for love and the world well lost!" he said aloud with a laugh. But it was not a pleasant laugh to hear. He knew it was his last night in the mountains, where he had tried to be honest and courageous.
God had weighed him for the last time in the balances, and found him wanting.
He could not keep his mind on Fetridge and the club, nor on Anna. He found himself chanting in his rolling baritone, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want."[42] It sounded like a devil's voice mocking him. It seemed but an hour ago that he lay, a little fellow of eight, on his trundle-bed, his face chapped with the wind and his hands black with bruises, and his mother sat beside him on the foot of the bed teaching him that psalm. A little pock-marked woman with a coarse brown stuff dress; but no face in the world had ever been to him as fair and dear as that one.
"The Lord is my shepherd." Why could he not drive the cursed words out of his head? "He is the shepherd of a lot of pious people in church," he said, walking faster, "but I don't see but that the rest of us have to shift for ourselves as best we can. The 'green pastures' of this world belong to them who can pay for them. It is men like Laird who sit beside the 'still waters,'" with a bitter chuckle.
But even as he said it he stopped on the side of the mountain, looking to the one gray break in the rain-drenched sky.
"Mother! mother!" he cried, though his dry lips made no sound. He was turning from her forever. Was there no help for him? Was it all money--money? Was this talk of the Lord a lie with which weak women fooled themselves?
When Jack was a little fellow learning his psalm, his mother knew that the next day at school he would be wholly ruled by whatever boy sat nearest to him. It was with the old boyish affectionate eyes and uncertain mouth, he stood now choosing his way of life. If he could go to Braddock for help? But he was afraid of Braddock and Braddock's God. To Anna? He shook his head. Anna's only thought, dear child, was a good salary for him. Salary and clubs, work, here was enough to reach for. He went on to meet them, but he did not look back to the gray break in the sky. A chance for another life lay behind him in the mountains, which should never come to him again.
----CHAPTER XIII.
IT was in the middle of December when Mr. Laird came up to the mountains again. Colonel Latimer met him at the Lock Haven station one nipping, bright winter's day, and rescued him from two local editors, who were taking notes of every word, wink, and garment, of the "Great Railroad King,"[43] for their next issue.
"Why don't you ask what the deuce brought me here in such weather? I know you think it," tucking the buffalo skin tightly about his knees in the sleigh as they drove off.
"I did think it. Nothing wrong?"
"For one thing, I felt qualmish; I don't know whether it's an inactive liver or disgust at trade, and the town and life in toto, but I do know there's something in the mountain air and the solitude, and--well, your daughter, Latimer--that acts like a tonic or galvanic battery on me--keys me right up. When I go down from here I always am resolved to turn over a new leaf for both soul and stomach; forswear late suppers, and money-making, and--all the rest of it."
"Morbid, morbid! If every man could have your record!" said the colonel gravely. "Why, look at the Christian Brotherhood you founded, and the homes for----"
"Yes, yes," uneasily. "Never mind that now. I was joking, of course. My other reason for coming was to bring you back with me, Latimer. I want to convince you what folly it is to bury yourself and Isabel here in snow and ice doing nothing, while you ought to be laying up a snug sum for her future."
"You will leave nobody in Nittany. First you took Andross, and then the judge and Anna, and then Braddock. Bell will think of you as the spider with the flies, if you tempt me down into your web."
The colonel's attempted pleasantry was not successful. "I am aware that Miss Latimer has a remarkable religious prejudice against towns," said Laird irritably. "She refers most of the usual ways of earning a decent livelihood directly to the devil. As for Maddox, he was selling his iron at a loss after October; he consulted me, and I advised him to stop the Works, unlock his capital, give it to me to invest for him and to come down to town to keep an eye over it, as I might say. The change has certainly been of advantage to him pecuniarily. As for that brilliant little girl of his, she needed society--she opens in it like a flower in hothouse air. I certainly had nothing to do with young Braddock's desertion of Nittany. It seemed a sensible move enough when he was thrown out of employment here. Even Miss Latimer, surely, could not have objected to that."
The colonel was silent. He jerked the reins, glancing anxiously at his companion as they hurried over the icy path. Laird, he knew, was ignorant of the right Isabel had to a share in Braddock's movements. He did not want to tell him the whole story; how the marriage had been arranged for August, and postponed by Braddock without farther reason than lack of funds on which to support a wife. Part of the matter, however, he could lay before Laird with advantage; but just as he was planning how to begin, his companion abruptly turned to him:
"The fact is, I should like to explain what it is I wish you to do before necountering isabel's prejudices. There's an end, I understand, to your experiments here?"
"Oh! altogether. When the Works stopped there was no chance for me. I could afford to hire the hands now and then for a day, but not to run the furnace. Well, to tell the truth," laughing, "Bell and I have to draw the lines tolerably close, even in the house."
Laird nodded gravely. "I thought so. Now listen. You know a man in my business--railroads, transportation, etc.--has a good deal of surplus capital. I have put it into a business about which I say little because of a popular prejudice against it. This is all sub-rosa, of course?"
"Of course."
"Well, since the government put that absurd tax on distilled liquors, thousands of barrels are secretly made in Philadelphia in Irish cabins; poison, sir, sheer poison! Made out of the vile deck-scrapings of sugar vessels, and seasoned with vitriol or strychnine. But the profits are e-normous! Well, to prevent this sort of thing, respectable men have gone properly into the business on a large scale, and they have induced me to invest a good share of capital in it!"
"In distilling whiskey!"
"Now, you're not a teetotal fanatic. I'm sure of that, Colonel. You take wine. Can't you see the propriety of giving the poor devils who don't take wine a pure article to drink instead of liquid death? I may have been wrong," with an anxious frown, "but I did it for the sake of humanity. Of course I only draw my dividends. I never was in the distillery of my life."
"But I don't see," evasively, "what I have to do with this?"
"Oh," eagerly, "now we come to the point! There is a certain office vacant in the city--Collector--and these gentlemen--this organization for putting down illicit distillers----"
"The 'Whiskey Ring,' Andross called it, I think?"
"Very probably. Mr. Andross's imagination is a fertile one. Did he tell you that I belonged to it?"
Now the colonel, dull as he was in such matters, saw that Laird was in a smothered white heat of rage at the bold, coarse name of his business. He stammered out, "No;" that Jack had not spoken of him as one of the Ring, but continued to ponder and eye him like a confused owl, with some vague remembrance of Andross's story, and a notion that there was a mystery and disgrace with which Laird had had something to do, under the matter, which he ought to be able to understand. Braddock, no doubt, if he were here, could see to the bottom of it in a minute.
"This organization," said Laird, after a moment's pause, "have, as I was going to say, a good deal of power in city affairs. We can give this Collectorship to whom we please; and as soon as I heard of it on Friday, I said, 'Latimer's the man!' Pontifex--the banker, you know--wanted it for his brother-in-law. But I said, 'No, Latimer's the man!' So I determined to take a holiday, and run right up about it."
"It was very kind in you, Laird, I'm sure."
"Not at all. But it's a snug thing, I can tell you, Colonel. Why, Prideaux, who had it before, built a ducal palace out Broad street, and lived in it like a duke, too!"
"I had no idea that government paid its civil service officers at such rate. Now, in the army we----"
Laird shot a doubtful, keen look at the colonel. Ware had hinted that the "innocent old patriarch" would not only make a fine figure-head for the business, but would soon be wide enough awake to all the tricks of the trade. But Laird knew better. The very invincible integrity of the colonel was the capital they needed with which to face the public. It must be genuine, or it was worth nothing. He had made a misstep in hinting at bribes.
"There are some perquisites attached to the office," he replied quietly. "The salary is not large in itself. Probably they were larger when Prideaux held it than at present."
"Oh, I shall not object to the size of the salary! If I take the office, the money will be my only object. If I sell my birthright, let the mess of pottage be as large as possible."
"You mean by your birthright----?"
"Bell and I have been very happy here, and contented. I doubt whether money would bring us either happiness or content."
"Yet you want it--like the others?" laughing.
"I've a reason for that," anxiously. "The man who was to have been Bell's husband has different notions from mine about dollars and cents. I've gone through the world head over heels. He has Scotch canniness; you understand? Very praiseworthy, no doubt. He is afraid to marry, unless, as he says, he can feel the ground under his feet. So, for the child's sake, if I had a few hundreds ahead----"
"Quite right. I did not know that Miss Latimer's choice was made," drily.
Mr. Laird remained silent after that. Certainly his pangs of disappointment at the knowledge that Miss Latimer could never be his wife could not be extreme, his passion for her having been of the most leisurely and well-bred description; they quite equalled, however, the anger and annoyance he felt when his friend Patterson outbid him the week before for a Gérôme[44] which he admired. Neither Bell nor the Gérôme would have been in keeping with his drawing-room furniture, perhaps; he was not quite sure that he really wanted either of them; but why should any other man have them? The other man in this case, he guessed at once to be that pious prig, Braddock, who had been afraid to trust him with his paltry savings. He would take care that the course of true love did not run smooth in that quarter.
"I am sure that Isabel's choice, whoever it may be, is a wise one," he said presently. "Better, perhaps, if he had not been of so practical a turn; if she lacks anything, it is imagination. But as for you, Colonel, it is your business to enable them to marry. Experimenting for humanity is all very well; but if a man has children, he is bound to furnish them with a solid foundation for happiness."
"In the shape of money?" smiling.
"In the shape of money. I want you to think over this offer of mine to-night, Latimer. I've a paper in my pocket with the details set down. Hillo! here we are at Millhall already."
----CHAPTER XIV.
"BUT, Bell, there is no reason in what you say."
"But it is true, father." They were waiting in the supper-room for Mr. Laird, and had been talking in an eager, low tone for some time. A red heat had come into Isabel's cheeks as they talked, and her eyes burned.
"You talk as if the earning an honest livelihood were worship of the devil. For my part," said the colonel, stretching his long legs before the fire, "I feel that dabbling in philanthropy and science has been too lazy a business for me. It's high time I went to hard work. I don't understand your objections. I can see no sin in a large salary any more than," glancing at the supper-table, "I can see the grace 'of God in cheap meat and no butter."
"I don't like dry bread either," with a shrug, "but nobody here thinks the worse of us that we eat it. I suppose it is because the mountains are so huge, and the sky so near, but you know it is a fact that money or the want of it is a trifling matter here. We take so little account of it, that we have time to think of other things. But in town, one smells the dollar everywhere. People are not ranked by their birth, as they were down in Virginia, or by their creative power, as they used to say up in Concord, but by their money. Very soon, papa, you and I would take the fever with the others. We would spend one half of our lives grubbing for the money, and the other in displaying it to shame our neighbours."
"Here is a moralist!" laughed Mr. Laird, who had come in unseen behind her. "But I'm inclined to doubt the effect of your huge mountains and sky as a cure for that fever, Miss Latimer," placing her chair behind the urn. "You must remember that I know your modern Arcadias tolerably well: I've not had the luck to find Cincinnatus at the plough[45], or Una at the churn[46]. Take your Berks county Dutchman, for instance--who lives on the refuse potatoes and pork of his farm, and hoards his penny savings in the clock-case; and his daughter has just as keen a zest for fashion as any city belle; she loops up her calico into a panier, and strings wax-beads in her hair instead of pearls." Isabel laughed, but Laird was in no humour for jesting. "I did not know," turning sharply on the colonel, "that you proposed telling Miss Latimer of my proposal immediately!"
"Oh yes!" calmly. "Bell are I are partners."
Mr. Laird sat down at the table, disarranging the napkin and plate while he leaned forward to renew the argument with her; suddenly silent again when he remembered that she never argued, and had none of the modern glibness of women. He knew her to be as slow of speech as Moses, except to her father. She had no brilliancy, no accomplishments, no beauty such as was possessed by a dozen girls in New York, who would not be unfavourable to his suit, and who as wives could bring both influence and money. What was there in the girl that always made him, when near her, feel how shabby a thing his life was, of how little import his money? He certainly had never felt any love or passion for her; it was rather an overwhelming conviction that as his wife she could and would lift him to a higher level than any man would have thought it possible for Houston Laird to attain.
"It's maudlin sentiment," he thought, staring meditatively at her from under his red eyebrows. "I've had the same sort of impression looking at old Nittany or listening to the vesper anthems, yet Houston Laird is hardly the man to spend his time mooning about mountains or churches. Yet what could that priggish bigot Braddock do with such a woman?"
Isabel, meantime, quite unconscious of any element of sublimity in her akin to Nittany or church music, was yet aware of the storm in the air, and wondered what had put their guest in such ill-humour, while the colonel carved the tough meat with chagrin. The game suppers he would give to Laird and the other boys when--that is, if he took the office!
"There can be no doubt," said Laird suddenly--"yes, coffee if you please--no doubt, whatever, that American society is corrupted to the very root by this greed for money. Yes, to the very root, sir! Chicanery and bribery in the very highest places, truckling and toadyism in the lowest, and, all to make a little more show than our neighbour. What else makes our men bilious dyspeptics and the women nervous wrecks at middle age? Yes, Colonel, you, passing your life in a farm in Virginia or experimenting here, have no idea of the rottenness of our social life. Isabel was right, sir! Her fine instinct showed it to her. The boy is trained from his cradle to make money, and the girl to marry a rich husband. It's all push, climb, heat, and struggle from the beginning to---I swear, I'm tired of it, Latimer!"
He spoke with vehemence, stirring his cup hurriedly, and keeping his eyes down. Bell was silent, turning carefully away from him with a queer feeling of having surprised him undressed. "There's something in the air here," trying to recover himself with an uneasy laugh, "that forces these things home on me. I always look down from this place on that gang of jobbers and gamblers at Harrisburgh, and think what cursed folly it all is--drive and cheat and steal for a handful of greenbacks more or less, and in a year or two--lie down in a wooden box in a cut in the clay, and there's the end!"
Isabel met his blue eyes fixed on her. Their rims were red, they were altogether off guard.
"Why do you tempt father down into the crowd then?" she said gently.
Some far-off thought crept into his eyes, shrewd, wary, humourous. "Don't take me at disadvantage, Miss Latimer," quickly, with a total change of tone. "Your father is incorruptible. I mean to serve him; I mean that, honestly. Besides, what would you have him do? His experiments here are stopped."
"My father," earnestly, "is a great inventor, Mr. Laird. He has something better to do than to make money. You have certainly heard of his new hygro-meter?"
"Yes," respectfully. "What became of that, Latimer?"
"Some fellow in Boston was beforehand with me, I found when I went to patent it."
"And the machine for surgeons to use, and the plough, and the attachment to sewing machines?" she held the cream-jug suspended, speaking so fast as to be scarcely intelligible.
"Bell only finds speech when defending me," said her father laughing. "Every one of those were really great inventions, Laird. But the difficulty was they were too intricate: the attachments cost double the price of the original machines."
"There is no reason why you should not go on inventing until you achieve something of use," with rising colour. "When my father," turning to Laird, "is in the army, or when he is experimenting, I go to bed every night, thinking how he is fighting or working for others. Never for himself. Some day the world will know what he is. I have known it always. I can not make you understand," stammering. "But he is the only great man I have known. I don't mind hunger or cold as long as there is a chance for him to do his work. But I will not have him go down to grub for money with the rest." She put both her hands suddenly on her father's shoulder, and looking at Laird, tried to smile, but her chin trembled, and the water stood in her eyes.
"I only hope," said Laird lightly, making a sudden flank movement of argument, "that he may be as successful as the rest who have come from Nittany. Andross is one of the luckiest, gayest fellows about town. Whatever he touches turns to gold. The judge, too, is on the high road to fortune; and as to Braddock, if he keeps to legitimate business," significantly, "I have no doubt of his success."
"What do you mean by legitimate business, Laird?" said the colonel, while Isabel sat down quietly.
"Well, Braddock is, I fancy, in haste to be rich. The fever," glancing furtively at Isabel, "which Miss Latimer dreads, has attacked him violently; it was in the blood, you know: Scotch-Irish."
"I never knew any man," she said composedly, "who was less disposed to overrate money than Dr. Braddock."
"I really ought not to differ with you, for I don't know the young man," carelessly. "I offered for his mother's sake to be of use to him when he came up to town last July. He had saved some money, a mere pittance, but his all, and I proposed one or two safe and profitable investments---" He paused, noticing the eagerness with which she followed him. It was part of Bell's dulness to have no curiosity, but it was not in woman's nature to refuse to listen now. She had known how every dollar of this pittance, which seemed to her so large, had been saved. How many hundred times had they consulted over its investment! Secretly Bell would have been willing to marry long ago without a penny, and to trust in the Lord; but Braddock had not been so minded. When the seven thousand were secure, however, he thought the future was safe. He had gone from her full of hope, meaning, as she knew, to put the money in Laird's hands for investment; the Nevada mines, or National Transit Stock, as everybody knew, were sure ground on which to grow dollars out of pennies. After he came back he never had once named the money to her; he had not, in the anxiety to conceal the real disposition he had made of it, even told her the different opinion he had formed of Laird on reaching town. She only knew that the money was not to be the basis of their future; that her lover had cooled and hesitated, and finally postponed the marriage on the plea of want of funds. She sat motionless as Laird went on.
"I proposed these investments, but he would have nothing to do with them; carried his money off to turn over according to his own judgment. I hope it was a wise judgment, I am sure. But there are so many sharpers about town ready to seize on a credulous fellow like Braddock, and so many ways of risking money---"
"Do you mean dishonest ways?" said Isabel, from the lofty height of her lover's innocence.
"Well--not precisely. Young ladies hardly understand financial operations clearly enough to comprehend technicalities. Without being gambling, strictly so called, there are certain ways of making money which are not clean, while legitimate brokerage is clean. I can scarcely explain it to you without---"
"It is not necessary. Dr. Braddock never invested in any dishonourable undertaking knowingly. And he is not at all 'a credulous person,' either," tartly.
"I am very glad to hear you speak so positively of the young man, Miss Latimer. Your judgment is, of course, unbiassed," heartily. "For his mother's sake, I should be sorry that he lost his little savings."
An awkward silence followed. "Laird," said the colonel, leaning over the table anxiously after taking council with himself, "the truth is that I wished to speak to you about this very matter. Braddock is a friend of ours. There is a reason why I am interested about his conduct in regard to that money. A business reason, you see?" feeling himself a very Talleyrand[47] of diplomacy. "But there have been very unpleasant whispers about that affair of the money in the neighbourhood. People in a sparsely settled place know each others' business, and are the very deuce to gossip. Braddock took the money away, and came home without it; began to save and stint himself in every way. There was talk of his having been drawn into a gambling-house, or to a race-course; but the lad is a professor of religion. I could not credit that. But now that you speak of those other modes---"
"Papa," said Bell, in an unnecessarily firm voice, "You may be sure that whatever disposition Doctor Braddock has made of his money was the very most honest and wisest disposition that could be made."
"That settles the question, Latimer." Mr. Laird forced a laugh.
"Not to my mind," eagerly rubbing both hands along his thin knees. "Heaven knows I have no desire to meddle in his or any man's business affairs. But this concerns--concerns a friend of mine, a woman whose future depends on him. Her happiness---" he glanced at Bell, wishing that she should understand, and quite sure that Laird would never penetrate the inscrutable mystery in which he wrapped his meaning.
"Of course," said Laird cheerfully, "he gave an account of his disposal of the money to anybody who had a right to such an account. Neither you nor I have that, Colonel. The natural supposition for us outsiders, when a young fellow from the country lets six or seven thousand slip from him in town, and makes no explanation about it, is that he has lost it in some disgraceful way. Miss Latimer must not think us harsh."
"That rule would not apply in this case," interposed Isabel calmly. "It would be simply impossible for Clay Braddock to be concerned in anything disgraceful."
She stopped, swallowing once or twice. Mr. Laird paused, his cup in his hand, looking at her in astonishment. He had always thought her a plain woman before. Something about her at the moment startled her father also. His wife had possessed a rare beauty which had made her everywhere a woman of mark, and it had often vexed him that her daughter had not one of her features, and passed unnoticed through life. But now---. It occurred to him also suddenly to think what the child must have suffered during her lover's long neglect and silence, about this same cursed money on which their future hinged. If he could but cure her of her love for the fellow!
"It looks badly," he blurted out. "And there is more than that which looks badly. Nobody knows it but Maddox; God forbid it should be whispered about--but I can tell you two. Braddock's books did not turn out right--the judge detected altered numbers, for years back. He said nothing to Braddock, because he could not find where the money was missing exactly; but the numbers were undoubtedly altered---"
"This is too much!" rising. "Mr. Laird, you do not know Dr. Braddock. I assure you it is all false. I wonder my father allowed Judge Maddox to hint such a thing to him! Clay never wronged a man of a penny."
"You have proof of that, of course, Miss Latimer."
"Proof? why, I know it is not true. That is enough," haughtily. "And as for any woman, papa, whose future is in his hands--you need have no fear for her whatever. Her future is safe. Perfectly safe."
She walked across the room, while the two men, not exchanging a glance, watched her as if mesmerized.
Laird drew a long breath. "To think," his thoughts ran, "that pride in such a respectable stick as that Braddock could lift her out of herself into that wonderful woman. It's just the difference between a scrawny flannelled race-horse in its stable, and the creature as it bounds into the goal, full of fire and beauty from head to foot. If she had loved a man, now--a man." His blood was strangely heated, but he helped himself to bread, composedly choosing a soft piece.
SHe took up her fur mantle, and began to hurriedly button it about her. Her father went to her. "Bell, where are you going?"
"I--I don't know, papa. If I could tell him"--with a bewildered look around her, the tears coming slowly up to her eyes.
"It's not like you to be nervous, child. Your hands are as cold--come to the fire." He began to take off the mantle; but in a minute she was herself again.
"I am chilly; I think I'll keep it on," going back to her chair. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Laird. Dr. Braddock is a friend of ours, and---"
"There are no half-way measures in your friendship! I only wish I had so loyal an ally. There must be a very genuine worth in that young fellow," he added with heartiness, "to gain such genuine friends as he has had the luck to make here and in town."
"I did not know that he had any friends in town," said Isabel quickly, "or even acquaintances."
"Why, you would not have the boy turn hermit, Bell?" her father interposed impatiently.
"He told me that his time was fully occupied in his work and study," she said.
Oth came in to remove the supper dishes. At Laird's proposal they sat still about the roaring fire of pine logs.
"I have taken a fancy to this room," he said lazily; "to the broad hearth and the red curtains, and the white hills without, and the deer's heads on the wall, and the bear's skin under foot."
The truth was, he did not wish to disturb Isabel; he wanted to watch her as she sat, her head bent forward from the fur, looking moodily in the fire, her hands folded idly in her lap.
"These suspicions of Braddock are having their effect on her," whispered the colonel, quite forgetting that he was keeping Bell's secret from Laird. "It's time she demanded an explanation from him, as Maddox said. The whole business has an ugly look. Clay ought to set it right, sir."
"She would not believe if she saw him pick Maddox's pocket. It would only be a pretext for exalting him into a more honest hero," laughed Laird. "Tut, tut. You don't know women, Latimer."
Oth piled up fresh logs and swept the hearth; the two men plunged into a discussion of the internal revenue tax, but still Miss Latimer's gray eyes were fixed immovably on the shifting blaze.
"Now, if it is the intention of the government to wipe out the debt---" said the colonel, pointing his argument off with his forefinger on his scuffed trousers.
"How many evenings in the week does he give to his friends, as you call them?" she said, looking up suddenly at Laird.
"Who the deuce---?" cried the colonel.
"Very nearly all, I judge," said Laird readily. "I meet him at Judge Maddox's every time I drop in there, and I see him at concerts, in opera boxes, and so on, constantly."
"Miss Maddox's opera box?"
"Yes, I believe so. That is--well, I have seen him with them twice this winter. What a charming creature that little girl is, Latimer, by the way?"
"Yes, very pretty. Not regular enough features to please me, however," absently, and glancing at Isabel, whom he felt, with a dog-like sort of instinct, was in fresh trouble of some kind.
"Anna Maddox's face has not a fault!" she said energetically. "I am sure, papa, you never saw such exquisite form and colour."
"Tut, tut. Nothing of the kind. The child is very pleasing, to be sure. The most innocent, ingenuous little creature---"
Mr. Laird laughed.
"On the contrary! I don't know a shrewder little practitioner in society."
"You are perfectly right, Mr. Laird," said Isabel, rising hastily. "She is full of art. I never knew anybody who was more persistent in laying her plans, or showed more skilful duplicity in carrying them out."
"Why, Bell, you certainly used to laugh at Anna as a silly child."
"Then I was very much mistaken. She has had sense enough to choose the man best worth any woman's choice for her husband, and she has succeeded in winning him, that is plain. Oh, that is quite plain!"
The face within the dark fur had suddenly lost its colour, and showed how thin and worn it had grown in the last few months.
"It is intolerably hot in this room!" pushing off the mantle. "I must go out for some fresh air. I'll see if Oth has--has put Rosy in her stall."
"Rosy! What the deuce has she to do with the cow? God bless me! the ways of women!" ejaculated the colonel, hurrying after her, while Laird, thrusting his hands in his pockets and stretching out his feet on the fender, laughed.
Her father found her pacing up and down the back porch, only prevented from pacing in the yard by the snow, which was up to her knees.
"Bell!" trying to part her hands, shut on each other.
"Yes, papa."
"This is unlike you. This is abject folly. Doctor Braddock---"
"Don't name him to me! Never again. That he could be so weak--as to be deceived by that--that miserable little creature! And then to deceive me! Oh, to deceive me!"
"Bell, you have no warrant for even accusing the man. Be reasonable. You have heard nothing except that he visits sometimes at the judge's, and was twice in their box at the opera. Could anything be more natural? And you go off at a tangent, and believe him in love with her."
"I believe more than that," with solemn calmness. "I believe that I have now the key to the whole mystery--he means to marry her. He meant it from the night she tricked him into wandering through the mountains, pretending she was searching for Andross. He has invested the money with a view to marrying her. Why should he not tell me what he had done with it else? It's just as clear---. He went to town to please her--followed her---."
"Because the Works stopped and left him without a dollar, Bell. Be just, child. You are not lacking in common-sense."
"Papa, my instinct told me all this long ago. It is all perfectly plain to me. He is married, very likely, by this time. I knew by instinct, the very day her cunning eyes turned on him and her wiles began to tell on him."
"Oh! confound instinct!" muttered the colonel. But Isabel's hands were beginning to feel cold and limp, and her forehead like fire; in spite of her low voice and swift steps he felt that she very likely would fall the next minute like a rag in his hands. "And what am I to do with her then?" said the bewildered and imbecile colonel. She had always been like a son to him, a ready staff on which to support his vagaries or griefs or rheumatism, and now at this first touch of idiotic jealousy she crumbled as it were into a senseless, helpless dead weight on his hands.
"Bell, dear, won't you at least come to your room? You'll certainly have the influenza again. And as for poor Clay---"
"If you think," with slow emphasis, "that I care about Clay, or that his going will cost me a single tear, you are mistaken, papa. If he could be beguiled by such a painted, shallow actress as Anna---"
"I thought," slyly, "you considered her beauty without a flaw?"
"Ah! you are laughing at me?" She stopped, looking up at him; her wrists which he caught trembled, the pulse was gone; she began to sob in a noiseless, stifled way.
"Laugh at you! God help you, my darling, no," cried the colonel, picking her up in his arms like a baby. "But you're such a fool! Come to bed directly." He pushed open the door of her room, and laying her in a great easy chair began to build up the fire, blowing it vigorously. "They're all alike--every woman of them!" he muttered half aloud. "She'd love him all the better if he'd committed burglary, but let him speak civilly to a pretty girl and there is no forgiveness for him. There," glancing over his shoulder, "she's crying comfortably, thank heaven! It'll all come right now."
The colonel wisely left Isabel to her tears. When he was going to bed a tall white-robed figure beckoned him to her room door.
"Papa, I've been considering Mr. Laird's proposal, and I think we had better accept it. There's no need that we should worship Mammon[48], if we do live in town."
"No," looking at her dubiously. "I thought we would take a month or two to talk it over. When would you wish to go, Bell?"
"To-morrow, papa."
"Oh!" said the colonel, and in that exclamation buried both his difficulties and amazement.
Bell went back to the clear fire, and the bear's skin in front, on which she had been sitting, and the low stool set on it, with the lamp, and her little old Testament open beside it. She had read it every day since she was a child, but so cheerful had been her life that this was the first time that its pages were wet with tears. Perhaps because she had had no mother, this Elder Brother of hers was more real and nearer to her than to other people. She could not read to-night, though she tried. No common-sense, no argument would have comforted her. But when she pushed away the lamp, and kneeling down laid her head on the stool, and cried without any words, she knew that He understood all of her story; how dear this old home was, and how innocent; what the man was to her who had loved her there, and how she had lost him.
He knew.
When she rose at last to get into bed it was with the quiet, almost happy, face of a child who has sobbed itself to sleep on its mother's bosom. She laid her cheek on her hand on the pillow, thinking with a smile that He would bring it all right, and that this world was a happy one after all, and full of good, friendly people. "Excepting one," she murmured, as she closed her eyes. "Artful little creature!"
----
CHAPTER XV.
MR. LAIRD passed most of that winter in New York, because, as he said, he must supervise the business of the National Transit Company in person, but in reality, to keep the Whiskey Ring at a distance from which none of the ill-odour of their doings could cling to his garments. The best chess-players are those who do not need to see the board.
One evening in March he dropped in as usual to the Century Club, which gave a reception that night to a distinguished English poet who had just arrived. Mr. Laird carefully avoided the public apartments, however, and hurried to a window where, half-hidden by the lace curtains, a small, fair-haired young man was alternately looking out at the moon and down at his dainty feet. On every Saturday evening he found this same fair-haired little man waiting for him at the same window.
"Ah, Willitts, you are here?" drawing up a chair.
"Yes, I've been here for an hour," balancing his eye-glass on his nose. "Perrott came over from Philadelphia with me, and we've been surveying the crowd. Some most remarkable faces there, sir," waving his little ringed hand to the mob of men who, in full evening dress, were gathered about the stranger. "But I doubt if the poet gets a fair glimpse of them through the cigar smoke. Tell him this is an æsthetic club, and then stifle him in their own parlour with the smell of tobacco and whiskey! It is simply indecent, nasty, as I tell Perrott."
"If you had not come I should have run over on the 12:20 train," said Laird heavily. There was an intentness in his manner, a rigidity in his solid features, which showed a marked departure from his usual easy indolent bearing when discussing business. "No additional news which could not be trusted to the wires, Willitts?"
"No," carelessly dropping his glass. "Good type of John Bull, that fellow yonder--of the lean, smug kind! No, nothing tangible. But a certain uneasiness and a good deal of talk about a tornado coming, nobody knows from whence. Pity somebody had not a nose for a financial crisis, as Jack Andross has for a thunder gust. That fellow scents it days beforehand! It is remarkable to find such magnetic sensibility in a healthy, stout man."
"I am not particularly interested in Mr. Andross as a barometer," drily. "Has he attended to that matter at Harrisburgh?"
"Well, no," beginning to take off his gloves. "The gentlemen down on Franklin street--your partners," hesitating.
"Very well, go on."
"They bade me tell you that the crisis is too imminent to risk anything. At least three votes are needed in the House to pass the bill---"
"I know all that! I told you last week that those votes could be bought as easily as any others. It is only a question of price. I told you to charge Andross not to spare expense. It's no time for haggling!" He got up suddenly, throwing up the window; the March wind, wet with sleet, rushed in, flapping the curtains.
"Ugh! Allow me," gently, closing it. "You forgot the hail. The difficulty," taking the dampened tea-rose from his coat, "is not with the legislators, but Andross. The gentlemen think it advisable to ask somebody else to negotiate the matter. Jack has some scruples, it appears. Heaven knows what they are," laughing. "Those fellows are for sale, and why not buy them as you would a pound of sugar?"
"No one can approach them so well as Andross," thoughtfully. "I don't wish to compel him--- But we shall need his vote also."
"Oh! That, of course, will be a debt of friendship. Jack has done nothing for us since you gave him his seat in the Senate. No price to pay there."
Mr. Laird was silent. "Andross is a working member of the Senate, I hear?" he said presently.
"Yes," laughing. "He has laid the axe to the root of the tree with a vengeance. No bill passes unquestioned, Perrott tells me. No snakes creep in with them this session. Some of the men think Andross is another name for honesty; and some, that he is only making a reputation to command a higher price presently!"
"He is quite sincere." There was a marked respect in his tone.
"Oh! yes. I've no doubt of it. I'd trust Jack's honour as I would my own. Now, if he makes any difficulty, I think I could go down and manipulate those fellows, Mr. Laird?"
"No, Ned. They are gentlemen and statesmen--for their constituencies. Transactions with them must be strictly under cover. It would not do to have you buzzing too much about Harrisburgh. You'd tell your errand everywhere, like a mosquito."
"All right," good humouredly. "But I think you've overrated Andross's possible usefulness to you. A man of business for the company he will never be, that's certain."
"No. But there's something about Jack that attracts people, and that's what I want. To me he has always seemed a weak, vacillating fellow, but his influence over the poorer classes is simply incalculable. No man could serve me better if he chose. But to make him choose--"
Ned Willitts twisted the waxed ends of his fair mustache meditatively, bending his little brain to the solving of this problem. At home Ned was a harmless, kindly, light-hearted fellow, ready to escort his sisters to ball or opera, and a famous referee in all matters of dancing or ball etiquette; in the office he had been taught since he could speak that man's duty was to make money--to "get on." In his neat little body, from feather head to feather heels, there was no troublesome monitor to ask meddling questions as to the "how."
"It would not be easy to reach Andross through his pocket," he said. "He has gone into a set who are so cursedly independent as to pretend to have souls above greenbacks; a lot of journalists, actors, and the like; very nice fellows really, but full of whims. I don't see but that they charge full value for their wares, though," laughing.
"What women does he visit?"
"Oh! a dozen. He's a social fellow, you know. But he's a perfect slave to that little girl of Maddox's. He does not care who sees that."
"And she will rate herself at a high figure when it comes to marriage."
"Very possibly; she's not a fool. She's worth it. But social position is of more weight with her than money; though I should not be at all surprised she'd make a love-match some of these days without either. She's an affectionate little thing."
"You seem to be quite behind the scenes, Ned."
"Well, yes. It's only a sisterly sort of friendship, but she really gives me more of her confidence than anybody else." The sentence ended in a conscious giggle. "Of course," he resumed gravely, "she depended on Andross a good deal to get into society. She's not the sort of woman to wait five or ten years of probation according to Philadelphia custom, so she began by going to all the public balls, meaning to pick up acquaintances there, but Andross soon stopped that. She has made her way into a certain fashionable set, however, to his great disgust. Girls who lead in petticoats and bonnets, and who are noticeably décolleté[49] at the opera. Jack is fastidious about women."
"Yes. She will lose her hold on him." If she did, Laird had lost his hold on him.
For the moment a rash impulse seized him, to let the gallant young fellow go. He was now doing an honest man's work honestly; saving money, as Laird knew, to replace that which he had stolen; well-clothed, light-hearted, going among all kinds of people, carrying a cordial cheerfulness with him. Everybody who met him, like Spellin at the furnace, had the feeling that Jack was a man who ought to have his laugh out in the world; and Laird was no exception to the rule.
But this was no time for generous impulses. He had educated and reared this man to serve him, and now when this service was needed to stand between him and ruin, it was no time to take off the yoke.
"I'll come over on Wednesday and see how matters stand."
"You mean in the Transit office?"
"No. That business is clear enough," gloomily.
"No trouble ahead, really?" nodding and smiling, as he stood behind Laird's chair, to his acquaintances in the crowd. Curious glances were thrown now and then at the great Railroad King and his jackal, as they called Willitts, but they were not disturbed. Laird made no reply to the last question. Certainly the business was clear to him! Destruction waited for him on every side. He remembered the old story of the prisoner inclosed in a cell with movable walls, which each day shut in upon him with inexorable steadiness, until he was crushed between them. There was no chance except in the relief which ought to come from the profits of the distilling business in Philadelphia, and if the bill he had drawn up did not pass the Pennsylvania legislature, these profits would be diminished one-half. To pass that bill, Andross's help was necessary. It was plain enough!
"That is the Rev. Dr. Hyde, under the chandelier," said Ned over his head. "No better brain in the city than that fellow's. He was coining money in trade, and threw it all up to preach to drunken sailors. By George, a thing like that makes me believe in religion! Ah, how'reye, Whalley?" winking with his eyelids and mustachiod upper lip at once; a familiar frisky recognition for which he was known on Chestnut street. "That bald man was Whalley, leading gentleman at Wallack's. By the way," lowering his voice with gravity, "that ballet-girl I told you of, and for whom you gave me carte blanche?"[50]
"Yes."
"Well, it was worse than I thought, though when I heard her coughing in her tulle and tights in the cold flies, it was so horrible it fairly sickened me. I told you about that, though. I found she lived with her mother in a squalid little court--Melon alley. They had nothing but what the girl made--mother was crippled; the girl actually crept out of bed, night after night, with the death sweats on her, to go down to the Varieties to dance. Perrott went with me; we had them both taken to the hospital, and put in one room together. All comfortable. I got Roberts--he's a clergyman, a friend of mine--to go at once to her; his wife took jelly and things---"
"You ought to have sent fruit. The fever is intolerable in that disease sometimes."
"Yes, I did. So did Cram, the Varieties manager; he's not a bad fellow, Cram, but careless; he ought to have seen to the girl before. Oh! it was all very comfortable for them, and Roberts told me she--she felt ready to go at the last. Roberts was quite satisfied with her state of mind, sir. The poor thing only lived two weeks."
"I am glad you attended to the matter so well, Ned," earnestly. "Any other cases of real want that come in your way, remember to call on me."
"Well. I generally keep out of sight of such things, but sometimes they force themselves on one. As for street-beggars they never get a rap from me."
Mr. Laird drew out his watch, and said something about supper, when Willitts stopped him.
"Oh! I meant to tell you, there was the very devil to pay in the distilleries."
Laird's dislike was so great to being openly identified with the business, that he affected indifference, even to this confidential messenger; who had for so many years been a go-between for the actual distillers and capitalists who furnished the means, that he had dubbed himself the Mercury of the whiskey-barrels; and who knew just how deeply he was involved with them.
"Ah! what is the trouble, Willitts?"
"An old officer named Latimer is the trouble, and a tolerably obstinate one, too. He is the new collector, and Wilkins and Brady and every other whiskey manufacturer are up in arms against him, and inquiring how the deuce he got the appointment. But he has it, and is likely to give them a Waterloo defeat before long, if all accounts be true."
"I gave him the appointment," coldly.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Laird. I did not know that."
"Now if you can lay aside jesting for awhile, perhaps you will explain the business so that you can be understood. I gave Colonel Latimer the place, because he was a brave, honourable man; the party has not so many of that kind in its service just now in Phildelphia."
Ned shook his head, listening attentively.
"Latimer" (Mr. Laird continued slowly, choosing his words) "is a man of invincible integrity. No bribe can touch him. He needed the place, and the place---"
--"Needed him," supplying the pause. "I understand. One such man will strengthen the party in public estimation, beyond the power of any Citizen's Reform Party to damage it. A cloak, like charity, to cover a multitude of sins. But, confound it, the old fellow need not have made honesty an epidemic! It's likely to prove more fatal to the distillers than the small-pox."
"In what way?" Laird motioned Willitts to come in front of him, and leaning both hands on his knees, looked steadily--not at the flippant young man, but at the disaster behind him.
"Well, hitherto, the distillers and officers have been as one family--brethren dwelling together in unity. Now--but to make you understand, Mr. Laird, I must enter into details, which hitherto you have avoided."
Laird coughed doubtfully. "I don't like them, Ned," frankly. "The tricks and the air of the distilleries are something totally alien to my habits or nature. When I put my money into the business, it was with the proviso that I was to have nothing to do with them. Still there seems to be brain-work needed now, and I must understand the situation. I have no doubt, now, that there is a good deal of deception practised on the government officers!"
"I am afraid there is," dropping his eyes to hide their twinkle. "In a dozen ways. If there were not, the profits would be small indeed. The most common trick is the sending out twenty barrels of liquor for one on which the tax is paid. The detectives, under controul of the collector, have been in the habit of taxing, every day, only the barrels on which they found no greenback laid. Neither of your distilleries have been taxed for one-tenth of the article they sold."
"I did not know how the thing was done. But the tax is really too exorbitant," said Laird calmly. "My distillers, I believe, are reckoned exceptionally honest. because they pay a tax at all."
"They will have a chance to grow in grace under Colonel Latimer's discipline, then," laughing.
"What do you mean? Nobody attempted to bribe him?"
"No. But his man Bowyer, special detective, has taken the collection of the tax in his own hands. Wilkins himself sent him in last night to count the barrels, having left on each one a crisp new note, and found them untouched. This morning Wilkins was arrested on charge of illicit distillation. In fact, that was the news I came over to give you. The other distillers are looking for arrest on Monday morning. Their houses will be closed if that be done."
"If they close now I am ruined," Laird said, so calmly that Ned rejoined lightly: "Not so bad as that, of course. What is to be done? Latimer can not be removed. There has been too much gratulation on his honesty. To behead him, on any pretext, would be for the party to plead guilty, in so many words."
"Tell the men to pay the tax on every gallon. We can stand it--for a week or two."
"You will not throw Bowyer off his guard in that way. The fellow has the eye of a lynx. And he really seems to do his duty for the duty's sake. A dull kind of fellow, I suspect, with no idea of making his way in the world. In case he is as wide-awake as ever, after this spasm of honesty in the distillers, what are they to do?"
Mr. Laird go tup and walked impatiently down the room. Coming back he beckoned Willitts. "It is quite time for supper," he said, as though he had forgotten the subject altogether. It was not until, with his napkin spread over his portly chest, he had discussed the bill of fare with the waiter, and settled himself to wait for the first dishes, that he replied, leaning back and directing his eyes to the chandelier overhead:
"This part of the matter I have nothing to do with, Ned. Isn't it enough that I furnish money to those fellows, but must I furnish both brains and hands? Wilkins ought to know how to manage such obstacles as this Bowyer. He used to have a way--and tools with which to force such obstacles to stand aside."
Willitts nodded, poured out a glass of sherry, sipped it and nodded again. "Y-es, I know," he said deliberately. "It is a good while since anything of that kind was done though, and it is risky, always. I don't know, exactly, how the thing was managed, but Wilkins could engineer it, no doubt. There was a fellow called Rourke or Voss, or any other convenient name, who was a useful person to have about, Wilkins said. The fighting manager, they called him at the distillery. Andross had the man under his thumb, they said."
"Jack got him out of the penitentiary four years before his sentence ran out," Laird said, with ill concealed irritation that he was obliged to answer. "I can send him back to-morrow if I choose. He fought with Mace last week in Brooklyn. Wilkins knows where to find him, if he wants him. Now, let us be done with this, Willitts. It's not a subject I fancy."
"That's true. It spoils digestion. Though if the worst come to the worst, it can only give Major Bowyer a month or two of seclusion in which to mend a broken head, and meditate on his own virtues."
"Try this salmi? Whatever is done to Bowyer, let it be effectual. Don't let there be any bungling. Don't let him be attacked and made more furious, like a beast half mangled by dogs."
"That is the objection to using that kind of men. You never know how much they will do, or leave undone. I object to coarse tools always."
Laird did not answer.
"By the way," asked Ned presently, delicately wiping his mustache with his napkin, "in case Wilkins is obliged to have recourse to our friend's aid, what is to be done with him afterwards? There will be no difficulty in bringing him through a trial scot free, if you choose the judge and counsel, or would you prefer to have him locked up for a few years?"
"Time enough to discuss that hereafter. He may not be needed at all. But if he is," stooping forward with a suddenly startled face, "remember Colonel Latimer is to be held as safe as I am. Bowyer is the point of attack. If one of old Latimer's gray hairs are touched, every man concerned in it shall suffer as for murder. Make Wilkins understand that."
"Very well," composedly disjointing his bird. But secretly he thought the blow had better be aimed at the real cause of difficulty, and he had little doubt that Wilkins would agree with him, and follow his own counsel. In fact Wilkins, infuriated by his arrest, had threatened this very morning to take matters in his own hands in future, and hinted that Laird's capital did not counterbalance the personal risk run by the actual distillers, or give him the right to dictate.
Willitts was forced to hurry his supper to catch the midnight train. Mr. Laird walked with him to the door of the club-house. He detained him a moment at parting.
"Ned, if you know any means which can be brought to bear on Andross to induce him to vote with his party, I wish you'd use them. I have a sure hold on the fellow, but I'd rather not have recourse to it, if possible. The fact is, I like Jack."
"Everybody does. I'll think of it."
Ned, stretched at ease in his sleeping berth, had leisure to think of it seriously. Andross used to be an easy fellow, ready to turn this way or that at anybody's beck or call. Since he came down from the mountains he had been wholly changed--economical, plodding, obstinate in trudging on his own path. "It's partly religion, and partly love for that little witch that ails him," shrewdly guessed Ned. "He thinks he can pass through the Harrisburgh legislature like Shadrach and his friends through the fiery furnace. Every time he turns his back on a fee, or plumps an honest vote, he thinks it brings him nearer to heaven and Anna." He lay quiet for a minute or two, and then whistled, his merry, good-natured faced twinkling.
"Aha! that will do! We can put a ring through any bull's nose in that way. Master Jack will find he can't slip the party traces. I wonder we did not think of that plan before. But Anna must manage it." And he composed himself to a balmy sleep.
CHAPTER XVI.
MR. WILLITTS had an early opportunity of carrying his plan into effect, as he found a note with Anna's monogram in daintiest pink and gold on the seal, inviting him to dine with her father the next evening. Miss Maddox usually controulled her father's efforts at hospitality.
As the church-bells were ringing for evening service, Ned found himself in the hall of the judge's gay little house on Spruce street. Every gas-burner that could give a light was blazing at its full head from garret to basement; frescoes and brilliant chromos and gilding, Axminster carpets and brocatelle curtains sent back the light all over the house; from the open parlor doors came a buzz of voices, amid which Anna's sweet, shrill little pipe cut the air incessantly. Ned drew off his overcoat quickly; he liked the house and the overdressed manner of it; it was like a brassy opera of Verdi's[51].
In the hall he met Ware.
"Is Andross here?" hurriedly asked Ned.
"No, but he is coming, I believe. He runs down from Harrisburgh every Friday to pay his court here until Monday, they tell me. What chance has he, do you think? Maddox will want his daughter to marry for money or position, I fancy."
"I do not know," said Ned coldly.
Ware was a good fellow, but in danger of forgetting the anvil from which he dated, if he was not snubbed now and then.
There were half a dozen men for dinner, but no women excepting Mrs. General Ralston, one of those ponderous matrons so common in Philadelphia, whose bulk and black velvet and hook nose and turrets of shining white hair atop symbolize a sort of social Gibraltar, commanding any position. Mrs. Ralston was there as a chaperone for Miss Maddox, who held herself, however, carefully aloof from her, having her own business to transact with every man present.
Anna, grown thinner, her complexion more delicate, and dressed by Worth with a regard to her peculiar style, was a much finer study of Simplicity and Youth than in her crude state in the mountains.
Willitts secured a seat beside her at dinner, and on somebody regretting the absence of "our young senator," remarked carelessly that he heard that Andross was determined to slip the party yoke, voting as he pleased, according to his conscience.
"Yes, by George, sir!" said General Ralston, a little, lean, bewhiskered man, with a bass voice; "the young man forgets himself, sir! We don't send representatives to Harrisburgh to exercise the right of private judgment, but to serve their constituency. It is lucky for the district that his term expires so soon."
"The meaning of which is," whispered Ware, "that Ralston took an axe up to Jack last week, and brought it back unground."
"An axe?" said Anna, bewildered. "But will not Mr. Andross go back to the senate after this term?" turning to Ned.
"I'm afraid not," laughing. "His tactics are not popular with the drum-majors of the party, as you see."
"But really, Mr. Willitts," said the judge, lowering his tones, "it is very wrong in Andross, as well as impolitic, to oppose the men that elected him. It's ungrateful! Ralston tells me he refused--absolutely refused point-black a position to his son-in-law, on the ground of incompetency. Now, without Ralston, Laird never could have got that seat for Andross. No use for Jack to butt his head against customs in force before he was born. It's cursedly Quixotic."
"Do you really think he will not be sent back next term?" persisted Anna, as soon as the voices drowned her whisper. Her fair forehead was knit, and there was an angry glitter in the blue eyes which Jack called saintly. "He has not so much social rank or money, Heaven knows, that he can afford to throw away the little his friends have got for him! What is the matter with his tactics? How does he offend these men?"
Ned was idly speculating, as she talked, how this shrewish tone would sound thirty years hence, when the nose and dimpled chin were sharp, and crow's-feet had come into the neck.
"Tactics?" he said hastily, catching himself. "Well, Andross has set himself against these men in every way; he is a rigid impersonation of virtue. He might be as honest as he pleased, but not run counter to every man's prejudices. Apropos to prejudices, I am glad to see that you are not a fanatic about temperance," glancing at the half empty champagne glass which she had absently raised to her lips.
"Do you think it looks unwomanly for a young girl to take wine?" looking sharply at him.
"I? Oh dear, no! All fashionable girls take it. You ought to see Netty Ford after supper! By the way, that is one of Jack's delinquencies. He is abstinent to an absurd degree; makes himself a sort of living sermon at every dinner or card-party in Harrisburgh. Now," leaning closer, as he saw how intently she listened, "he is precisely one of the men to whom wine in moderation would be an advantage. A glass or two would make him more genial, pliable--popular; you understand?"
"I shouldn't like," shaking her head gravely, "to see him a drunkard."
"Am I a drunkard? Is your father? Be reasonable, Miss Maddox. It is your duty, as his friend, to advise Andross for his good; and you see the imminent danger he is in of losing his seat."
"Oh, if he loses that little bit of respectability, he need not count me as his friend, I can tell you," tossing her daintily coiffured head. "Let us talk of something else. I'm tired of Andross!"
Ned obeyed. But he saw that she only meant to gain time to make up that bundle of small particles, her mind. There was a slight bustle in the hall presently, and Andross's voice, loud and hearty, was heard. A pleasant stir passed round the table, as though a fresh wind had suddenly come into the room. "There he comes!" said one to another, smiling. Even Ralston relaxed his scowl: he could not help but like the fellow in spite of himself.
"Why, Jack my boy!" cried the judge, going to the door as Andross in full evening dress, his handsome face glowing and ruddy with the frost, came in. He shook hands with everybody, joked with Ned, touched Anna's hand with a furtive look, which Willitts caught, and thought how like a woman the man was, with all his tremendous muscular power. Ned had never seen a woman's eyes so brilliant and tender.
"You think if he would be friendly and drink moderately with those people it would bring all right?" breathlessly whispered Anna.
"He would undoubtedly become more ductile. The party complain he won't work in harness, as you heard."
"He ought to work in harness or in anything they give him," irritably. "What right has he to oppose the party, when they can take his salary from him?"
"I would not argue with him on political grounds if I were you," cautiously suggested Ned.
"Oh, I never argue!" quickly. "Nothing disgusts men with a woman so much. As for politics I owe all I know to you, Mr. Willitts," with an upward confiding glance, which for the moment rendered Ned dumb. "But if the wine is a remedy I will administer that," smiling across the table to Andross who, unable to hear her words, was watching her lovely, mobile face with delight.
"I went into Holy Trinity church, Miss Maddox, as I came up," he said, "and heard Phillips Brooks lecture. I am glad you have chosen that church."
Anna bowed and smiled. Her care in choosing a church had been to find one in a fashionable neighbourhood, and when found, to secure a foremost seat in it.
"Yes," responded Mrs. Ralston, "one comes out of it with a new faith in humanity."
Andross felt as if he did not need Phillips Brooks[52] to give him faith in humanity to-night. Life was so different with him from the best which he had hoped, when he put on Laird's yoke. Nothing had interfered with his resolve to be honest. To-day he had seen a chance where by a lucky stroke he might honestly earn the money to replace to the Gray Eagle account. That done he could look God and the world in the face again. As for this depravity in mankind, to which Mr. Brooks had referred, that was a far-off matter for theologians to deal with. No doubt there was truth somewhere in those old symbolic legends of a pilgrim soul beset in its dark and lonely way by tempting fiends, which, when it was vanquished, dragged it down to abodes of unknown, unutterable woe. But what place was there for tempted souls or evil spirits in Judge Maddox's drawing-room? Jack's heart was light as he walked by Anna's side into it; his eyes full of laughter. These men, all the men he knew in the city, in fact, were such a cordial lot of good fellows! sensible, practical, attaching too much importance to money, perhaps, but ready to help on with any useful work of science or knowledge; charitable, too, and supporters of churches and asylums. Ned Willitts, for instance; why, that featherheaded fellow had a heart as easily moved as a girl's by a fine poem, or a touching song, or a tale of suffering. And then there were the women--with their beauty and tenderness, as if God had sent them purposely to help a poor striving fellow back to Him.
He paused by the door, holding it open for Anna to pass through. She halted one moment uncertainly, and then motioned to a servant:
"You did not take wine with me, Mr. Andross," smiling, the glass in her outstretched hand. "We must drink to your reëlection. I shall have no trouble in finding work out of Harrisburgh."
"The toast ought to take a wider range, then, Miss Maddox," said Ned. "Your success, Andross; you can't refuse that."
"No," draining his glass. "To my success."
Anna blushed shyly as she took his arm, having caught the look with which he gave the word significance.
"I wish I could think wine or anything else would help me to speedier success," whispered Jack, as she leaned upon his arm. "But you are so far removed from me now."
"You must act differently," eagerly. "You must keep your position if we hope to marry at all. Papa is a prosaic, practical man, as I have told you before. And to keep it, you must be more friendly with the leading men of your party; join their parties--play cards--drink with them. You are not afraid to do it?"
"Why, who has been filling your little head with politics?" laughing. "As to those men, they know me, and what I am worth, tolerably well. I am no hero in their eyes as in yours," softly; "and as for drinking, of course, I'm not afraid. I never cared for liquor in any shape, and never shall. It is rather disagreeable than otherwise. Tobacco is the fatal temptation to me."
Yet at the time he felt strangely warmed and heartened, whether by the wine or the fervour of Anna's repeated soft glances he could not tell.
----CHAPTER XVII.
WHEN Andross left the judge's house that evening, he saw a man crossing one of the squares, and waited under a lamp for him to come up.
"It looks like Braddock; but it can't be the old fellow, surely?" he muttered anxiously. Braddock had been for the last three months in Washington, which had prevented their meeting. This man was just off a journey, carried his satchel in his hand; but where was the immaculate broadcloth, the glossy shirt-cuffs, the high hat by which Clay was wont to be known afar off to all men? Andross noted the stooped shoulders, the worn coat, the general air of shabbiness and depression. The change startled and touched him so sharply that he stood still instead of hurrying forward.
"What trouble can he have had? What can he have done?" He always had thought of Clay, with his firmness and virtue, as one of the people who jog safely along a straight but pleasant path from the baptismal font to the gate of Heaven; very much with the unutterable envy with which the prodigal come back from feeding the swine, regarded the elder brother who never had left home or respectability behind him. Yet there was something of the hungry and disreputable air of the prodigal in Braddock now.
Perhaps nothing could have made it plainer to himself that he was "going down hill" than the scuffed trousers and unblackened boots; but it would have been hard for him to explain what was the trouble. He had been barely able to earn bread and butter in the city, was ono thing. When the time came for him to dispatch his weekly remittance to his mother, he had more than once been driven to a pawn-shop to obtain it. In Washington it was worse. One young fellow after another said to him, "There's no room for patient, honest effort in a city. You must have capital, or influence, or cheek, which is better than either. Money-making is a great game of grab, and a modest man stands no chance. Look at Fisk[53] or Tweed[54], in New York, or---," naming two or three Philadelphians, whose liveried and gold-mounted equipages dazzled the street. "Did they achieve success by modest industry?"
He could not but remember that he had put Laird's influence and his own little capital away from him for the best motives; and where was his reward? The wicked were exalted and the righteous man cast down. Clay, standing with his empty pocket at the street corners while these carriages flung mud from their wheels in his face, was tried by the old problem which thousands of years ago vexed David. And what chance had he to marry now?
As for Andross, he heard of him as rich and prosperous; a touch from Laird's sceptre had opened every way to him. Now although Braddock had carefully hidden from Jack the sacrifice he made for him, he was galled that he did not know it, and angry at his ingratitude. He had heard in Washington this morning that he was to marry Anna Maddox, and had come on purposely to stop it. It was a righteous errand, and justified the Sabbath travel, he told himself. It was his own fault if this marriage took place. His mawkish feeling for Andross had kept him silent--made him shelter him when he should have warned Judge Maddox against him as a thief. It was not yet too late. The innocent child could yet be saved. He would be silent not a day longer.
And under all this disappointment and bitterness and rage there was another feeling at the remembrance of the innocent child, which gnawed at Braddock's conscience, and made him more wretched than them all.
It was in this mood, hurrying to deliver himself of his message, that, looking up as he came under the lamp, he faced Andross.
"Braddock?" He caught him both hands on the shoulders. "Have you been ill? Don't you know me, Clay?"
The light shone full on the erect, gallant figure, the fine, sensitive face. There was a peculiar warmth, a gayety about Andross in these his happiest days which stirred even passers-by into momentary cordiality and cheerfulness. Braddock resented it; he resented the upright, prosperous bearing of the man; the very rose in his button-hole, the anxious, alarmed scrutiny of himself, which seemed to assert their friendship on its old footing.
"No. I have been quite well," settling his hat on his head and forcing a civil smile. "I ought to have known you, Andross, You are not altered."
"I did not know you were coming up," he went on eagerly; "I asked Miss Latimer to-day when you would be at home, but she did not expect you."
"No;" with the old mannerism which Jack remembered he has used to others. "Since I was obliged to postpone our marriage I have not written to her as regularly as I ought. My resolve to come up to-night was sudden, prompted by some news that I heard."
"Where are you going now, Clay?" walking beside him and holding his arm as an affectionate school-boy might.
"To Judge Maddox's."
"I came from there just now. The house is closed by this time. Come to my room. You can see them to-morrow, but I must be gone by the early train. Come."
Braddock went. There was something in the manner and touch of the man which he could not resist. He walked slowly, angry at himself for yielding to the old unaccountable influence.
Andross talked on, too excited and eager to be conscious of the chilly reserve. There was nobody, not even Anna, who came as near to the headlong fellow as Braddock. Other men were his friends, but a brother might have done to him what Clay had done.
"Were you sorry to leave old Nittany? And how does it go in Washington? Miss Latimer tells me she thinks you have been successful there."
"I have succeeded as much as I had a right to expect, probably," coldly.
"Every time I came up from Harrisburgh I hoped to find you here. I wrote, you know, but you did not answer. I knew you were too busy; don't think I minded that, old fellow." They walked on in silence for a square, when Jack broke in: "It's odd, Braddock, but whenever I think of you, it is as you looked to me that day out by the coaling hearth, you remember? My going there was a mad freak, and yet to go back seemed madness, and when you, a gentleman, spoke to me, half naked and covered with ashes, as your equal, it was like a voice calling me out of the pit. You remember you bought clothes for me at Bellefonte, and took me straight into the office. No man ever trusted another as blindly as you did me." He was so much moved that he did not notice Braddock's unbroken silence.
They stopped at a modest little house on a narrow street. Andross opened the door, and led the doctor up to a small room plainly furnished. An open fire was the only sign of comfort. "Come in," cried Jack heartily. "This is my boarding-house while I'm in town. It's clean, at at events. Put your feet up to the fire," wielding the poker vigorously.
Braddock looked curiously about him. "I certainly expected to find you in more luxurious quarters. I thought you were on the high road to fortune?"
"Not precisely," carelessly. "The salary's fair enough, but I'm sailing close to the wind, you see. By George, I turn a penny over twice now, before I spend it."
"May I ask why?" standing eagerly before him. "You are going to marry soon?"
"No. It's not for that," colouring, and beating a tattoo on the bars of the grate. "It's a debt that I want to pay. Six thousand dollars. It was a terrible criminal piece of business--God forbid you should know anything about it, Clay. I've had the weight of it to carry until sometimes I thought I never could rise under it. But, God willing, I'll clear it off by spring."
The doctor, shabby and thin, stood looking down at him for a minute. "Stop rattling that poker, Jack," he said, laying his hand on his shoulder. "You behave like a school-boy."
Something in the touch of the hand made Andross look up, and the two men laughed.
"Why, I forgot. You've had nothing to eat!" cried Andross jumping up. "I'm as hungry myself as a Nittany wolf. I was at Judge Maddox's for dinner, but I never can eat in that house." He had thrown off his coat, and was hurrying from the table to a little closet. "Pull off your boots--there are slippers. We'll have supper in no time. I board myself, you see. Oh! I'm a model miser, Clay," fastening a wire stand over the gas-burner, from which presently came a whiff of stewing oysters and coffee. Dr. Braddock put on the slippers and toasted his feet before the fire with an odd sense of comfort and good fellowship which he had almost forgotten was in the world. It was not possible for him to show affection by words and glances like Andross, any more than he could have laid aside his dignity to stew oysters in his shirt sleeves. But the man who could took his heart and fancy by storm.
"You said it would have been madness in you to go back from the coalings to Laird and the Ring again. Yet you have gone back, Andross?"
"Yes, I have," sitting down beside him while the cooking went on by itself. "Laird offered to put me into Sheffield's place--you know how two or three men here controul the election. When I accepted his offer that night at the furnace I felt as if I had sold my soul to the devil."
"Yet you did it?"
"Yes, and like the first man, for a woman," with an attempt to laugh. "I was mad, I suppose. But I am not cured of the madness," going uneasily about the room to hide his agitation. "I supposed," after a pause, "that I would be the tool of Laird and his clique. But as yet I have been wholly untrammelled. I have voted and spoken in the Senate in every case out of my honest conviction, in the best service of the party--not the Ring. They have not once interfered with me."
"It is an unusual result," said Braddock drily, "that the yielding to temptation should help you on the way both to honesty and success. My experience has been different."
"Yes. I don't know how it is. I'm tempted to think sometimes there is not such a strict watch kept over us above after all. It really seems as if there was no devil nor special--Providence; just a lot of fellows struggling together to get ahead of each other. Gód knows, Braddock, I have yielded--sunk about as low as a man could. Yet here I have the chance to win back my own self-respect--to be a rich man, honestly, and to marry some day the only woman I ever loved," his fine face heating again.
"You mean Miss Maddox, of course!" with such marked reserve in his manner that Jack became more anxiously cordial. "Yes, I think there is no doubt of the judge's consent if I am reëlected. There are three or four men madly in love with her: Bislow and Hoar, the diamond dealer. Hoar has enormous wealth and is well preserved in spite of his age. But the judge would prefer me, provided, as I said, I go back to the Senate."
"And Anna?"
"Oh, I have no doubt of Anna!"
Doctor Braddock turned in his chair and scanned his face; his own curiously haggard at the moment. But Jack's countenance was so bright and genuine; the man himself, affectionate and hopeful, looked out of it so frankly that Braddock turned away. How could he tell him that his errand to-night was to take this woman from him by proclaiming him a criminal? He clasped his hands behind his head again, and leaned back in his chair.
"You were born for success, Andross."
"It looks like it now! It really looks like it! Come Braddock, come; supper is ready."
About midnight, Andross left Braddock in his room and started to take the one o'clock train. The doctor stood at the door of the little house and watched him go whistling down the street, his springy step ringing on the pavement; the policeman touched his hat and wished him good night, cheerfully; the driver of the street-car woke up and brightened into a human being as he jumped aboard with a hearty, Hillo!
But the charm was off of Braddock when his back was turned. "Uncertain as water, thou shall not excel," he muttered.
Jack at the same moment was summing up his own future. "When I am clear of this cursed theft, I'm safe," he thought. "No danger that I should ever slip again. I'll be successful, as he says, and deserve success."
CHAPTER XVIII.
DOCTOR Braddock called on Miss Maddox before finding Colonel Latimer's the next morning. He told himself the reason for this was that the house lay directly in his way; yet he despised himself for the lie, as he did it.
Anna, when his card was brought to her, was especially in need of the soothing influence of friendship: love, she felt this morning, was harassing beyond endurance. If she had to begin manœuvring for Andross as a lover now, to keep him up to a decent grade of salary and society, what would she not have had to do had they been married? Had he not invited her once to a blissful union to be founded on honesty and twenty dollars a week? In the vexation caused by such blind pig-headedness, the advent of Doctor Braddock, who regarded her as a bewitching saint, was opportune and refreshing: she hurried down to meet him.
Outside, the sky was thick with fog, a heavy rain falling; streets and pavement deep with mud; the jarring of carts and cars, the patter of rain. on umbrellas the only sounds heard; inside, the gay little room was filled with flowers, birds sang, a delicate Italian grayhound slept on a Turkish rug before the sparkling fire, and Anna, in white, her fair hair flowing about her shoulders, was the personification of summer. Doctor Braddock had but little imagination; but that small share was taken captive by the scene and the actor. He was guarded to dulness in his manner, however, through his fear of betraying Andross's secret, which he knew she already suspected, and perhaps from some deeper reason. But the morning was too wet for her to go out or to expect visitors, and the stiff, pale man in his unfashionable suit of black, and green necktie, on the other side of the fireplace, was the only support offered for Anna's clinging nature. Scuffed trousers and green necktie were trifling drawbacks compared to the stupidity which would make a man fly in the face of his salary.
She did not propose, however, to confide this individual grief to her friend. She gave him very clearly the general idea of her lonely and isolated condition in the fashionable crowd; of her homesickness for the mountains; he penetrated to the depths of her nature, he thought with delight, as one would look into a clear forest spring--she all unconscious of his gaze. She was Maud Miller--without the desire to be the Judge's bride, decked in silken gown. Then she concerned herself gently for his well-being; was sure his feet were damp; ran to feel his overcoat as an anxious mother might, brought him a cup of hot coffee "to take the chill of," and stood, her innocent eyes upturned to his, holding the saucer while he drank it.
A mother? A wife.
And Andross, with all other good fortune, was to have this lovely creature to wait on him, to be waited on, cherished, held in his arms.
"You are chilly--you are so deathly pale! Will you have some more?" drawing back in unfeigned fright.
"No, thank you. I saw Andross last night, Miss Maddox," forcing a smile. "Faithful to his allegiance still?"
Unmistakable sadness clouded her fair brow. She was silent a moment, and then her confidence ebbed slowly forth. Her father and Mr. Andross looked upon their marriage as a certainty: she herself felt as though she were tangled in a net which drew her in more closely every day. Mr. Andross was a dear friend to her, he was a dear friend to everybody. "But, oh! Doctor Braddock," her head sinking on her breast, "there is something in him that I dread! He is in some points totally alien from me!"
"Ah! I believe that, Miss Maddox. And yet Jack is a loyal friend, and he would be a most faithful husband."
"I know by your voice you are forcing yourself to say that!" without looking up. "You know he is a grown-up child, and so am I. I ought to have a stronger guide than he is. I have fancied that when I married---"
Doctor Braddock set down the cup. Why should he not listen to her innocent talk? She was but a spoiled child, as she said. "What was your dream of a lover or husband then?" with an awkward laugh.
"I hardly can put it into words," gazing with absent eyes into the fire, while the tall figure in black stood stiffly before her. "A man strong in principle and piety. Yes, of all things, principle would be first in my eyes."
"You would respect such a man; but would you love him?" Doctor Braddock passed his forefinger over his mouth once or twice after he had spoken; a most ungainly, stupid gesture, but some motion must break the intense strain which he had put upon himself. The rain pattered hard upon the pane, the cat purred and turned sleepily over, but Anna was silent. Her fingers pressed closer on each other until the delicate tips sunk into the pink flesh.
"Love and friendship," the doctor's harsh voice broke the silence, "are such different things. You--you could not love such a man?"
She suddenly raised her dovelike eyes to his, a fiery red dyed her face and neck and bosom; she started up and shyly began twisting the dried fern leaves in the vases.
Braddock made a hasty step towards her, and then dropped into a chair by the table, covering his eyes with his hand. What fight he fought with himself in that minute no one ever knew but himself and God. He stood up again angular and stiff, wiping his pale face with his handkerchief; "precisely," as Anna told herself, "like a Presbyterian elder beginning an exhortation."
"Your idea of what married life should be coincides with mine, Miss Maddox," he said formally; "I chose a wife whose principle of action is higher than--than mine. God help me!" with a sudden break, "I love her very truly. I respect her too as I do no other human being," emphatically, and talking as Anna well knew, to himself.
"Ah! but we can not all deserve her happiness!" with a tearful smile. "There are few Bell Latimers among womankind!"
The magnanimity of the lovely child! How she struggled against her pain lest she might trouble him; struggled against--could it be? her love for him?
Again a sudden silence fell upon the room, the dreary beat of the rain again grew audible. For one rapt moment Doctor Braddock saw only the mellow tinting of a delicate cheek turned from him, across which a bit of fair hair had fallen; then he began to pull on his worn gloves, took up his hat, and muttering he knew not what, stumbled out of the room and the house.
"The awkward wretch!" said Anna, "he almost fell into my jardiniére[55]. His feet are such scows--like coal barges. To think me in love with him--of all the conceited---" But seeing at that moment his umbrella pass the window, with his stern, thin face under it, and realizing how much more picturesque it was than Jack's merry phiz, and that he was gone from her forever, she sat down and dribbled out some of her ever-ready tears.
A few minutes later, Doctor Braddock, seated in Andross's room, without taking off his overcoat, wrote the following letter:
"Dear Isabel: It is with the most thorough trust in your love for me that I ask you to prove it. There is no need of our waiting longer for more money on which to marry. You do not care for it, and God knows I have need of that which no wealth can buy just now, but which you may give me." He stopped, dipped his pen in the ink once or twice, conscious that he had strayed from the main subject into one which it was not easy to pursue further. Doctor Braddock was suffering from none of the mental agony expressed by cold sweats, pallor, etc., common to Anna's imagined heroes; he felt as if he had been struck a blow from which he would never recover; the feeling he had for Anna was so different from any he had known that he fancied it deeper and truer; but was he not playing the Christian hero by conquering it? He had never felt better satisfied with himself than as he wrote "Dear Isabel" upon the blank page, and his self-respect and complacency increased with every word. He ended by asking her to set their marriage-day a week hence; he would come up from Washington on Wednesday morning, and the wedding could take place that evening; begging in conclusion that it might be as quiet as possible; and was always hers sincerely, H. Clay Braddock.
Was he not hers? He thought, as he directed the envelope, his whole life would be given to her service, and she never should be troubled by knowing that he might have married a woman of such different mould. For there was the difference between them of fine porcelain and plain Delft. He was very fond of Isabel, and would give her the homely, domestic love which her homelier nature craved. So resolving, he put the letter in his pocket-book, to be mailed at Washington, and started to catch the southern train; wretched enough at resigning Anna, but with a comfortable enjoyment of his own martyrdom.
Notes
A drastic purgative used as a laxative, as well as to treat hepatic diseases including hepatitis, edema, venereal diseases, and other conditions.
John Dryden (1631-1700): English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright.
René Descartes (1596-1650): French philosopher, mathematician, and writer. Often called the "father of modern philosophy."
Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825): French political and economic theorist and businessperson.
An historic district of Paris; long known as the favorite home of French high nobility.
The Paris Commune was a revolutionary socialist government that ruled Paris between March-May 1871.
Possibly a reference to Icarus. In Greek mythology, Icarus gained wings (made from feathers and wax) which melted when he flew too close to the sun, consequently falling into the sea.
The name is taken from the title of an 1856 poem by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892).
From the Old Testament Book of Judges chapters 11-12.
A reference to Edmund Spenser's (1552/1553-1599) The Faerie Queene (1590/1596).
French translates to "workhorse" or "horse of battle."
A character from The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan (1628-1688), an English writer and preacher.
In Arthurian legend, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table and one of the three achievers of the Holy Grail.
Lady Godiva (1040-1067): 11th-century Anglo-Saxon noblewoman.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): the reference is likely to The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel.
Used as painkillers and sedatives in the nineteenth century, respectively.
The act of intentional self-destruction and/or suicide by impaling. Also spelled "hara-kiri," of Japanese derivation.
The name Gulliver gives his "nurse" in Book II of Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet, and cleric.
The story of Noah's Ark from the Book of Genesis chapters 6-9.
Desdemona is a character in Othello (c. 1601-1604) by William Shakespeare (1854-1616).
Fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland; the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with a combined number of dead, wounded, and missing at 22,717.
Refers to the comic ballad The Diverting Ballad of John Gilpin (1782) by William Cowper (1731-1800), English poet and hymnodist.
(530BC-468BC): ancient Athenian statesman, nicknamed "the Just."
(1777-1852): American lawyer, politician, and skilled orator who represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.↩
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): American essayist, lecturer, and poet.↩
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864): American novelist and short story writer.↩
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894): American physician, poet, professor, lecturer, and author.
Edwin Thomas Booth (1833-1893): American actor who toured America and major capitals of Europe.
Joseph Jefferson (1829-1905): American actor and one of the most famous of all American comedians.
Likely Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis/Cato the Younger (95BC-46BC): politician and statesman in the late Roman Republic.
Italian for "carving" or "notch."
Isabell I/Isabella the Catholic (1451-1504): queen of Castille and León (Crown of Castille).
Diogenes of Sinope/Diogenes the Cynic (412/404BC-323BC): Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynic philosophy.
One of three Amorite confederates of Abram: see Genesis 14:13-24 and Numbers 13:23-24.
See note 10.
See note 14.
Biblical figures: see Judges 16.
Character from "Gertrude, Or Fidelity Till Death" in Records of Woman: With Other Poems (1828) by Felicia Hemans (1793-1835).
Key character in Sir Walter Scott's (1771-1832) epic poem Marmion (1808).
A scene from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (1749-1832) Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy (1808).
Psalm 23:1.
Likely John Work Garrett (1820-1884): American banker, philanthropist, and president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O).
A work of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904): French painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism.
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (519-430BC): Roman aristocrat and statesman.
See note 10.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838): French bishop, politician, and diplomat.
In the New Testament of the Bible, Mammon is material wealth or greed, most often personified as a deity.
French translation of "revealing" and/or having a low neckline.
French translates literally to "blank paper": complete freedom to act as one wishes.
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (1813-1901): Italian Romantic composer known primarily for his operas.
(1835-1893): American Episcopal clergyman and author.
James Fisk, Jr. (1835-1872): American stockbroker and corporate executive.
William Magear Tweed (1823-1878): American politician most noted for being the "boss" of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in the politics of nineteenth-century New York City and State.
French translation for "gardener."
The Pool of Bethesda features in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John.
See note 9.
Key Words
Antietam, Aristides, capitalism, Cato the Younger, Charles Maurice Tallyrand-Perigord, Cincinnatus, Diogenes, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edmund Spenser, Edwin Booth, Faust (Goethe), Felicia Hemans, Gulliver's Travels (Swift), Henri de Saint-Simon, Henry Clay, James Fisk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bunyan, John Dryden, John Greenleaf Whittier, John Work Garrett, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Jefferson, Jr., King Arthur's Round Table, Lady Godiva, Marmion (Scott), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Othello (Shakespeare), Paris Commune, Phillips Brooks, Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan), Queen Isabella, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Records of Woman (Hemans), Rene Descartes, Sir Walter Scott, Tammany Hall, The Diverting Ballad of John Gilpin (Cowper), The Faerie Queen (Spenser), The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), Verdi, Whiskey Ring, William Cowper, William Shakespeare, William Tweed
Creator
Dan Graham
John Andross, New York, Orange Judd, 1874 Serialized: Hearth and Home, Dec. 1873-May 1874, pp. [TK].