Part 9

Nevertheless, all his commercial instincts revolted. They would not support this arbitrary dispensing of justice. The Gerault Bonley Marble Company’s right was definite and indefeasible, and unlawfully he had divested them of it. The idea was abhorrent to his commercial conscience. All the depth of character which he possessed lay in this endowment. He had no religious convictions, no spiritual estimate of the abstractions of right and wrong. To him the thought of religion was like a capitulation. It had never occurred to him as a thing to live by. It seemed of the nature of mortuaries, akin to last wills and testaments, of the very essence of finality. His moral structure was the creation of correct commercial principles,--sound enough, but limited. It was an impenetrable external shell, at once an asset, a protection, and a virtue, but it had no intimate inner tissues. His soul languished inert within it. As far as his financial integrity was concerned, there had been no leanings to the wrong, no struggles against temptation, not even temptation; he was proof against it. His integrity diminished even his capacity for repentance. He had never felt himself a sinner. On the contrary, he thought he had done mighty well. He had been for years in touch with the markets at home and abroad, but he could quote no spiritual values. For the first time in his life, he groped for a knowledge of the right, he strove with the definite sense of wrong-doing. His supposed death had all the taint of dishonor; it affected him as a false entry might have done. The indirect good that it wrought, the natural justice that it meted out, appealed to him no more than the success of speculating with the funds of the firm that employed him might serve to commend this peculation to his incorruptible commercial honor.

He fared better when he sought to protest an irresponsibility. It was the Marble Company’s affair to disprove his death if they could, to maintain themselves in continual assurance of his life. “I’ve seen old Bonley perform so long like a hen with one chicken that I imitate him instinctively. I assume a sort of guardianship of the Gerault Bonley Marble Company as they assumed it of me, and one is as absurd as the other. The company’s counsel ought to be equal to the situation. I have nothing to do with them. Their property is held for a term of years, which happens to be the duration of my life. I take on as if a _cestui que vie_ was a salaried officer of the Bonley Company,--as if I were paid for drawing the breath of life. It is no part of my duty to report continually for observation. I forfeit no pledge. I violate no trust. And self-preservation is the first law of nature.”

With these vacillations he had struggled in throes of mental agony as he lay on the ledges of the rocks above the river and affected to angle; or as he wandered alone through the woods; or when he sat, unheeding the drawling talk of his host, in the open passage where they lighted their pipes together, his evident preoccupation shrewdly noted by the suspicious mountaineer; or, more than all, in the silent watches of the night, before physical fatigue could coerce sleep to his aid,--always arguing the wrong that his silence and absence wrought to others, yet the false suspicion on the part of Greenhalge, Gould & Fife, and the consequent terrible fate that his return would bring upon himself; the intrinsic justice in the restoration to the reversioner of his plundered lands, and yet the positive legal rights which the Gerault Bonley Marble Company held in their unexpired tenancy _per autre vie_; the lies that thus conspired in their masquerade as truth, yet the fact that the truth unmasked would prove the falsest of them all. He had never in all the exercitations of his various problems seemed so near a definite and final decision as now. Never had he reverted so often to one basis of action. He determined that he would not return to the certainty of an ignominious imprisonment on a false suspicion for the sole benefit of a strong corporation of financial sharks, who, on the pretext of a tenancy _per autre vie_, were tearing the estate of their grantor from off the face of the earth; the reversioner would have nothing left but literally a hole in the ground! This awful sacrificial surrender would serve no moral right, but one of those legalized robberies which arise from a fault of the law through its constitutional deficiencies, being at last only of human device. And if, he argued, it was not his function to remodel the laws, and administer them according to the moral basis of evident right, it was in this instance his privilege to dispense even-handed justice.

But when he fell asleep, and his will lay dormant, and his reasoning faculties were blunted, and only his conscience vaguely throbbed with an unassuaged wound, the sense of the commercial wrong that he did, the realization of the definite legal right that he extinguished, the weight of responsibility with which his mere breathing the breath of life had burdened him, all were reasserted without the connivance of volition, and over and over again that poignant cry, “But the one who lives--the one for whose life--his life--his life--his life!” rang through the house with all the pent-up agony of his days of doubt and strivings and distress in its tone.

It was a silent house. No wind stirred. Not a leaf rustled. One might hear the ash crumble covering the embers on the hearth. A vague monotone came from the river. Outside, the still radiance of a late-risen moon lay pallid and lonely on the newly ploughed fields. Here and there crevices in the chinking between the logs of the walls made shift to admit a ray, sending its slight shaft through the brown gloom of the interior, visible itself and luminous in its filar tenuity, yet dispensing no light. One of these rays glimmered through the clapboards of the roof on the face of the sleeper, which showed in the dusk, with all its wan trouble on it, with the distinctness of some sharply cut cameo, to Tubal Cain Sims, who, half dressed and with shock head and bare feet, had climbed the stair, and lurked there listening, that perchance he might hear more to convey to the sharp-set curiosity of the magisterial lime-burner.

This involuntary lapse of his resolution left no trace on the juggler’s consciousness when he awoke the next morning. He was not aware that he had dreamed, that in sleeping he had swerved from his intention, far less that he had cried out in his unrealized mental anguish. He took comfort from his stanch mental poise. The fact that he held fast to his conclusion seemed to confirm the validity of his judgment. Here he was to begin life anew, and it behooved him to make the most and the best of it. For one moment the recollection of the world he had left almost overcame him,--the contrast it bore to his sorry future! Even its workaday aspect,--the office, his high desk by the window, the thunder of the cotton-laden wagons in the streets and the clamor of voices impinging so slightly on his absorption in his work as to be ignored,--even this wrung a pang from him now. How much more the thought of the club, with its brilliant lights, and its luxury of furnishing, and its delectable cuisine, and the pretensions of its elder members, and the countenance they were pleased to show him; of the fraternity halls where he was so prime a favorite; of the gymnasium he affected, and the boating and swimming clubs; of his choice social circle, with its germans and musicales, its little dinners and tally-ho drives, its private theatricals, its decorous parlors of refined and elegant suggestions, of which he valued the _entrée_ in proportion as he had once felt it jeopardized by the bruiting abroad of that wild gambling escapade, which he feared, in the estimation of the severe and straight-laced matrons and delicate-minded young girls, ill became a member of so elevated a coterie. They seemed, in his recollection, of an embellished beauty and aloof majesty infinitely removed from his sordid plight and maimed estate. He faltered as he thought of his hopeless alienation from it all, his dreary exile.

And then, with a sudden bracing of the nerves, he reflected on the view which this refined society would entertain of the alternative that fate presented; the disgrace which he would sustain in his return was hardly to be mentioned to ears so polite! Was he farther from his friends here than he would be there? Was he more definitely banished from his wonted sphere? He was dead to them,--forever dead,--and the sooner forgotten the better!

In pursuance of his determination, he went downstairs arrayed in the blue-checked homespun shirt and gray jeans trousers which Mrs. Sims with so great and dilatory labor had contrived. He thought he looked the typical mountaineer in this attire, with a pair of long cowhide boots, purchased at the cross-roads store, drawn up to his knees over the legs of the trousers, and a white wool hat of broad brim set far back on his dark red-brown hair. He could hardly have deceived even an unpracticed eye. The texture of his skin, shielded by his vocation from wind and weather; the careful grooming which was the habit of years; the trained step and pose and manner, unconscious though they were; the hand, delicate, however muscular, and white, and with well-tended nails; the silken quality of his smooth hair and mustache; the expression of the eye;--he looked like a young “society swell” dressed for a rural rôle in private theatricals.

Mrs. Sims, who was languidly setting the table in the passage, while Euphemia, clashing the pots and pans and kettles in the room to the left, was “dishin’ up” breakfast, paused in her wheezing hymn, catching sight of him, to survey her handiwork.

“Waal!” she exclaimed in delighted pride, appropriating to her own skill the credit of the effect of his symmetry. “Now don’t them clothes jes’ set! I’ll be boun’ nobody kin say ez I ain’t a plumb special hand fur the needle an’ shears! I jes’ want Tubal Cain Sims ter view them ‘vain trappin’s,’ ez the hyme calls ’em,--though ez we ain’t endowed by Providence with feathers, thar ain’t no use in makin’ a sin out’n hevin’ the bes’ clothes what we kin git.”

The juggler was as vain as a young man can well be. But he had seldom encountered such outspoken admiration, and was a trifle out of countenance; for what Mrs. Sims conceived to be the excellence of her own proficiency as a tailor he apprehended was due to the graces of his personal endowment. He made her a flourishing bow of mock courtesy, and then stood leaning against the jamb of the door, one hand in the pocket of the gray trousers, the other readjusting the wide low shirt-collar about his throat.

“I’d like ter know what Tubal Cain Sims _will_ say now!” exclaimed Mrs. Sims, pursuing corollaries of the main proposition of triumph. “He ’lows, whenst I make him ennythin’ ter wear, ez he kin sca’cely find his way inter sech shapen gear. An’ whenst in ’em, he ’lows he’ll never git out no mo’, an’ air clad in his grave-clothes--goin’ ’bout workin’ an’ sech--in his grave-clothes! It’s a plumb sin, the way he talks!”

Her face clouded for an instant, remembering the ungrateful flouts; then as her gaze returned to her guest, she dimpled anew.

“But laws-a-massy!” she cried, “how peart ye do ’pear in them clothes, to be sure! A heap more like sure enough folks than in them comical little pantees ye hev been a-wearin’.”

He could not forbear a laugh at her criticism of the spruce knickerbockers; but with the thought of the varying standards of a different status of life the realization of his exile came to him anew, and imbittered the decoction called coffee which Mrs. Sims handed to him, and although his eyes were dry, as he gulped it down, he tasted tears.

It was difficult for him to resent any admiration of himself as too redundant, but she could not quit the subject, and pointed out to Tubal Cain Sims, when he entered, the excellence of the fit of the shirt about the shoulders and its flatness in the back; apparently arguing that if this shirt fitted the juggler, it was only Tubal Cain Sims’s rugged temper and finical fancy that _his_ shirt did not fit. The old man’s prominent shoulder-blades were not long destined to be concealed by the worn cloth drawn taut across their recurved arches as he leaned slouchingly forward, and the loose amplitudes over his narrow bent chest might well have been economized for a supplement across the shoulders. It never seemed to occur to either of them that the cloth should be cut to suit the figure, or at all events the bearing, of the wearer. She only tortured her helpless partner with her adherence to a pattern at least fifty years old, and which had fitted him well enough twenty-five years ago; but as seam, gusset, and band burst under the stress of his crookedness and increasing slouch, he considered that the hand of Jane Ann Sims had utterly forgotten its cunning, and talked as if his clothes were a trap requiring a certain diligence of investigation to get into, and from which there was no escape.

The juggler grew restive lest Euphemia should enter while he was a bone of contention between the two, for Mrs. Sims was still disposed to call on all who might behold to note the beauty of the fit of his shirt, and Tubal Cain Sims as resolutely refused to admire. Royce was ready to laugh at himself that he should thus desire to shirk these personalities in Euphemia’s presence, and that he should assume for her a delicacy in the discussion which he was very sure Mrs. Sims would not appreciate. Yet he was not so coxcombical as to preëmpt for her Mrs. Sims’s standpoint; he realized that she might be as stolidly unadmiring as Tubal Cain himself. He finished his breakfast with a hasty swallow or two, and was about to take himself off with his fishing-rod down to the river, hearing Mrs. Sims remarking after him, “Ye oughter thank the Lord on your bended knees, young man, fur the fit o’ them clothes,” and Tubal Cain Sims’s growl of objurgation that “folks oughter have better manners an’ sense ’n ter be thankin’ the Lord for the set o’ thar clothes on the blessed Sabbath day.”

“Is this Sunday?” asked the juggler, and stood stock-still.

“It air the blessed Sabbath,” said Tubal Cain, his eyes still full of the misfit rancor and his mouth full of corn dodger.

Ah, how Lucien Royce heard across the silent Cove the bells ringing from the church towers of St. Louis, hundreds of miles away! He distinguished even the melody that the chimes were rippling out,--he would have sworn to it amongst a thousand,--and the booming of heavier metal sounding from neighboring steeples. He knew just how a certain dissonance impinged upon the melodious tumult,--the bell of an old church below Seventeenth Street that had a crack in it and rang false. The raucous voices of newsboys were calling the Sunday papers, much further up town than on week-days. The clanging of the cable cars sounded here, there, everywhere; the sunlit streets were full of people. And then, as his heart was throbbing near to breaking for this his world, his home, of which he was bereft, he realized how his imagination had cheated him. Across the Cove the slanting sun-rays had not yet reached the levels of the basin; the red hue of the dawning still tinged them. The mists of the night clung yet in purple shadowy ravines. The dew was in the air. Away--away--the far city of the mirage lay sluggard and asleep. No bell rang there save the Angelus. Now and again a figure slipped along to early mass. The rumbling wheels of a baker’s wagon or the tinkle of a milkman’s bell might sound,--a phase of the town, an hour of the day he did not know and for which he did not care. And so he was admonished to beware of fancies. This--_this_ was his home, and here he was to spend his life.

He hardly knew how he might contrive to spend the day, he said, as he flung himself down on a ledge of the rock overlooking the river. He appreciated how he would value the rest, had a week of hard work preceded it. He was no Sabbatarian on religious principles, but adhered to the theory as physically economical. As he lay smoking, he argued that much of his tendency to revert to the troubles that had whelmed him, to pine for even the minutiæ of his old life,--aught that suggested it was dear!--to forget that it had gone forever and could never be conjured back, and that a far different fate awaited him in his familiar world, was only an indication of the morbid influence of idleness and mental solitude. The persistence of the activities of the human mind is but scantily realized. Given adequate subjects to work upon, to engross it,--a stent, so to speak,--and its powers seem rarely greater than its task; but remove the objective point of occupation, and the complications of the engine, its normal strength yet its perilous fragility, its inherent tendencies to dislocation, its perpetual uncontrollable subjection to any idea, evolved at haphazard, clutched with a tenacity as of the muscles of a galvanized grasp, result in a chaos of disaster, the mere contemplation of which is wonderfully conducive to energy and the embellishment of toil.

Blessed are the hard workers, for their minds and their hearts shall be sound. This truth was most deeply felt by the young exile from the business world as well as the world of pleasure.

“I must get at something,” he said to himself. “I must realize that I am here to stay. This juggling money”--he rattled in his pocket the silver that he had earned the evening of his ill-starred entertainment--“won’t last forever, even at the rates of board and lodging in Etowah Cove. It would be the part of wisdom to ingratiate myself with the miller,--cross-grained old donkey,--help him with the mill, marry the miller’s daughter, and succeed to the throne.”

He laughed, with a mocking relish of the incongruity of the idea. Then, as he thought of the miller’s daughter, a vague perception came to him that he had never before encountered a woman apparently so indifferent to him; for indifference was not the sentiment which he was wont to excite. He remembered, too, his hasty retreat from the table, lest her delicacy be offended if his garments were descanted upon in her presence. “Am I going to persuade myself that I am in love with this rural Napoleon in petticoats?” he asked himself scornfully. Then he argued that it was merely because he was not used to such critical scrutiny of his vestments except by his tailor. “All the same, I got out of there before the lady Euphemia appeared.” He thus took as dispassionate note of the fact as if he were discussing the state of mind of another person. “I might meet a worse fate. She could be trusted to keep me extremely straight from now till the Judgment Day. She is so pretty--that--if she were a trifle softer--a trifle different, it wouldn’t be such hard lines to make love to her.”

Perhaps it did not seem such “hard lines” when she suddenly came out of the house, later in the day; for as he glanced up the slope and beheld her, he rose promptly and went to meet her.

It was a tortuous way up the slope; the outcropping ledges here and there projected so heavily that it was easier to skirt around than to climb over them. Brambles grew in shaggy patches; trees intervened; more than once, gnarled roots, struck but half in the ground, the bole rising at a sharp angle with the incline, threw him out of the line of a direct approach. He saw, in drawing near, that he was as yet unperceived, as she made her way slowly along the road. Her wonderful eyes were fixed meditatively, softly, upon the blue mountains beyond the Cove, showing through the gap of the nearer purple ranges. Her lips had a drooping curve. The golden glimmers of her brown hair, rising in dense fairness above her white brow, had never seemed to him so distinct. She carried her pink sunbonnet in her hand; the large loose curls floated on the shoulders of her calico dress. It was of a sleazy texture, and the skirt fell in starchless folds from a short waist to the tops of her low-cut shoes. The color was a rose pink, and on it was scattered a pattern of great roses of the darkest red hue, and she looked as fantastic as if she were attired for a fancy-dress ball. Somehow, this accorded better with his humor than the sombre homespun attire which the mountain women as a rule affected. Her costume, regarded as a fad, did not so diminish her beauty. He could judge better of it, as he paused, still unperceived because of the intervening brambles, hardly ten feet from her. She looked like some old picture, as, swinging the bonnet by one string, she stood still for a moment, with an intent expression in her lovely eyes.

“Ef he speaks so agin,” she said slowly, “ef he speaks so agin afore them all, I dunno _how_ I kin abide it.”

There was a look of pain on her face which, however, did not promise tears. He realized that tears were scarce with her and came hard. It was the look of one whose heart is pierced, and whose pride is bent, and whose endurance flags. Then, with an access of resolution visible in her soft face, she suddenly moved onward, and the swaying sprays of the brambles painted the picture out.

He had hardly time to take stock of his impressions, or note his own surprise, or marvel of what or of whom she spoke, when Mrs. Sims issued, waddling, from the house. She perceived him readily enough, having him in mind, perhaps, and called to him to hurry up, “for we-uns air all goin’ ter meetin’ over yander at the church-house, whar ye gin that show o’ yourn,” displaying a fat dimply smile too jolly for the occasion, and all un-meet to companion the Sabbath-day expression on the sour visage of old Tubal Cain Sims, who was shuffling out with high shoulders and hollow chest and bent knees to join the family procession.

Lucien Royce welcomed the summons with the half-bewildered delight of one unexpectedly rescued from the extremest griefs of ennui. His first instinct was to run and dress. Then remembering that he wore the best clothes he had, he composed himself with the reflection that he was in the fashion as it prevailed here. He was consoled, too, as he strolled along beside Mrs. Sims, for the lack of a younger companion, by reflecting that he wanted to make no mischief among any possible lovers of Euphemia, which his public appearance walking with her to church was well calculated to do.

“I think I am safe with Mrs. Sims,” he said to himself. “I suppose nobody is in love with her,--not even old Tubal Cain, whatever he may once have been.”

He cast a glance at the lean and active partner of Mrs. Sims’s joys and sorrows, forging along at a brisk pace which was certain to land him in church before the rest of the household had achieved half the distance.

VI.